If You’re Sitting This Long Everyday, Your Health Will Suffer

Let's face it, in today's world we spend more time sitting than ever before. Whether it's in the car, the office or at home, we are on our butts more than ever. When you tabulate the total time each day that we are sitting, it often reaches double digits and that is not good for our over all health.

We know this intuitively and probably don't need a study to show us that, but sometimes it's the wake up call that we could all use.

For all of the time and money we're spending on gyms and pickle ball and various other physical activity, you would think that we are sitting less, but that is not the case. The other bad news is, it doesn't appear that we can exercise our way out of it.

The only way to beat the ill effects of too much sitting is quite obvious, get up and move around a lot more.

Spending more than 10-and-a-half hours sitting, reclining or lying down during daytime hours could increase the risk of dying from heart failure, a heart attack or stroke – even if you do the recommended levels of exercise, a study suggests.

Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital analysed data from fitness trackers that captured movement over seven days for nearly 90,000 British people.

Overall, sedentary time averaged out at around 9.4 hours per day. The team then followed up on participants’ heart health around eight years later.

Analysis revealed that the chances of dying from heart failure, a heart attack or stroke during this period were minimal until a certain ‘threshold’ of sedentary time was reached.

They found that the risk of dying from these causes rose significantly in people who sat, reclined or lay down for more than 10.6 hours a day.

And this was also the case for participants who met the recommended 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise per week.

One way to track the amount of time that you are sitting is a smart watch of some type. Apple Watches automatically track the amount of time you're sitting and will even prompt you to stand up at least once an hour and will track how many hours you actually were standing.

With the holiday season upon, maybe that would be a great gift for someone you love and even for yourself.

Can you do it?

Remember when you were a kid and you RAN everywhere? To the backyard, to the freezer for ice cream, down the street to meet your friends?

And your parents said "STOP RUNNING"?

You listened.

Maybe a little too well. Because now all you do is sit and it's literally killing you.

According Dr. Bruce Y. Lee at Psychology Today, tricking yourself into exercising is actually kind of easy.

"When I was a freshman in college, a guy shot out of the building like a cannonball in a full sprint. I  asked my classmate why the guy was in such a hurry. My classmate responded, "He's just going to lunch. He decided that he would go everywhere in a full sprint so that he could get exercise along the way," he wrote.

Lee said we all think of exercising as going to the gym or a class.

"Cave people probably didn't say, "Hmmm, it looks like my gym membership expired," he wrote.

Lee argues that if you have to go out of your way to schedule something, you are much less likely to do it.

"It's the first thing that goes when you get busy," he wrote in Psychology Today. "Therefore, the best way to guarantee that you get exercise is to incorporate it into as many different things as you can."

As a person who sits at a desk all day and drives everywhere, I'm all for incorporating these little ways to sneak in a bit of exercise. I mean, every little bit helps and if you can get your steps in WHILE attending a boring meeting, well, you've killed to have-tos with one walk.

Who can argue with that?

Or even jogging or cycling meetings?  That's a bit much.
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"Whoever said that standing around in circles while holding drinks in your hands is the only way to socialize?" Lee asked. "Why not play tennis, volleyball, basketball, touch football, hopscotch, or anything else that can get your body moving? This way you have something to do when you run out of superficial things to say."

This can be weird if you are breathing heavily, so you might want to give the caller a heads up.

Dance in the kitchen when you are waiting for the microwave to ding. In the shower. During commercial breaks. Just dance!
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"What's the point of watching others on TV, the movies, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and other social media platforms move around when you are not doing so yourself?", Lee reported.  "Instead, while watching others, try to mirror what they are doing at the same time.
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