5 ms·

'Active' sitting is better for brain health: review of studies

135 points by mikhael 9mo ago

nbosse 9mo ago
I'm confused by this... It seems to me like the relevant part is "playing computer games is good" not "the type of sitting you do matters". Playing computer games while standing might be even better
- eatsyourtacos 9mo ago
  It's probably more "active" sitting. If you are a gamer (especially computer gamer), you are generally not just sitting back "relaxing". Your body is more engaged and you are constantly moving your body in some way. Sitting and watching tv you can literally be completely still for long periods of time.
  - p0w3n3d 9mo ago
    Depends on the game. I'd say I have two modes of sitting when programming, one is passive and my muscles ache. Another is active, when I try to use belly muscles (abs?) to keep my posture etc but... When I fall deeply into thinking I will eventually release muscles and feel worse later. I wonder if there could be an application that would encourage active sitting
    - layman51 9mo ago
      This is what I was thinking about too. I thought that "Active" sitting was going to be something about making sure you're not slouching, but rather adjusting yourself every so often to make sure you're sitting up straight instead of slouching off the chair.
  - yunwal 9mo ago
    They mention reading as an example of active sitting despite the fact that it requires no more motion than changing the channel (or whatever the modern day equivalent is).
  - iammjm 9mo ago
    Consider StarCraft: Brood War, a legendary real-time strategy game. To be played well, it requires between 200-400 actions per minute (APM), with some players going even beyond 500 APM. Some games last for more than an hour. Players use both the mouse and the keyboard. There's always more to do than you can realistically do. You are always putting out fires, managing your economy, producing units, securing income, carrying multiple attacks at once, fighting tactical battles, and executing strategic goals. Yeah I'd call that a pretty active sitting :)
    - mna_ 9mo ago
      Let's be honest, most of those actions are useless keybashing and clicking. It's easy to get a high APM.
      - DrewADesign 9mo ago
        In Smash? Sure. In StarCraft? I’ve never measured it, but I wouldn’t say ‘most’ by any stretch.
      - valenceelectron 9mo ago
        This is certainly true in the beginning of a game. Players claim to do this to warm up. However, in a busy confrontation there is no reason to spam any actions that are not directly contributing towards your endeavor. If you spam useless actions during a fight, your opponent who does not will best you.
      - iammjm 9mo ago
        The game's been played competitively for more than 25 years now, people still earn their living plying StarCraft. You wont find a single one of them with APM below 200. Having their livelihoods and legacies depending on this, do you think they'd be repeatedly doing something useless instead of optimizing? Anyways, I think you are missing the point that this thread is about active sitting. I imagine there isn't much difference to the meaning behind movement: movement is movement, meaningful or not.
  - PaulHoule 9mo ago
    I am thinking about stance while sitting lately. I am breathing and speaking more from my belly and that starts with posture which is neither slouched forward or back.
    - tartoran 9mo ago
      Me too and it's something I've become more aware as I got older. In short the lesson I learned is be well stacked and relaxed at the same time with the gaze forward. Also be able to freely move around around a fixed point if needed (the sit bones connecting to a sturdy surface of a chair). I find that swivel chairs or too soft of a chair could mess up stability/proprioception. A fixed/rigid chair at the right height helps me plant my feet better into the ground, forming some a sort of a tripod for better stability. Also an eye level monitor and a keyboard in reach without having to stretch out the arms helps keep a better posture. Another thing I practice is not leaning on the backrest too much. I noticed my kid shifting to bad postures when doing homework. Just gently telling him about it from time to time and making him be aware of his improved and what a correct posture should be seems to have improved his habits.
- helph67 9mo ago
  "A professor at the Institute for Work and Health found that people who stand throughout the day at their jobs have a 2.2 times higher risk of developing heart disease than those people who sit during the day." https://www.ergolink.com.au/blog/standing-vs-sitting-at-a-desk-which-is-better-for-you https://www.ergolink.com.au/blog/standing-vs-sitting-at-a-de...
  - goda90 9mo ago
