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Sedentary Behavior and Mortality in U.S. Middle-Aged and Older Adults
- overcast 9y agoThis should be obvious, however people still refuse to get up, and just walk around every hour for a minute. I spend a silly amount of time behind a computer, but I'll do 10-20 pushups / jumping jacks, every hour or so. After hours, I'll bang out six miles on the hiking trails. Get up, go get a drink, do a lap around the office. Get a stand/sit desk. Do some simple exercises. Pushups can be done anywhere, and will alleviate lower back pain.
- ffumarola 9y agoSeconded. I used to feel lower back pain due to the amount of sitting at a desk. Running and lifting weights did wonders for how I feel on a daily basis.
- eropple 9y agoExercise didn't help me with my occasional back issues, but switching to a standing desk really did. I didn't get one of those adjustable ones, because $400 for a desk that raises and lowers was silly--instead I just got a draft-height chair and stand and sit as appropriate.
- gknoy 9y agoAt some point, I decided I wasn't even going to bother with a chair. Every time I sit on the tall chair at work, I'm just Not Productive compared to standing.
- flachsechs 9y agofwiw, they make drafting stool aeron high-chairs. protip: buy one used, because the new price is high even for HM.
- eropple 9y agoYou can also buy high bases for existing Aeron chairs. I use a knock-off, though.
- komali2 9y agoJust running and lifting before or after work doesn't necessarily solve the problem though. I was talking to my doctor about it, and she said it was equally if not more important to take regular breaks during work to walk around, "look at something far away" (computer job), etc.
- technofiend 9y agoLosing enough weight so that there's not cantilevered fat out front acting as a lever on your lower back muscles really helps.
- DougWebb 9y agoThat also makes things like using a standing desk, or taking breaks to walk around, a lot easier to do. That weight hanging out in front makes everything but sitting painful.
- kbutler 9y agoThe report said sedentary periods >= 10 minutes were sufficient to cause increased mortality. "(high sedentary time [≥12.5 h/d] and high bout duration [≥10 min/bout]) had the greatest risk for death." I don't think I know anyone who is active on < 10 minute intervals.
- sliverstorm 9y agoChrist, unless I'm missing something that's practically fundamentally incompatible with modern society and just about any intellectual pursuit.
- overcast 9y agoSure, but I'm advocating getting your ass up and doing anything but sitting down all day. 10 minute intervals aren't realistic, but I frequently stand up, at least a half dozen times an hour just to stretch.
- puranjay 9y agoTwo habits that have changed my life: 1. Waking up early and reading something significant with my morning coffee. Usually something on philosophy or theology. Not looking at any screens until I'm at work. 2. Working out for an hour each day. It's like a switch: once I work out regularly, everything else falls into place. I eat better (because I don't want to lose the benefits of the 1 hour workout I just put in). I sleep better (because I have to be up early to workout). Working out daily truly is one of the best habits I've ever picked up.
- windexh8er 9y agoFully agreed on the screens part. I've gone back to ditching the screen at night. Previously I'd want to read an electronic book, but would end up distracted with everything else. The upside to ditching the electronic screen is focus and general avoidance of the light prior to bed. While RedShift/NightLight modes are nice, I still notice a profound difference by dumping the phone an hour or so before I turn it in. I think the other component we'll see questioned more and more over the coming years is the general questioning around homeostasis. I recently finished Scott Carney's: "What Doesn’t Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength" and it was a great read. While the main premise of the book is Scott's initial mission to debunk the Wim Hof Method he delves into a lot of newer research and training that is centered around building up our bodies beyond traditional exercise. Recently I read through comments on HN when the Bay area hit record highs and how people were cautioning of all of the bad things that would happen if one didn't seek A/C. It really hit home how many people are not acclimated, at all, to any level of extreme that other portions of the planet and people deal with on a daily basis. Just as we're sedentary, we're also not as capable to environmental adaptation - and I'll speculate this isn't good for us long term either. I've moved to 5+ minutes per shower of full cold and stopped using A/C in my vehicle, and more sparingly in my home. If you've never done the cold showers as a test to see what you're body is truly capable of - do it. It's amazing how you adapt in a short period of time. Also the clarity and anxiety reduction it brings to either the start or the end of the day is an understatement. Try it, it's cheap and takes no additional time out of your day if you're already showering anyway.
- CalRobert 9y ago"still refuse to get up" It's hard to be the first one to do this. I've been in some places where it would get you funny looks, some where it would get you marked as lazy (somewhat paradoxically), and some where it's encouraged. I like to do a decent swim on my lunch breaks (1250 meters these days). It was a good sign when my boss asked about how to join the same gym instead of wondering what I was gone for 50 minutes.
- overcast 9y agoPeople would give you funny looks for standing up to stretch? People need to stop caring what others think.
