Sitting Isn't Just Bad for Your Body...It Hurts Your Brain As Well

You probably already know that sitting all day is bad for you. Yep, it's pretty common knowledge that living the sedentary lifestyle of a desk job by day and couch potato by night can shave years off your life and lead to a host of health issues, but did you know it can also change the way your brain works and not in a good way?

You have to understand, the body of a person who is standing uses energy differently from that of a body for a person who is sitting or in motion, which means that just working out won’t counter the negative effects of sitting all day. You actually have to make an effort to stand more. When you’re standing, your body burns calories and stores them in different ways than it does when you’re sitting. Brain function is affected as well, and studies have shown that our brains perform better when we’re standing than when we’re sitting. Sitting all day can cause serious mental fatigue; the lack of motion tells our bodies to go into sleep mode, and to stop pumping as much blood and oxygen into the brain as we do when standing or moving. For all intents and purposes, a sitting body’s muscles are “as silent as those of a dead horse.”

And studies have found that people who spend most of their day sitting are prone to illness no matter how much they may exercise the rest of the day. So when we put our focus on getting people to move rather than getting them to stop sitting, we’re still not getting to the root of the problem.

“Even if you’re active,” UNC-Greensboro Professor Michael Perko explained to New York Magazine, “even if you get up at five and do your P90X — if you sit six hours a day, those benefits are negated.”

The Internet is chock-full of accounts of people who almost immediately started feeling the benefits once they began using standing or walking desks, and it may be something to seriously start considering if you find yourself brain-dead in a desk chair every afternoon. If you can’t bear the thought of getting off your butt, at least get up and walk around or stretch every half hour or so. Need a little encouragement? There’s — you guessed it! — an app for that.

[Pic via Flickr - JoshSemans]