    I can think of a lot of confounding factors for that. Are they just looking at standing desks, or also at the numerous blue collar and service industry jobs that demand long hours of standing at machines and registers? If it's just the former, then there's the question of what kind of people choose standing desks over sitting desks. Is it people worried about their health but don't take the time to exercise outside of work and think standing will be enough? If the latter applies, then there's facts about the stresses and complications of being less financially secure, such as less access to healthcare, longer working hours, poorer diets.
    - kilington 9mo ago
      Certainly but correlations not working make it unlikely that sitting is a dominant factor in current health problems. Looking at the details described it makes sense that sitting is a form of idleness and idleness is possible in a standing job. Therefore idleness could more reasonably be the dominant factor with other correlations then contributing more for idle standers than idle sitters, etc.
  - gamerdonkey 9mo ago
    I was a little miffed that this blog didn't include a link to that particular study, especially with how vague the citation is, so I went and found the original publication[0]. Of note, they have a "Setting the record straight" addendum[1] that includes a couple important quotes: "Misconception #1: Office workers should now be confused about whether they should sit or stand, and about whether sit/stand stations are a good idea. They shouldn’t be, says Smith. The study’s main finding was about workers who are required to stand for long periods (i.e. five hours or more) throughout their work shift, without opportunities to sit. Extending this to any worker who stands (e.g. an office worker using a sit-stand desk) is not correct. This is because office workers who stand at these types of workstations likely have the option to sit down when they get tired or when they feel pain in their legs and back." and "Misconception #2: We no longer have to worry about the negative health effects of prolonged sitting, thanks to this study. Not so fast, says Smith. There was nothing in this study to refute the research on the health consequences of a sedentary lifestyle. Much of that research is about sitting too much throughout the day—at work, while commuting and at home. This study only focused on prolonged sitting and prolonged standing at work. "And even within the study, another finding about prolonged sitting at work got lost in the coverage. Yes, prolonged standing occupations were linked with twice the risk of heart disease as prolonged sitting jobs. However, prolonged sitting jobs were still linked, among men, with a 40 per cent higher risk of heart disease compared to jobs that involve a mix of standing, sitting and walking." [0]: https://www.iwh.on.ca/newsletters/at-work/90/standing-too-long-at-work-carries-twice-the-risk-of-heart-disease-as-sitting-too-long https://www.iwh.on.ca/newsletters/at-work/90/standing-too-lo... [1]: https://www.iwh.on.ca/news/study-on-prolonged-standing-and-heart-disease-setting-record-straight https://www.iwh.on.ca/news/study-on-prolonged-standing-and-h...
nikkwong 9mo ago
Original source: https://news.uq.edu.au/2026-01-not-all-sitting-same-when-it-comes-brain-health https://news.uq.edu.au/2026-01-not-all-sitting-same-when-it-... > "...Passive activities such as watching television have been linked to worse memory and cognitive skills, while ‘active sitting’ like playing cards or reading correlate with better brain health, researchers have found." ...Do these researchers even read this to themselves aloud before hitting publish? It's confounding that they would find "sitting" to be the active ingredient pushing the outcome differential. Obviously, if you remove the bodily posture from the action that the user is engaging in, you would observe the same outcome the researchers did—meaning sitting was not operative here (..duh). Breaking news at 11: the brain works best when it’s actually used.
- zemvpferreira 9mo ago
  It's malice, not stupidity. They know people will click stuff that says sitting is good. Sounds controversial just to think about it.
rippeltippel 9mo ago
Breaking news! Using the brain is better for brain health than not using it. Next: Playing chess on one leg is better for brain health than sitting.
- tartoran 9mo ago
  It's not directly obvious that sitting in a certain way activates the brain more (it probably does if any balance center is activated), but sitting in better posture does have a lot of benefits from breathing better, not having muscles worn in overdrive to try to compensate and so on. Playing chess in one leg is a curious thing to me, I think it would initially affect the player's performance but that's just a guess.