- QAPereo 9y agoThings like FB Snap, Instagram are heavily and successfully invested in convincing people that what others thing of them is the most significant aspect of their lives.
- CalRobert 9y agoNo, but if I left and went for a ten minute walk I would definitely get disapproving looks. At the time I was at a point in my career where I had fewer options and took what I could get.
- QAPereo 9y agoYou're that way until that behavior gets you in some real pain, then you stop caring about the looks you might get.
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- fragsworth 9y ago> Evaluation of their joint association showed that participants classified as high for both sedentary characteristics (high sedentary time [≥12.5 h/d] and high bout duration [≥10 min/bout]) had the greatest risk for death. Is sleep included in the 12.5 hours per day? Even if it isn't, I and everyone I know sits for at least that long each day. Definitely for more than 10 minutes at a time. If we need to interrupt our sitting bouts every 7.5 minutes in order to be healthy, I don't know how the hell to do this.
- bitexploder 9y agoI'd suggest every hour is a good stop gap. Take 5 minutes. Drink water. Walk, squat and stretch your hips. A nice deep squat, hold it for a minute. It is amazing how much stiffness this alleviates from sitting. Hip flexors get tight after about 15 minutes. It is one of the reasons desk warriors have so much trouble with IT band if they are also recreational runners. Tight-ass hips. I really despise smart watches, I turn off blue tooth and everything, but the Fenix 3/5 is my companion in my fitness journey. I follow the move indicator. When my watch buzzes, I move for 5 minutes in a way I just described and drink some water. It is annoying, but if you make it meditative and keep your task at hand in mind I have found, with practice, and this being something you always do, it does not disrupt flow state. Flow isn't like meditation, you can literally do this right in front of your monitor and keep thinking about your code or deep work task while you do it.
- ams6110 9y agoWell these are the same types of people who told us coffee was bad, saturated fat was bad, low-fat/carbs-rich diets were good, etc. and have been found to be wrong across the board. I don't worry too much about how other busybodies tell me I should live my life.
- bitexploder 9y agoCome on. This is HN. No one is telling anyone how to live their life. Well, people are but we all already know to ignore them right? We are trying to parse all this data about stand/sit/walk-desk and figure out if there is anything to it regarding overall mortality. If we can make some relatively small adjustments to our lives and gain back years that static positions may be taking from us why not? This is a quest for discovery about what the data is telling us. Yes, some of the time the data leads us on a path that is not the best (coffee/fats are bad?) -- it happens. Food and nutrition studies are worse than these types of studies, I think. There are so many more complicating factors compared to the broader strokes of these sort of lifestyle studies.
- hfourm 9y agoHonestly, I feel like a study of this nature is backing up what we already know to a degree. But, we need to know more and I feel like a 4 year tracking period isn't enough. For example, how do we know that people who were already the most unhealthy coming into this study are also the most sedentary? How are they handling these types of things.
- icelancer 9y agoThat's the danger of these types of studies. We all know what is healthy and what isn't, but the methodology here is suspect at best and the analysis shows weak conclusions. When headlines like the one posted here take root and people expose the truth for what it is, it damages the credibility of research and science in the minds of the masses, who are then more likely to ignore science in general.
- johnny313 9y agoThe headline result (sedentary behavior leads to increased risk of mortality) is not completely supported by the results shown in the abstract. They break the test subjects into four groups ranked by activity level, and compare the the highest activity group to the rest. But in the results, only the lowest activity group has a hazard ratio where the 95% confidence interval does not contain 1. Translation: the data only shows a meaningful difference in mortality risk between the highest and lowest activity groups. For the other two groups, the data does not support show an increased risk.
- BenoitEssiambre 9y agoAlso they didn't randomize the activity level of the subjects by putting them on different exercise programs. I would think that people being in an end of life state at the beginning of the study would tend to be more likely to be tired and avoid exercise. It could well be that early undiagnosed terminal illness causes people to be sedentary and not the other way around.
- wjnc 9y agoRandomized trials are the gold standard, but I wouldn't blast a study straight for being prospective. My main thingy with studies like these is that actuarial bookkeeping is hard. The difference in base mortality rate between a few age years in difference can be huge. But since the study runs 4, that difference in base rate multiplies. Properly accounting for that is hard.
- GCA10 9y agoAgreed. We're back in cause vs. correlation territory, no? The most sedentary people may also be the most obese, the most likely to suffer from diabetes, the most burdened with respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, etc. Their expected lifespans will thus be quite shorter. I'm willing to believe that appropriate exercise is good for you, almost no matter how robust or frail your health is. But this would be a much better study if it tracked cohorts with roughly parallel starting health. That way, the degree of active-vs.-sedentary living could be a study variable that wasn't tainted by undocumented variations in starting health status.
