Don't take it sitting down

I think we've heard this before now|:

Stand Up: Your Life Could Depend On It

ScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2012) — Standing up more often may reduce your chances of dying within three years, even if you are already physically active, a study of more than 200,000 people published in Archives of Internal Medicine shows. The study found that adults who sat 11 or more hours per day had a 40% increased risk of dying in the next three years compared with those who sat for fewer than four hours a day. This was after taking into account their physical activity, weight and health status.

sitting around and diabetes

I have had stuff up here before about the dangers of being too sedentary.  Here is a new one about its link to diabetes

Diabetes Risk from Sitting Around

 "This study provides important new evidence that higher levels of sitting time have a deleterious impact on insulin resistance and chronic low-grade inflammation in women but not men and that this effect is seen regardless of how much exercise is undertaken. This suggests that women who meet the national recommendations of 30 minutes of exercise a day may still be compromising their health if they are seated for the rest of the day.

Work is killing you

stress....sitting......and more


Created by: Online University

Lifehacker on the dangers of sitting

I've had stuff here before on the health impact of spending too much time sitting down.  Lifehacker had a good piece on it today too:

Do you sit in an office chair or on your couch for more than six hours a day? Then here are some disturbing facts: Your risk of heart disease has increased by up to 64 percent. You're shaving off seven years of quality life. You're also more at risk for certain types of cancer. Simply put, sitting is killing you. That's the bad news. The good news: It's easy to counteract no matter how lazy you are.

Their prescription was:

Happily, you only need to do two things to counter the effects of sitting all day:

• Remember to stand once an hour.
• Get about 30 minutes of activity per day.

Whether you're a couch potato watching marathons of Firefly or an office worker sitting in front of a computer, an Australian study suggests short breaks from sitting once an hour can alleviate most of the problems described above

Sitting - bad for mental health too

I've had stuff here in the past about the way in which spending a lot of time sitting has serious negative health consequences.  Previously the things I've pointed to have highlighted the impact on physical health - cardiovascular disease, posture etc.

Today I saw this report which also mentions the impact on mental health. (via Science Daily)

There is not much detail but it just notes that

• That more time spent sitting at work was associated with a decrease in mental well-being.

and quotes one of the researchers:

Dr Duncan says "People don't need a psychologist to tell them to get up and walk around. But if it helps, I'd tell them to put a post-it note on their computer to remind them. Anyway go and talk to your colleagues face to face, it's a lot more sociable and better for you than emailing them."

Fair enough.  If we are doing things that are not what we were designed for then there will always be negative consequences which include problems for our mental state.  This of course is related to the things I've also mentioned in the past about Green Exercise.  Like sitting down a lot, being isolated from nature is also unnatural and will lead to problems (as Chris Kresser pointed out just this week)

Burn the chair and move

This is superb from mc (interviewed here)

Burn the Chair, We’re Wired to Move: Towards Design Implications for Inovation, Discovery and Creativity in HCI via Neural Science and Human Performance Studies

The whole paper is here, but here is the abstract:

(The following paper is meant as a starting exploration around the questions: if we know that our bodies’ state has an impact on our cognitive performance, what are the implications for design and evaluation of design – particularly design to support creativity, innovation, discovery?)
As per the Creativity Tools Report, 2005, a goal of Human Computer Interaction / Human Factors research with respect to creativity and cognition has been to develop principled heuristics that can both inform design of software, hardware and their environments, as well as offer a foundation for evaluation metrics [41]. As an approach towards developing such formalisms, we propose a novel combination of research from two domains not usually associated with HCI: (a) neuroscience for its mapping of creative acts to brain area and function, and (b) human performance for its research of physical activity’s effects on cognition. We show how research in both these areas may be combined to inform new, neural based insights into design and evaluation. We suggest that working from this perspective may significantly reconfigure knowledge work software, hardware and work environment design and evaluation.