- graypegg 9mo ago
  It's a !! Science Alert !! I feel like I've seen enough of these "X is good/bad for Y" articles on these popsci explainer sites surrounded by the same ads for an entire lifetime. Not that I don't think this is actual research, it's just the canonical link we end up with here on HN is probably... not the ideal one. I wanted to grab the journal link, but going back to the article now, I'm trapped in a "keep reading" loop that blocks the article, so I can be told "Mouse Study Suggests Nose-Picking Has a Surprising Link With Alzheimer's". If I could use an adblocker on the work PC I would.
goda90 9mo ago
"Passively watching TV" feels like a common target for brain health/strength/etc discussions. I'm curious if there's been any studies into the differences that engagement with television programs can have on the brain. There's been a whole breadth of television programming over the decades. I think it would be wrong to treat it all as equal in regards to how it impacts your brain.
- dexwiz 9mo ago
  I don't even think it's the same across viewers. When my partner and I watch some shows, we make prediction for the plot and evaluations of characters. We even have a bet book where we record and score predictions for some shows. It's makes watching much more engaging, especially if the creators hide details and foreshadowing in the background. But you don't even need high quality content to do this, just tighten the restrictions. Law and Order and Hallmark movies only get 30 seconds of content before we make predictions. It's much more stimulating than just passive consumption. If I don't do this I feel like brain turns to mush after a few hours of TV.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - collinmcnulty 9mo ago
    My wife and I do this for Survivor and The Amazing Race. We’re very engaged, debating strategy, making predictions. And then we watched with other people and they just … watched.
    - huhkerrf 9mo ago
      I've seen people be smug that they read books and don't watch TV before, but this is the first time I've seen someone be smug that they watch reality TV better than someone else.
      - collinmcnulty 9mo ago
        You're right, this does come off as smug. It was really more of a culture clash; they were annoyed at us for talking over the show, and we didn't realize that not everyone talked over it. We enjoy engaging with the shows this way, but no disrespect or superiority was intended.
daedrdev 9mo ago
Maybe in the future people will focus on solving problems some AGI can solve better to keep themselves in shape, like how exercise is a modern invention
- mhog_hn 9mo ago
  Still in awe that AGI is happening
  - jesse_dot_id 9mo ago
    It's not happening.
dizzard 9mo ago
This article has nothing to do with sitting.
- tasuki 9mo ago
  I read it sitting. Does that count?
pedalpete 9mo ago
That this is the state of "science" is very disappointing, and whenever I see the domain sciencealert, am pretty much trained that it is going to be nonsense. Sadly, other science publications seem to be following a not dissimilar trend.
- IndySun 9mo ago
  Sciencealert seems to summarise academic studies using tabloid journalists.
- ramon156 9mo ago
  the journal that's linked seems "okay"... definitely nothing groundbreaking but any research on Alzheimer is better than no research
IndySun 9mo ago
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13872877251394751 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13872877251394751 Based on this report.
griffinlam 9mo ago
Very inspiring
Brajeshwar 9mo ago
Don’t do that. Don’t give me hope.
Nevermark 9mo ago
I have an “ADHD” Pipersong desk chair so I can go through a random-walk sitting position open-ended training circuit while I work. Without even thinking about it.
PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago
As soon as my kid was able to play video games, we basically banned him from watching tv. His only tv was phonics and numbers, which helped significantly because when he started playing minecraft on creative, he had to sound out the items he wanted to search for. I didn't have any science, it was intuition. I suppose next step is to figure out which video games are best. We basically don't let them play Idle games, but I'm starting to think platformers might need to be banned too.
- efilife 9mo ago
  just ban breathing next
amadeuspagel 9mo ago
When I read this title I imagined active sitting to mean something like sitting in a rocking chair. To call sitting active because someone is using their brain seems even more stretched. We already know that you need to exercise your body and brain. Do we really need a term for different kinds of sitting to make us feel better about at least using our brain while our body decays?