- FabHK 9y agoWould be interesting if the massive (potential) data trove from smartphones and smart watches could somehow be brought to a similar analysis. Apple has ResearchKit and CareKit, but not sure to which extent it's deployed and used and analysed.
- subru 9y agoCan a moderator please kindly delete this comment and the child
- d3ad1ysp0rk 9y agoYour depression may be exacerbated by a lack of exercise/fitness.
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- subru 9y agoPlease kindly remove these comments.
- dhimes 9y agoI flagged your comment to help get the mods' attention.
- wgaggioli 9y agoIs there any evodence to suggest sedentary time is causal?
- Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago10 minutes is a high bout duration for sedentarism? Wow. Where did they find the group with low bout duration then? That would mean having meals standing up, not driving or commuting 10 minutes or more, not watching even a 20-minute TV program, etc.
- makemonisonline 9y agoI've purchased a stationary bike that I'll go on basically any time that I watch TV. I can't imagine just sitting down for 20 or 40 minutes to watch TV anymore.
- flerchin 9y agoThose about to die are more sedentary?
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- yodsanklai 9y ago"high sedentary time [≥12.5 h/d]" Suppose I'm sedentary 13 hours a day, and that I walk / exercise for 2 hours, does it make me sedentary with a high-mortality risk?
- rxhernandez 9y agoI do find that bizarre as I do qualify for that metric and also run for about 6.5 miles a day.
- xexers 9y ago> “Even if you’re a gymgoer and think you’re safe on account of your excellent effort, you are not,” Levine said. “No one gets away from this stuff. … Excess sitting, this study seems to suggest, is a death sentence.” http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-sitting-death-risk-20170911-story.html http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-sitting-...
- phatbyte 9y agoI baffled by how many tech guys/girls don't understand this. This is so obvious it hurts. At my company's last year medical checkup the results were just absurd, specially for men above 30 years old. Abdominal fat, high cholesterol, diabetes, etc..Yet, nobody gives a damn, almost no one changed their habits. Guys, just get up and move. 30m-40m a day, you can fit this into your daily schedule, don't come up with excuses. If you can fit your TV shows/gaming or your accumulative time on social media, you can redirect that to your health instead. And the output will have a major impact not just to your health, but to your appearance and your confidence. Eat healthy, exercise and go to bed on time. You don't have to go to a gym, you can buy some gear and follow a plan from your home. Trust me, the change can be quite dramatic. Before work, or after work, pick a time, have a working out plan, track your progress, create the habit. After two months it will feel like not taking a shower if you skip it.
- the_cat_kittles 9y agoworth noting that its probably less about time and more about energy- so make it easy to get 30m of exercise. do something you like, make it near where you are, etc...
- phatbyte 9y agoThe funny thing is, since I started my energy levels increased. I can sustain much more time focused on a subject than before I didn't do any exercise. So, the first two or three weeks will be painful (physically), but afterwards, trust me, you will feel with so much more energy and less tired after work.
- kitsunesoba 9y agoIt might sound stupid but one of the things that's stood in the way of establishing a workout routine for myself is lack of consistent private space to do it in. The self consciousness and embarrassment is just too overbearing, and between an open office at work and having a roommate at home, adequately long contiguous blocks of privacy just aren't there. Gyms aren't really a solution either, as not knowing those surrounding me doesn't help the issue at all.
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- raviolo 9y agoDid they die because they were sedentary, or were they sedentary because they were nearing end of life?
- touchofevil 9y agoI can't recommend varidesk.com or geekdesk.com enough. A varidesk is great if your company already supplies you with a non-standing desk and a geekdesk is excellent if you work from home and get to pick any desk you want. Be sure to get a mat to stand on as well.
- brightball 9y agoBig varidesk fan. Got one 2 months ago and haven't lowered it back to a sitting position yet.
- eropple 9y agoWhat good is buying it, then? You could've just bought a higher desk (mine sits at 38") and saved three hundred bucks. Standing desks are awesome for sure, but I don't get the adjustable trend when draft chairs have been around forever.
- brightball 9y agoMy house had an office with a built in desk that made Varidesk a great option. I've wanted to lower it a couple of times but opted to push through for endurance sake.
- eropple 9y agoGotcha, that makes more sense. Having that much difference between the table and the desk surface seems clunky though and multiple monitors feels pretty weird. That's why I ended up just getting a table.
- brightball 9y agoI got the dual monitor mount on the back too.
- catacombs 9y agoI've started noticing how much sitting every day. Most of my day involves me sitting in front of a computer: Programming and designing during the day and gaming at night. My department has a ton of people who use standing desks, but I never saw the need. After reading through this thread and thinking about how much sitting I do on a daily basis, I'm more likely to now to ask my company for a standing desk. I'm hoping this will make a difference.
