Time to stand up against too much sitting down

If you’re an office worker, get up and walk around sometimes

Sitting is the new smoking, it’s often said, and new research might encourage us to quit it.

Here’s the shocker: standing at work can make you less tired than sitting, according to a study published in the British Medical Journal. Boffins studied 146 NHS office staff, some who stood and some who sat, and found the standing desk users were more attentive, less tired and more healthy, with fewer musculoskeletal problems.

(As an aside, The Courier pays me by the word and today one of the words I’m getting paid for is “boffins”. Twice.)

The key message from this study is we get healthier if we get off our backsides for a while. That’s no surprise, but the most interesting part is the commentary about “occupational sedentary behaviour”, which translates as “sitting in an office until despair sets in like dry rot of the soul”.

I’ve seen both extremes of workplaces. I’ve suffered in office chairs for too many hours over too many years, feeling my spine slowly liquefy along with my sense of self. Conversely, I spent years travelling around rural Perthshire meeting people, a reporting role for this newspaper that was unforgettable and made offices forever intolerable to me.

I’ve written columns for The Courier in many places: sitting in coffee shops, standing in children’s play centres and even, on one intimidating day, in longhand on scraps of paper on a Toronto subway train that was stuck in a tunnel. Right now I’m in an armchair tapping at a laptop, although I know I’ll regret it when I ask my legs to move again.

My point is this: humans are versatile creatures. We don’t need studies to tell us we shouldn’t spend so long in chairs, however carefully designed they may be. It’s unnatural, so let’s stop expecting it of each other.

If you’re an office worker, get up and walk around sometimes. Consider a standing desk or a change of position. Take your breaks. Don’t judge others if they get up, because it’s a sensible thing to do.

And maybe they’re pining for a summer’s day by Loch Tummel, when their job was just to shoot the breeze.