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Chapter 1: What are the effects of a sedentary lifestyle?
I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and you're listening to the Sunday Story from Up First. Now, I'm guessing that a lot of you listening are like me. You spend a lot of time searching, scrolling, and tapping on your devices. And a lot of times, you're sitting kind of like a little shrimp. You're hunched over. You're screamed with your shoulders all up around your ears. By the end of the day, you feel stiff.
Your neck hurts. Your eyes burn. Your mind is foggy. You feel like you need to touch grass. At least that's how I'm feeling. But maybe not after today, because today I'm talking with someone who's going to pitch me on a challenge.
The point is to feel good in your body, Aisha, to reconnect your body to your brain, to feel like a human who is in the world, not just like a brain popped on top of a bag of flesh.
You might recognize that as the voice of Manoush Zomorodi. She hosts the TED Radio Hour, and we've had her on the Sunday Story before to talk about how technology has shaped us.
We all feel awful at the end of a long day sitting attached to our devices. But why? What exactly is happening to us physically when we use our technology? And what can we do about it?
Since we last spoke, Manoush has spent three years combing through the results of a massive study with thousands of NPR listeners. in partnership with Columbia University Medical Center. And the results are at the heart of her new book, Body Electric, the hidden health cost of the digital age and new science to reclaim your well-being.
Today, she's back to explain how we can reclaim our humanity in a world that's designed to keep us sitting and glued to our screens.
We're talking about like some pretty fun, positive ways of just having more joy and energy in your life. We'll be right back.
This message comes from the NBC News podcast, Here's the Scoop. This month, senior legal correspondent Laura Jarrett talks with experts and lawyers behind Supreme Court cases of the past and how those cases are shaping decisions today. Listen now on Here's the Scoop.
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Chapter 2: How can gentle movement improve our well-being?
They offer a lot of entertainment. What's wrong with that?
OK, so we're going to go sort of twofold. First of all, there's the fact that when you are on a screen, you are mostly sitting. And that has the effect of sort of kinking your body in two places like a garden hose. At your torso and your knees, you're kinked. Pressure backs up. Your blood flow sort of gets limited. And also your leg muscles are not stimulated.
You need your leg muscles to be stimulated in order to suck oxygen. the glucose and the lipids out of your bloodstream and to process them and to push oxygen up to your brain. If you don't do those things over weeks, months, years, chronic conditions like diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular issues can start to creep in.
Three out of four Americans right now have one of those chronic conditions, and many of them are preventable. And then there's the screens, right? So every time we're looking at a screen, we often get sucked in to the point that we're not paying attention to what our body needs. Our body might be screaming for a break. We might be feeling so anxious and our back is killing us.
But something called interoception is interrupted. This is the conversation between the body telling the brain what we need and we just don't hear it.
Okay. I mean, you know, look, I hear you. That sounds, well, that doesn't sound good. Sounds bad. And I get the concerns about the glucose and all of that as I get older. I'm thinking about that stuff, too. So what have you learned about how to address those physical issues that we're all facing?
Yeah, so back in 2023, when I was wondering what we could do to feel better, I heard about the research of a physiologist at Columbia University Medical Center named Keith Diaz. And here's what Keith wanted to figure out.
If people are going to change their behaviors and tackle this sitting problem that we have, they need targets to shoot for. They need guidance on what do I do? And so really the goal of my lab is to try to figure out a prescription. And in particular, what we're really interested in is what's the least amount of movement that you can do to offset the harms of sitting?
So in Keith's lab, they found that five minutes of movement every 30 minutes, and we're talking gentle movement, Aisha, walking two miles per hour, a stroll, that radically improved blood sugar, blood pressure, people's focus, and it reduced fatigue.
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Chapter 3: What did the study reveal about movement and health?
Yeah, well, those were my questions too. And I was so sad to hear the answer that unfortunately, it is not enough to go to the gym in the morning or evening if you sit for the rest of the day. I think we think of exercise as something you check off your list a couple times a week. That kind of exercise, don't get me wrong, it's still really important.
You can build muscle strength, cardiovascular capacity. But if you sit for the majority of your waking hours, you are still going to have the health harms of doing that. You need consistent movement throughout the day, interstitial movement. And unfortunately, a standing desk isn't enough either.
In fact, they have found that if you stand for over two hours a day, you run the risk of getting blood clots and varicose veins. So to get the blood flowing, to get oxygen, you need these little breaks throughout the day.
Okay, so then you posed a challenge to your listeners.