- jimmytucson 9y agoThere was a thread on here a couple weeks ago about how the good and bad parts of technology go hand in hand. I think this is a perfect example. We went from hunting and gathering to farming and domesticating, to mechanized farming and manufacturing, to cubicle farming and so on... We've made such great technological leaps that we've afforded ourselves hours to sit on pillows and watch screens and use hydrogenated fat to stave off hunger and boredom. EDIT: Found the thread. It was actually about the Unabomber. Go figure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15145849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15145849
- Greenisus 9y agoHere's one thing I've done to increase exercise in my life: I keep a jump rope in the trunk of my car, and I have a self-imposed rule that it costs 100 jumps to get into the car. I drive a few times per day, so that adds up to many small workouts!
- kbenson 9y agoIf that wouldn't result in me embarrassing myself in the Target/Costco/supermarket/work parking lot multiple times per week, I would actually be really interested in that approach.
- hughes 9y agoYeah that seems like a prohibitively high apparent social cost.
- krisroadruck 9y agoWhy in the world do you care what some rando in a parking lot thinks about you?
- kbenson 9y agoBecause I've been socially and culturally conditioned to, and no matter how much I can rationally justify that what other people think doesn't matter (which isn't entirely true), that doesn't mean I can emotionally accept that without angst. Put another way, it's not rational to ignore how you think you will respond to social pressure just because you think you shouldn't respond that way to the pressure. The human mind is not so simple as that.
- ZeroFries 9y agoTo be fair, if you can rationally justify the behavior, the feelings will disappear overtime. I used to be embarrassed working out in playgrounds. After doing it for a few years, I have 0 embarrassment. People also respond more positively than you initially imagine, on average.
- swframe2 9y agoI changed my primary work goal 2 years ago. Now I try to minimize stress as the most important goal of the work day. I redefined my job; it now is to solve problems in the lowest stressful way. In other words, my employer is not paying me to kill myself. I walk 10 mins every 1 to 2 hours and use that time to review. I try to find ways to solve problems in ways that are more fun, easier, and effective. So to me a 10 min break is a work requirement. Solving a stressful problem and not reducing the stress first is wrong. It isn't just something I do for my health, it is the way people are supposed to work because it produces much better solutions. After 50 mins working on something very difficult my mind gets so mucked up. Often I discover a simpler solution during the break and end up getting my work done much faster. Sometimes stress can peak and when that happens I just take a nap until it dissipates. Usually just 30 mins but there are times when it can take an hour or more. Again, I view the nap as doing work because often I wake up with a simpler solution that also has much less stress. If I can't find one, then I escalate the issue. Again, it isn't my job to absorb stress to the point where it degrades my effectiveness. Please note, I don't work on production system being used by 100s of millions of users. I've done it; it was fun; it is not possible to reduce stress in that work so it is not worth the effort. I now make 2x as much and have almost no stress.
- ourmandave 9y agoI walk 10 mins every 1 to 2 hours and use that time to review. I try to find ways to solve problems in ways that are more fun, easier, and effective. So to me a 10 min break is a work requirement. Ah, the old Walk-n-Talk meeting style. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WalkAndTalk http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WalkAndTalk If I could get Alan Sorkin's endorsement I'd sell it as a work out routine and make millions.
- CodeCube 9y agoonly tangentially related ... but this is a funny take on the ol' walk and talk :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2_Re7wmd2o&ab_channel=RocketJump https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2_Re7wmd2o&ab_channel=Rocke...
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- DateCalculator 9y agoI guess I already kind of knew how bad it was, but I just chose to ignore it. I decided instead of keeping a big thermos of coffee/water with me that lasts hours. I will instead actually get up to get something to drink, every time. It's a good reminder I think, and beats my alternative of setting an alarm for every 30 minutes of the work day.
- pconnelly15 9y agoLet's ignore the morality claim and look at this from a pure productivity and intellectual standpoint. It has been proven, many times over, that being active (moving) will make you think better, work better and basically outperform those who do not. So if you need a reason to move around do it for job performance.
- kazinator 9y agoThis shows a correlation between death, and reduced movement before death. Pardon the obvious! You would expect that many of the 340 subjects who died might have died, rather than accidentally, due to some progressively deteriorating condition which reduced their movement for a substantial period of time; perhaps years. We don't know whether the onset of death produced less mobility or vice versa. A relationship between sedentary lifestyle and mortality requires a very long term study. Like following large number s of people from age 18 (if not earlier) onward, and correlating levels of physical activity with life span.
- sridca 9y agoUsing a standing desk leaning against the wall is surprisingly comfortable. I wish someone made a product out of it. This kickstarter comes close, but the project has no update since 2 years ago: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1133385494/leanchair-the-portable-reclining-standing-desk https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1133385494/leanchair-th...