135 points by mikhael 9mo ago

I'm confused by this... It seems to me like the relevant part is "playing computer games is good" not "the type of sitting you do matters". Playing computer games while standing might be even better

eatsyourtacos 9mo ago
It's probably more "active" sitting. If you are a gamer (especially computer gamer), you are generally not just sitting back "relaxing". Your body is more engaged and you are constantly moving your body in some way. Sitting and watching tv you can literally be completely still for long periods of time.
- p0w3n3d 9mo ago
  Depends on the game. I'd say I have two modes of sitting when programming, one is passive and my muscles ache. Another is active, when I try to use belly muscles (abs?) to keep my posture etc but... When I fall deeply into thinking I will eventually release muscles and feel worse later. I wonder if there could be an application that would encourage active sitting
  - layman51 9mo ago
    This is what I was thinking about too. I thought that "Active" sitting was going to be something about making sure you're not slouching, but rather adjusting yourself every so often to make sure you're sitting up straight instead of slouching off the chair.
- yunwal 9mo ago
  They mention reading as an example of active sitting despite the fact that it requires no more motion than changing the channel (or whatever the modern day equivalent is).
- iammjm 9mo ago
  Consider StarCraft: Brood War, a legendary real-time strategy game. To be played well, it requires between 200-400 actions per minute (APM), with some players going even beyond 500 APM. Some games last for more than an hour. Players use both the mouse and the keyboard. There's always more to do than you can realistically do. You are always putting out fires, managing your economy, producing units, securing income, carrying multiple attacks at once, fighting tactical battles, and executing strategic goals. Yeah I'd call that a pretty active sitting :)
  - mna_ 9mo ago
    Let's be honest, most of those actions are useless keybashing and clicking. It's easy to get a high APM.
    - DrewADesign 9mo ago
      In Smash? Sure. In StarCraft? I’ve never measured it, but I wouldn’t say ‘most’ by any stretch.
    - valenceelectron 9mo ago
      This is certainly true in the beginning of a game. Players claim to do this to warm up. However, in a busy confrontation there is no reason to spam any actions that are not directly contributing towards your endeavor. If you spam useless actions during a fight, your opponent who does not will best you.
    - iammjm 9mo ago
      The game's been played competitively for more than 25 years now, people still earn their living plying StarCraft. You wont find a single one of them with APM below 200. Having their livelihoods and legacies depending on this, do you think they'd be repeatedly doing something useless instead of optimizing? Anyways, I think you are missing the point that this thread is about active sitting. I imagine there isn't much difference to the meaning behind movement: movement is movement, meaningful or not.
- PaulHoule 9mo ago
  I am thinking about stance while sitting lately. I am breathing and speaking more from my belly and that starts with posture which is neither slouched forward or back.
  - tartoran 9mo ago
    Me too and it's something I've become more aware as I got older. In short the lesson I learned is be well stacked and relaxed at the same time with the gaze forward. Also be able to freely move around around a fixed point if needed (the sit bones connecting to a sturdy surface of a chair). I find that swivel chairs or too soft of a chair could mess up stability/proprioception. A fixed/rigid chair at the right height helps me plant my feet better into the ground, forming some a sort of a tripod for better stability. Also an eye level monitor and a keyboard in reach without having to stretch out the arms helps keep a better posture. Another thing I practice is not leaning on the backrest too much. I noticed my kid shifting to bad postures when doing homework. Just gently telling him about it from time to time and making him be aware of his improved and what a correct posture should be seems to have improved his habits.