Yeah, so Keith was kind of depressed. He's like, I have found this formula, but I don't think people can do it. And we were like, well, let's ask them. Let's see if they can. So NPR and Columbia combined forces and more than 20,000 listeners signed up to join the study. They could move for five minutes every half hour, five minutes every hour, or five minutes every two hours.
And we wanted to test, you know, was it feasible? Could people get these little movement breaks into their lives? And what happened if they did? And how did it go for them? Well, it was fascinating. So 80% who committed to doing it were able to stick with it for two weeks. 82% actually liked it. We saw up to 28% less fatigue in our participants.
And actually, all those interruptions didn't reduce productivity. It actually made productivity rise slightly, 4%. Here, I want to play you some voices of people who took part.
My energy went way up. So when you get home from work, you don't feel like cooking dinner. You don't feel like doing anything. I didn't really get any of that while I was doing the study. I feel so much better, have more energy, can focus better, and I'm happier.
I felt as if I could go for longer, and I really felt like the cloud in my brain kind of dissipated. Okay, so those were voices from a man named Jordan Smith, Roger Eastman, and a woman named Dana Lopez-Miley. And I want to tell you a little bit more about Dana, Aisha, because we have stayed in touch.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of five minutes of movement?
Like, that's a really big change for Dana. Like, was that true for a lot of people in the study that they like experience these wide ranging impacts on their health?
Yeah, I think for her, she told me just feeling good. good in her body again regained her confidence. She was feeling like there was nothing she could do to improve her health.
And we heard that from so many people that just adding a few of these interruptions per day, they didn't have to go crazy and have 16 interruptions or movement breaks, that just adding four to five on average, people started to feel like they could focus again, like their optimism came
back at the end of the day like they weren't as anxious that they felt like they could sort of go home and be present for their family they had enough energy to clean up around the house they didn't feel like they just had to lie on the couch so little tiny steps can add up to be a lot
But at the same time, is this a little too good to be true? Like, does this really work this well for everybody?
Yeah, I think the thing that we're saying is even just adding a little bit of movement to your life can make a profound difference. It is a low lift thing. You can try. Maybe it has huge results. Maybe you just feel a little bit better that day.
Okay, so it's my understanding that you are trying to put me to the challenge. Yes, we are. But I got to understand this challenge. So these people are walking around. What are we doing? Are we moving our legs? Are we walking in place? I'm trying to understand exactly what does this movement look like?
OK, so we found that the most feasible cadence was walking for five minutes every hour. But when I say walking, I just mean moving your legs, Aisha. So you can do what I call the zoom and shuffle. If you're listening to a presentation on Zoom or you're in a conference call, you can turn off your camera, shuffle back and forth, side to side. You can march in place.
Try to take some of your phone calls with your earbuds in and walk while you're on a phone call. If you want to take a break and get off your screen, great. Walk around the house, pick up all the dirty laundry and gather it all together. You can vacuum. You could just take a lap around the block. Anything that gets your body movement activated. And it doesn't, you don't have to go crazy.
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Chapter 5: How does movement impact productivity and fatigue?
And then, you know, for older people, some of them said, you know, I'm busy all day. I am moving. I'm gardening during the day. I'm looking after my grandchildren. It's the evenings, those long evenings. So some people make a date with the neighbor. We meet at 7 o'clock every evening. We walk down the block. We eat. check out the birds that are nesting there, and we walk back.
So trying to link it to something that you also need in your life, which maybe is socializing or being in nature, however that works for you. So I think the idea is like, this is not punishment. It is not an Exercise regime is a way to be out in the world, which we know nature makes us feel better. Socializing makes us feel better. Moving our bodies makes us feel better.
And those are things that are hard to get when we are sitting and looking at screens. It's not to say screens are the enemy. We've heard that a lot. This is to just say, let's remember all the other things that you need in your life too.
Well, thank you for this and bringing this to me. And, you know, it seems like it's making a real difference. I'll let you know if I see you around the office or something, how it's going.
Aisha, thank you for being game. I appreciate your enthusiasm and willing to experiment.
That was Manoush Zomorodi, host of NPR's TED Radio Hour podcast. Her new book is called Body Electric, The Hidden Health Cost of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Renice Vernosky. Liana Simstrom edited this episode with help from Sanaz Meshkenpour. The engineer was Jimmy Healy.
The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo, Jenny Schmidt, and Justine Yan. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.
Brazil used to have one of the fastest growing economies in the world. People called it the country of the future. There are songs. O Brasil é o país do futuro. Because it seems like we have it all, man. But then the music stopped. On the Planet Money podcast, a lot of countries these days aren't rich. They aren't poor. They're just kind of stuck in the middle. Why is that?
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