Sitting is killing us

Amajority of U.S. workers spend most of each weekday seated and looking at screens, putting ourselves in a slow-moving health crisis marked by alarming rates of early-onset diabetes and hypertension.

Columbia University Medical Center researchers found that five minutes of gentle walking every half hour can offset the harm of sendentary lives. Is it possible to add regular movement breaks to our deadline-filled days?

We asked National Public Radio listeners to join a study run by the same Columbia researchers to see whether they could incorporate regular movement breaks into their day and report back on why they could or couldn’t. Here’s what we found out:

Participants were in a better mood on days when they took movement breaks, reporting more positive emotions and fewer negative feelings. They also felt more energized.

The breaks didn’t hurt job performance. Participants reported that they felt more engaged in their work and showed slight improvements in work quantity and quality.

Many participants struggled to take movement breaks from daily routines every half hour. The commonly cited barriers were pressure to be productive, feeling too busy to take a break and concerns about disrupting workplace cultural norms.

Participants found that taking movement breaks every hour or two was less disruptive to their daily lives. However, feeling too busy and work performance pressures were still regularly reported as barriers even to these less frequent breaks.

Our findings show that public interest and participation in research are critical to identifying barriers to movement breaks. But we hope this project also fast-tracks a broader conversation about a cultural reset, one that would require collective effort. We shouldn’t accept sacrificing our general mental and physical well-being just because society has come to regard constant sitting as the norm.