Want to be happier and healthier? Switch up your day with movement breaks

(CNN) — Manoush Zomorodi has some good and bad news for you.

The bad news? All that sitting you do — whether you’re working at a desk or scrolling — is way worse for your health than you probably realized, the New York City-based NPR journalist warned in her new book, “Body Electric: The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being.”

The good news? There’s a simple, free way to eliminate a lot of the negative effects of being sedentary.

I spoke to Zomorodi about how building five-minute movement breaks every 30 minutes into our daily routines can leave us healthier, happier and more productive.

This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

CNN: You warn that sitting all day is killing people. Why is it so bad for us?

Manoush Zomorodi: There are three reasons it’s so physically detrimental. One is that your leg muscles need stimulation, so being at a standing desk doesn’t make a difference. They need stimulation in order to suck the glucose and the lipids out of your bloodstream and push the oxygen up to your brain.

The other thing is that when we sit, we’re constricting our diaphragm, which doesn’t let us take in deep breaths. The third thing is interoception, which is the body telling the brain what it needs. When we’re staring at a screen, we’re in thrall with what is happening externally, and we ignore the signals that are coming from our bodies. So, your body could be begging for a break, and you don’t even hear it.

CNN: How do you suggest adding movement to our lives? What happened when you and your listeners tried it?

Zomorodi: NPR combined forces with Keith Diaz, a physiologist at Columbia University Medical Center. Based on the findings of his previous research, we asked people to move for five minutes every half hour, five minutes every hour or five minutes every two hours for two weeks.

They could do anything. They could march while they were on a phone call. They could walk around the house collecting all the dirty dishes to put them in the dishwasher. They could take the dog out for a walk. It could be an imaginary dog. If walking was not an option, arm movements really do count.

We had to close it after 23,000 people signed up, so clearly people need this.

By the end, 80% of the people who committed to taking the breaks stuck with them, and 82% actually enjoyed taking the breaks. We saw up to a 28% reduction in fatigue levels.

We heard from people who found their attention spans again. They were able to focus and lost that brain fog so many of us have these days. They also got back more energy and a little taste of positivity. The main thing is that their moods stabilized.

CNN: While you say we shouldn’t stop other forms of exercise, we can’t counteract the negative effects of sitting all day by going to the gym in the morning first. Why not?

Zomorodi: Don’t stop working out. It will improve your muscle strength and your cardiovascular capabilities. But, unfortunately, sitting all day kinks your body like a garden hose. When you kink a garden hose, the water starts to get backed up and pressure builds. The same thing is happening at your torso and at your knees when you sit, and that pressure buildup doesn’t allow the muscles to be stimulated.

The human body evolved to need movement in order to survive. Every innovation and technology that we create reduces the need to move. We’re at this moment where we have to look at the things that humans have engineered out of our lives that our biology requires.

CNN: A lot of us think we don’t have time to take breaks, but you say they’ll make us more productive. Why?

Zomorodi: This was the biggest surprise to me. I had predicted that taking all these breaks would interrupt my workflow. Actually, in our study, productivity rose 4%, so slightly, but it didn’t harm it. People rated the quality of their work as much higher.

Anecdotally, we heard from people who said they would take a break, get back to their desk and feel refreshed, like they could focus again. Many people also used those five minutes to think, “What is my priority for the next hour of work? How should I answer that email?” They were more targeted and strategic when they came back. I certainly experienced that myself.

When I took part in a lab study, on the day I took breaks, my blood sugar dropped by nearly half, my blood pressure dropped by five points and my self-assessment of my positivity and the quality of my work remained even throughout the day. On the day I didn’t take breaks, my anxiety and fatigue went up, and my focus went down.

CNN: You acknowledge that our coworkers might find us strange if we start pacing the office twice an hour.

Zomorodi: We heard from a lot of people who would say, “There’s this weird experiment that I’m taking part in, and I don’t know if it’s going to work, but I’m going to try it.” You can try not being dogmatic about it and invite people to join you.

Other people changed their calendar settings to make all invites 55-minute meetings instead of 60. On video calls, a lot of people would say hello, then turn off the cameras and move.

CNN: You say using technology can cause us to miss signals our bodies are sending us. How does that happen, and what can we do about it?

Zomorodi: We are so externally bombarded by information, sound and news. I certainly feel overloaded by the amount of information we’re asked to take in all day.

I talked to University of California, Los Angeles interoception researcher, neuroscientist and psychiatrist Sahib Khalsa. His whole thing is that you should give yourself a sensory break. If you can’t get to a float pool, take half an hour or 45 minutes to float on your bed. Close the shades. Don’t listen to any music. Nothing. Give yourself a moment to just be without taking in anything. Reset yourself.

The really interesting thing we found in our study was that to start, people had to set timers in order to remind themselves to take movement breaks, but by the end of the two weeks we heard from so many people that their internal sense of needing to move came back or took over. People said they didn’t even need to use timers anymore.

We can build back this conversation between our body and our brain about what we need to support ourselves. It’s really encouraging. It’s not something you need to buy, like a new wearable. It’s in you. You just need to give it a chance to speak up again.

The-CNN-Wire
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