Our bodies are begging us to move. Let's listen!
Join me this week for an experiment inspired by Manoush Zomorodi and her new book
One of my favorite parts of being a writer is getting to meet other writers and learn about their work. So I was really excited when I was invited to join Manoush Zomorodi for an event last night being hosted by the Frenchtown Book Shop Lit Fest to talk about our books.
If you’re a regular NPR listener, you are probably already familiar with Manoush: she’s the host of the TED Radio Hour podcast (for which she recently interviewed me about fun, which is how we started scheming about doing a book event together).
She’s also the author of two books: Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self, which came out in 2017 and was an inspiration to me as I worked on How to Break Up With Your Phone, and a new book — which came out on May 5th — called Body Electric: The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Wellbeing.
One of the many things I appreciate about Manoush’s work is that she specializes in creating, as she puts it, “large-scale public experiments that invite audiences to investigate how technology is reshaping our brains, bodies, and behavior.”
And when she says “large scale,” she means it. For both of her books, she reached out to her listeners and recruited more than 20,000 people to participate in her experiments. For Bored and Brilliant, she designed a series of experiments to help people become more intentional around phone use. For Body Electric, the experiment was even bigger — and the intervention was simpler (if challenging): she teamed up with Kenneth Diaz, a researcher at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and invited participants to see how their lives might be changed if they were to move their bodies for five minutes every half hour.
Our bodies were not built to sit still
This is not what most of us are doing. Instead, Manoush points out that today, many of us are spending the majority of our time awake sitting and staring at a screen — and it’s not just us adults: she writes that school kids spend roughly 70% of their day sitting!
I’m often guilty of this myself, which is not great because, to put it mildly, sitting for hours at a time is extremely bad for our bodies. Its possible effects include an increased risk of insulin resistance, inflammation, and chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Also, all that sitting reduces blood flow (and, therefore, oxygen and glucose) to your brain — which leads you to feel “foggy, tired, unfocused, and even sleepy.”
When she first came across Kenneth’s research, Manoush was intrigued to find that amongst his participants, just taking a five-minute walk every five minutes “reversed many of the effects of prolonged sitting.” As she writes, “Blood sugar spikes, blood pressure, mood dips, fatigue, all vastly improved in his lab’s participants.” And the effects were not subtle: participants saw their blood sugar drop by nearly 60 percent (as a type 1 diabetic myself, this does not surprise me), their blood pressure fall by four to five points, and their mood lift. They felt, as Manoush writes, “more energized, less fatigued and . . . just better.”
Sounds great, right? But Manoush also had the same question that may have popped into your own head: could this ever work in the real world?
Enter 23,000 NPR Listeners
This led Manoush to reach out to Kenneth and invite her NPR listeners to participate in a large-scale version of the experiment. (“We had more than 23,000 people sign up,” Manoush said. “We crashed Columbia’s servers.”)
Turns out that it is possible to incorporate more movement breaks into the day—even if you’re not able to take one every single half hour. You just may have to get creative. According to Manoush, some people followed the original experiment’s protocol and got up from their desks and went for a walk. Others paced in place. Some stretched at their desk. Others danced, or did a more intense exercise break.
Regardless of what type of movement people chose, they consistently reported amazing changes in both their physical and mental health. People said they had more energy, better focus, and lower stress. Counterintuitively, taking regular breaks actually made them feel more productive. Many people reported improvements in long-standing health concerns. And, my personal favorite finding (and one that’s not usually identified as an endpoint in clinical trials!): many people described “feeling good in their bodies again.”