helph67 9mo ago
"A professor at the Institute for Work and Health found that people who stand throughout the day at their jobs have a 2.2 times higher risk of developing heart disease than those people who sit during the day." https://www.ergolink.com.au/blog/standing-vs-sitting-at-a-desk-which-is-better-for-you https://www.ergolink.com.au/blog/standing-vs-sitting-at-a-de...
- goda90 9mo ago
  I can think of a lot of confounding factors for that. Are they just looking at standing desks, or also at the numerous blue collar and service industry jobs that demand long hours of standing at machines and registers? If it's just the former, then there's the question of what kind of people choose standing desks over sitting desks. Is it people worried about their health but don't take the time to exercise outside of work and think standing will be enough? If the latter applies, then there's facts about the stresses and complications of being less financially secure, such as less access to healthcare, longer working hours, poorer diets.
  - kilington 9mo ago
    Certainly but correlations not working make it unlikely that sitting is a dominant factor in current health problems. Looking at the details described it makes sense that sitting is a form of idleness and idleness is possible in a standing job. Therefore idleness could more reasonably be the dominant factor with other correlations then contributing more for idle standers than idle sitters, etc.
- gamerdonkey 9mo ago
  I was a little miffed that this blog didn't include a link to that particular study, especially with how vague the citation is, so I went and found the original publication[0]. Of note, they have a "Setting the record straight" addendum[1] that includes a couple important quotes: "Misconception #1: Office workers should now be confused about whether they should sit or stand, and about whether sit/stand stations are a good idea. They shouldn’t be, says Smith. The study’s main finding was about workers who are required to stand for long periods (i.e. five hours or more) throughout their work shift, without opportunities to sit. Extending this to any worker who stands (e.g. an office worker using a sit-stand desk) is not correct. This is because office workers who stand at these types of workstations likely have the option to sit down when they get tired or when they feel pain in their legs and back." and "Misconception #2: We no longer have to worry about the negative health effects of prolonged sitting, thanks to this study. Not so fast, says Smith. There was nothing in this study to refute the research on the health consequences of a sedentary lifestyle. Much of that research is about sitting too much throughout the day—at work, while commuting and at home. This study only focused on prolonged sitting and prolonged standing at work. "And even within the study, another finding about prolonged sitting at work got lost in the coverage. Yes, prolonged standing occupations were linked with twice the risk of heart disease as prolonged sitting jobs. However, prolonged sitting jobs were still linked, among men, with a 40 per cent higher risk of heart disease compared to jobs that involve a mix of standing, sitting and walking." [0]: https://www.iwh.on.ca/newsletters/at-work/90/standing-too-long-at-work-carries-twice-the-risk-of-heart-disease-as-sitting-too-long https://www.iwh.on.ca/newsletters/at-work/90/standing-too-lo... [1]: https://www.iwh.on.ca/news/study-on-prolonged-standing-and-heart-disease-setting-record-straight https://www.iwh.on.ca/news/study-on-prolonged-standing-and-h...

