Consequences of a Sedentary Lifestyle
You might find yourself spending nearly your entire day sitting in front of a computer for work or watching Netflix on your couch, particularly during this current crisis. Staying at home saves lives, but this may be causing some people to be less inactive, possibly contributing to poor health conditions. According to a review of studies published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2015, living a largely sedentary lifestyle is associated with heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer. It is also thought to be linked to many other health conditions, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, osteoporosis, and stroke.
Prolonged sitting can increase the risk for deep vein thrombosis (DVT), or blood clots in your legs. If the blood clots travel through your veins, it can end up blocking up your lungs, causing a pulmonary embolism (PE). This can cause serious problems, damaging your lungs, and possibly other organs, due to lack of supply of oxygen throughout your body’s tissues. There is also some evidence suggesting a sedentary lifestyle may also be bad for your mental health, particularly because it may cause anxiety and depression. In addition, it seems that sedentary behavior is especially dangerous particularly for adults who already have preexisting mental health conditions, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anxiety, and depression.
If you think that you can just balance out those hours of sitting by hitting the gym for a 30 minute session of light cardio, unfortunately, you may be potentially wrong. Sitting for a long time can’t be offset by high levels of exercise -- a study reveals that there may be a threshold of 10 hours of sitting, over which cardiovascular risk significantly rises, whether a person is highly active or not. Working from home can dramatically decrease the amount of time we move around, and increase the time we spend sitting or staying in the same position for extended periods of time. So what can we do?
Evelyn O’Neill, the manager of outpatient exercise programs at the Harvard-affiliated Hebrew Rehabilitation Center, suggests that you can start small, by incorporating little opportunities to exercise throughout your daily routine. Perhaps this means that every time you walk to the fridge, you do twenty push ups, or maybe you can do lunges back to your desk from your trip to the bathroom. Maybe every time you see an ad on TV, you can walk around your room or march in place. You can get very creative at how you can fit more physical movement into your life. Apparently, soup cans, one of the best quarantine foods, work as great dumbbells. Though this may seem silly and useless, O’Neill says this can be effective. By moving the joints and muscles and breaking up the amount of time you stay glued to your seat, you can help reduce the effects of prolonged sitting and inactivity.
For people who want to do more for their physical health, but do not have the luxury of a personal fitness gym in their own home, there are many ways to exercise from home. There are many YouTube videos online on exercise regimes you can follow that you can do from your own office or room, using minimal to no equipment. However, it is still important to incorporate regular periods of short exercise into your daily life, and take frequent breaks from sitting to stand out and move around.
References:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27434872/
https://medlineplus.gov/healthrisksofaninactivelifestyle.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012812605900006X
