Your body wasn’t built for a desk

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

In this episode of The Gray Area with Sean Illing, guest host Bryan Walsh interviews Manoush Zomorodi, author of 'Body Electric,' about the hidden physical dangers of

Key takeaways

• Five minutes of gentle movement every 30 minutes significantly improves blood glucose, blood pressure, fatigue, and focus.
• Sitting for extended periods—up to 187 days per year—is linked to increased risk of early death, comparable to smoking.

Main topics

• The physical consequences of prolonged sitting
• Impact of screen time on bodily health below the neck

Notable quotes

"Five minutes of gentle movement for every half hour of sitting was sort of this gold star, that it had outsized effects on people's blood sugar, their blood pressure, their mood, their fatigue."

Conclusion

The episode concludes that small, consistent physical breaks—like a five-minute walk every half hour—are powerful tools for combating

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) I'm Ina Garten. On my new podcast, Happy Hour with Ina, I'm inviting really interesting guests to join me for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. I'll be getting personal with chefs, actors, comedians, musicians, and writers I admire. So grab a snack, pull up a chair, and join us. Subscribe to Happy Hour with Ina on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes will be available every Wednesday starting September 16th. Speaker 1 (0:38) Megan Rapinoe here. This week on Why Are You Like This, I am talking with Roxane Gay. That's right, Roxane Gay. Roxane is a fearless writer and cultural critic whose impact goes way beyond her New York Times bestselling books. We dig into all the big moments of her life. And of course, she shares if she's more mommy, daddy, or baby. Check out the latest episode of Why Are You Like This wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. Welcome to The Gray Area. I'm Brian Walsh, filling in for Sean Elling. My guest today is Manoush Damaroti, host of NPR's TED Radio Hour. We're all familiar with what our screen addiction is doing to our brains and our attention span. But Manoush's new book, Body Electric, is about what a life of sitting and staring at screens is doing to us below the neck, to our blood, our breath, even our posture. She reported it with the scientists studying the problems. Speaker 1 (1:34) on her own screen-addicted body, and on more than 20,000 NPR listeners, which became a peer-reviewed study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine with Manusha's name on it. I asked Manusha on the show because as much as we think we know how our devices affect us, we're really only scratching the surface. What is a day in a chair actually doing to a person? And is taking a five-minute walk a serious answer to a problem this big? Speaker 1 (2:05) Manu Samarody, welcome to The Gray Area. It's great to be here, Brian. You and I are going to be spending an hour sitting here talking about the dangers of sitting, among other things. So are we slowly killing ourselves by doing this? Yeah, basically, yes, we are. This will come as no huge surprise to you. You probably heard a decade ago that sitting was the new smoking, right? So we all know, like, we're supposed to get a certain number of minutes of exercise per week. And also there's a vague sort of... governmental advice is to move more as well. But, well, A, we don't do it, and B, a lot of this has been compounded over the last 10 years by the amount of screen time that we consume. Because in order to live our lives, we have to sit more. It is estimated we sit around 187 days per year and consume 12 and a half hours of media. Speaker 1 (3:01) per day. That's one of the more depressing stats I've heard. Yeah, I'm sorry about that. We're going to get to the good news very, very soon. But I think what I sort of pinpointed for me was, yeah, I knew I was sitting too much. But then I was also being told that, like, screens were not a physical problem. I was being told that they were the reason why there were rising mental health issues and anxiety and depression in kids. And we can't concentrate because social media has rotted our brains. Speaker 1 (3:28) But I had this moment in 2023 when I, I think many people, when I say this, people are like, oh, yeah. It was that moment when, you know, when you close the laptop at the end of the day and you're like, I think I have just enough energy to crawl over to the couch to scroll some more. If I'm lucky. If you're lucky. And to me, I was like, this feels so physical to me. I don't really feel depressed. I just feel exhausted and drained and like nothing. And so I wanted to understand what was going on in our bodies biologically. Like, okay, so sitting is the new smoking. What exactly does that mean? How do screens potentially add or maybe not add to the problem? And also, how does that affect our cognitive ability, our ability to focus, pay attention, and our mood? So I was kind of wondering. Speaker 1 (4:17) about this question when I came across research from a guy at Columbia University Medical Center, a physiologist named Keith Diaz. So Keith, you know, this is his jam. He is trying to figure out how do we get people to move more. But he really wanted to find out in the lab was what is the minimum amount of movement that the human body needs so that it doesn't die like an early death. That's good because the minimum amount is the one that I personally would like to hear about. Exactly. So like you, he's setting the bar extremely low. And he found in his lab that five minutes of gentle movement for every half hour of sitting was sort of this gold star, that it had outsized effects on people's blood sugar, their blood pressure, their mood, their fatigue. So both biological and psychosocial effect. Speaker 1 (5:13) He was like, he printed the, you know, he wrote the paper, et