nikkwong 9mo ago

Original source: https://news.uq.edu.au/2026-01-not-all-sitting-same-when-it-comes-brain-health https://news.uq.edu.au/2026-01-not-all-sitting-same-when-it-... > "...Passive activities such as watching television have been linked to worse memory and cognitive skills, while ‘active sitting’ like playing cards or reading correlate with better brain health, researchers have found." ...Do these researchers even read this to themselves aloud before hitting publish? It's confounding that they would find "sitting" to be the active ingredient pushing the outcome differential. Obviously, if you remove the bodily posture from the action that the user is engaging in, you would observe the same outcome the researchers did—meaning sitting was not operative here (..duh). Breaking news at 11: the brain works best when it’s actually used.

zemvpferreira 9mo ago
It's malice, not stupidity. They know people will click stuff that says sitting is good. Sounds controversial just to think about it.

rippeltippel 9mo ago

Breaking news! Using the brain is better for brain health than not using it. Next: Playing chess on one leg is better for brain health than sitting.

tartoran 9mo ago
It's not directly obvious that sitting in a certain way activates the brain more (it probably does if any balance center is activated), but sitting in better posture does have a lot of benefits from breathing better, not having muscles worn in overdrive to try to compensate and so on. Playing chess in one leg is a curious thing to me, I think it would initially affect the player's performance but that's just a guess.
graypegg 9mo ago
It's a !! Science Alert !! I feel like I've seen enough of these "X is good/bad for Y" articles on these popsci explainer sites surrounded by the same ads for an entire lifetime. Not that I don't think this is actual research, it's just the canonical link we end up with here on HN is probably... not the ideal one. I wanted to grab the journal link, but going back to the article now, I'm trapped in a "keep reading" loop that blocks the article, so I can be told "Mouse Study Suggests Nose-Picking Has a Surprising Link With Alzheimer's". If I could use an adblocker on the work PC I would.

goda90 9mo ago

"Passively watching TV" feels like a common target for brain health/strength/etc discussions. I'm curious if there's been any studies into the differences that engagement with television programs can have on the brain. There's been a whole breadth of television programming over the decades. I think it would be wrong to treat it all as equal in regards to how it impacts your brain.

dexwiz 9mo ago
I don't even think it's the same across viewers. When my partner and I watch some shows, we make prediction for the plot and evaluations of characters. We even have a bet book where we record and score predictions for some shows. It's makes watching much more engaging, especially if the creators hide details and foreshadowing in the background. But you don't even need high quality content to do this, just tighten the restrictions. Law and Order and Hallmark movies only get 30 seconds of content before we make predictions. It's much more stimulating than just passive consumption. If I don't do this I feel like brain turns to mush after a few hours of TV.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- collinmcnulty 9mo ago
  My wife and I do this for Survivor and The Amazing Race. We’re very engaged, debating strategy, making predictions. And then we watched with other people and they just … watched.
  - huhkerrf 9mo ago
    I've seen people be smug that they read books and don't watch TV before, but this is the first time I've seen someone be smug that they watch reality TV better than someone else.
    - collinmcnulty 9mo ago
      You're right, this does come off as smug. It was really more of a culture clash; they were annoyed at us for talking over the show, and we didn't realize that not everyone talked over it. We enjoy engaging with the shows this way, but no disrespect or superiority was intended.

daedrdev 9mo ago

Maybe in the future people will focus on solving problems some AGI can solve better to keep themselves in shape, like how exercise is a modern invention

mhog_hn 9mo ago
Still in awe that AGI is happening
- jesse_dot_id 9mo ago
  It's not happening.

dizzard 9mo ago

This article has nothing to do with sitting.

tasuki 9mo ago
I read it sitting. Does that count?

pedalpete 9mo ago

That this is the state of "science" is very disappointing, and whenever I see the domain sciencealert, am pretty much trained that it is going to be nonsense. Sadly, other science publications seem to be following a not dissimilar trend.

IndySun 9mo ago
Sciencealert seems to summarise academic studies using tabloid journalists.
ramon156 9mo ago
the journal that's linked seems "okay"... definitely nothing groundbreaking but any research on Alzheimer is better than no research

IndySun 9mo ago

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13872877251394751 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13872877251394751 Based on this report.

griffinlam 9mo ago

Very inspiring

Brajeshwar 9mo ago

Don’t do that. Don’t give me hope.

Nevermark 9mo ago

I have an “ADHD” Pipersong desk chair so I can go through a random-walk sitting position open-ended training circuit while I work. Without even thinking about it.

PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago

As soon as my kid was able to play video games, we basically banned him from watching tv. His only tv was phonics and numbers, which helped significantly because when he started playing minecraft on creative, he had to sound out the items he wanted to search for. I didn't have any science, it was intuition. I suppose next step is to figure out which video games are best. We basically don't let them play Idle games, but I'm starting to think platformers might need to be banned too.

efilife 9mo ago
just ban breathing next

amadeuspagel 9mo ago

When I read this title I imagined active sitting to mean something like sitting in a rocking chair. To call sitting active because someone is using their brain seems even more stretched. We already know that you need to exercise your body and brain. Do we really need a term for different kinds of sitting to make us feel better about at least using our brain while our body decays?