What Prolonged Sitting Does to Your Body

The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), in a bid to counter the negative effects of sitting at work, released a list of health standards that companies will be required to follow, starting in November 2017. You can check out the details of their Department Order 184 here.

Heading the list is allowing workers to have five-minute standing breaks every two hours. The rest include promoting awareness about what sedentary work does for your health, organizing after-work activities like calisthenics and dance lessons, and even tweaking work tasks to allow for more diversity of movement.  These standards extend to all workers who spend a lot of time sitting at work–those in desk jobs, toll booths, and the like.

This is an interesting break from how work has traditionally been done. Whether in the factories from centuries ago or our modern-day office cubicles, it has always been taken for granted that employees can stay in one place for the entire duration of their work shift.

Sitting is perceived as more humane than standing or engaging in manual labor. After all, employees are comfortable–it’s difficult to complain about sitting.

The Problem of Prolonged Sitting

However, recent studies have revealed surprising statistics about how sitting too much is quite literally killing us–not to mention staring at phone and computer screens for hours. Compared to our ancestors, we have become alarmingly sedentary.

Fitness was mandatory for them. They had to chase and hunt down animals to survive, while we can refuse to budge from our sofas and still get food conveniently packaged and delivered to where we are. It’s not just work, either–we sit for pretty much everything, from meals to long commutes.

Lest you underestimate the risk–which is extreme enough for our government to have taken notice–prolonged sitting makes you twice as likely to die. You become 90% more prone to type 2 diabetes, and it also spikes your risk for cancer and cardiovascular diseases.

The World Health Organization further states that being sedentary is the top four risk factor for deaths globally, leading to 3.2 million deaths every year.

To make it worse, you can’t offset this with intense physical activity. So even if you have a gruelling gym session lined up afterwards or you make sure to go jogging every night, it doesn’t undo the damage that prolonged sitting wreaks on your body.

Biologically speaking, we weren’t designed for this: the human body is meant to move around. When we oppose that by being sedentary–not just sitting, but staying in one position for too long–our metabolism slows, blood sugar increases, and fat builds up: the recipe for chronic disease, which medicine is still struggling to cure.

What You Can Do

So are you doomed to a much shorter lifespan because you have a desk job? Well, not quite–if you take measures to counteract it. Despite the prevalence of standing desks, going the other extreme and standing the entire time isn’t the solution–that would still count as sedentary, and might cause additional pain. Instead, go for diversity of movement.

A formula that you can follow without attracting too much attention is to stand up every 30 minutes. This is based on findings about how the people with the lowest mortality risk confined their sitting time to less than 30 minutes.

For a more sophisticated guideline, get some cardio activity in: still block out a 30-minute time frame, but now you sit for only 20 minutes, stand for eight, and exercise (Jumping Jacks, anyone?) for two minutes.

Although you might curse this as way too distracting–how will you ever get your work done if you can’t sit still?–people who have tried it report that they feel much more refreshed afterwards and can better plow through their tasks, essentially doing more in less time.

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