cetera. And I was like, dude, you found the answer. You found the dosage, right? Like, this is the one we should be doing. So I called him up and I was like, why aren't we all doing this? And he was kind of depressed. He was like. Has he been sitting too much? No, because he thinks there's no way anybody's going to do this. Right. Like, I can find this in the lab and figure it out. But like, no one is going to actually do this. Speaker 1 (5:40) I was like, I don't know. I think we should ask them. If you found the answer, let's try. And so he and I ended up partnering on a clinical trial that was just published, actually, as a scientific research paper. With you as a co-author. With me as a co-author, which is super exciting as a journalist. I am now also a scientific researcher officially. And we decided to test, could people actually take movement breaks? And what was the effect? I should say, the first thing he did was invited me up to join the lab. I want to hear about your experience in the lab because you were basically a lab rat. You volunteered to spend the whole day. And what was the first thing you did? Like, you actually were forced to sit. Speaker 1 (6:22) Yes. For a whole day. For a week before I went up to the lab, they had me strapped with like various accelerometers, et cetera. I wore a glucose monitor. They just wanted to get my sort of baseline to understand how I, was I a relatively active person? How did I usually metabolize glucose? What was my resting heart rate? But you were, I mean, to be clear, you were. I mean, you were not like a couch potato. But I. I'm a desk jockey. Like, there's no doubt about that. Like, for sure. There are hours that go by and I look up and, like, my left foot is asleep and I haven't gone to the bathroom, right? Like, so they got that baseline and then I went up there and they were like, we just want you to have, like, Speaker 1 (6:59) A typical day. I was like, okay. So I sat on my laptop and I worked and I had a lunch break and I was able to use the bathroom. It was pretty much a typical day. And then I came back another day and that day they put me through the protocol. And so every half hour, his assistant would tap me on the shoulder and she would lead me to a treadmill where I would walk two miles per hour for five minutes. And two miles per hour. Put that in like a. New Yorkers probably walk four miles per hour. So this is a stroll. Okay. This is like you're walking. This is like Kansas walking speed maybe? Yeah, maybe in a mall. Yeah, in a mall. You know, just sort of browsing. It wasn't that hard. Okay. And at first I was really annoyed. I was like, I only wrote like two emails. How am I going to get my work done? And I sort of understood what he was saying. I was like, I don't. Speaker 1 (7:49) This sucks. But something happened like after I'd taken sort of three or four breaks. I suddenly started using the time differently. I started to use it as strategy, mini strategy sessions on the treadmill. And I didn't have to put on my sweater even though I'd been freezing the time before. I rated my mood, my fatigue, my ability to concentrate all improved. But what surprised me the most was really like when he gave me my like stats. My glucose was cut in half. My blood pressure dropped by five points. And all in all, I just was like a healthier person. And this was as compared to that eight hours we had. Correct. That part of the book also jumped out at me because like it wasn't just like a normal eight hours. You really just had to sit there. You couldn't get up, right? Speaker 1 (8:37) I got up to use the bathroom. And what was that feeling like? Terrible. Awful. Like, sleepy. Really sleepy. And it was... But honestly, what would I have done usually? I would have gone and gotten another cup of coffee. Do you know what I mean? Wouldn't have taken like a five-minute walk. No. I would have gone and get coffee and thought, oh, I'm really struggling today. Or maybe I would have... you know, scroll to social media as a break, you know? So this really convinced me, just in two days, the difference that I felt and also the difference in the numbers that there were. So after I did that, I was like, dude, we got to ask everyone. We need people to try this because if you can show it in the lab, like what is the point if it can't get out into the wild? And can you, like what actually is the physical mechanism here? Like I understand like sitting would make you. Speaker 1 (9:30) tired in the sense of sluggishness, like it would catch up with you. But what is actually happening to your muscle, to your blood that results in these vastly different readings, action versus no action? It's fascinating. So there's multiple things going on. The first is, as Keith described it to me, this will be an image you will never let go of, and I apologize in advance. When you sit, your body is kinked at your hip and your knee is kind of like a garden hose, right? And when you have a garden hose that's like kinked, the water starts to back up. Speaker 1 (9:58) It's the same sort of mechanism that's happening with your blood flow, right? So no blood flow means that oxygen, glucose are not getting to your muscles. The muscles, when they're stagnant, obviously they're not stimulated. Stimulated muscles are important to extract the glucose and the oxygen from your blood and literally push it up to your brain. When you also sit hunched over, you know, you're working away, you are constricting your diaphragm. Your diaphragm can't bring in enough oxygen. You start to take shallow breaths. Maybe you've heard of that screen apnea. Have you ever heard of that? Linda Stone, the technologist, she coined that phrase. That's the real thing. So you're not breathing properly. And then your brain, as it burns through the— Speaker 1 (10:45) You're working, you're switching tasks, all that cognitive switching burns through glucose and oxygen and CO2 starts to build up in