Sitting in a chair all day can make you sick. Getting up and moving around every hour can help.

Sitting in a chair all day can make you sick. Getting up and moving around every hour can help.

Lydia Denworth

For writers who want to finish writing, there’s a golden rule: stay seated. I try to spend most of my day sitting in front of my computer. But I also sit at the kitchen table, in front of the TV, and sometimes on planes, trains, and cars. “If you look at people’s lives, you see what they do: they just sit,” says Neville Owen, a behavioral epidemiologist at the Centre for Urban Transition at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. Most adults sit for more than half of their waking hours, usually nearly eight of a 16-hour day, and sometimes as much as 11.5 hours.

A growing body of research shows that sitting-related health problems, such as heart disease and diabetes, aren’t just the result of sitting for long periods of time. Uninterrupted Time: Eight hours is fine as long as you take a break every hour by getting up and moving around, or do more vigorous exercise when you’re awake.

Research on sedentary behavior began decades ago by linking the amount of time people spent watching television to how overweight or obese they were. Research has progressed to include more sophisticated devices that can measure not just the number of steps taken but also how few steps people take. These studies show that too much sitting, especially for long periods of time in a row, impairs glucose metabolism and increases the risk of type 2 diabetes. A study published in 2024 found that JAMA Network Open A study of about 500,000 people in Taiwan found that people who primarily sit at work had a 16% higher risk of death from any cause and a 34% higher risk of cardiovascular disease compared to those who do not. JAMA Oncology A study of 1,535 cancer survivors found that those who sat for more than eight hours a day and did no physical activity had the highest risk of both general mortality and cancer-related mortality. (The researchers selected health characteristics to minimize the possibility that disease was the cause of sedentary behavior in the first place.)

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In recent years, heated headlines have gone so far as to call sitting “the new smoking.” Experts say that’s far from it: People who smoke heavily have a many times higher risk of death from any cause than those who sit a lot. But sitting is such a serious health problem that public health organizations, such as the World Health Organization, have begun to include recommendations to reduce sitting time in their physical activity guidelines.

Those in the top 25% of physical activity can sit for more than eight hours a day without increasing their risk.

These health guidelines also recommend 150 to 300 minutes of moderate exercise per week, whether that be at the gym, jogging, or brisk walking. But here’s the thing: even if you’re doing other regular exercise, sitting too much can still be harmful. “It’s possible to be physically active and still be sedentary,” says Lin Yang, a research scientist in the Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention Research Unit at Alberta Health Services in Canada and co-author of the 2022 cancer study. Anyone who exercises regularly, like me, but sits at work, is at risk.

Sedentary behavior is defined as waking activities (sitting, lying, leaning) that involve very low energy expenditure. Scientists are still figuring out why it’s so bad, but there are a few possible reasons: Sitting, or lack of movement, affects vascular function (especially in the legs), blood pressure, blood sugar, cerebral blood flow, and inflammation. “Patterns of being active or inactive are very fundamental to our biology. They’re expressed in almost every system,” says Owen.

One solution is to get more exercise overall, says Ulf Ekelund, a physical activity epidemiologist at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, who studies the combined effects of sitting time and physical activity. “Physical activity can mitigate the effects of prolonged sitting,” Ekelund says. “If you have to sit for long periods of time, you should strive to get more physical activity than is recommended.” Research has shown that people in the top 25 percent in terms of physical activity can sit for more than eight hours a day without increasing their risk of early death.

Breaking up sitting time with some movement is also important, but scientists haven’t yet pinpointed exactly how much is needed. Our bodies work hard just to get up from a sitting position, or vice versa. “Getting up from a sitting position is very biologically active,” Owen says. Experimental studies suggest that there’s a dose-response relationship between sitting and moving. If you’re only going to stand up for a minute, Owen says, you should probably do it every 30 minutes. If you’re going to walk around for a few minutes, standing up every hour should be enough.

Standing desks naturally reduce the amount of time office workers spend sitting, but the evidence on health benefits is limited and only applies to the workplace: standing for long periods of time can lead to health complications such as varicose veins. “It’s really about movement,” says Owen.

The key is to change how much time you sit. This is a lot easier than getting a fancy desk, ergonomic chair, or computer stand, although there are uses for those too. What the vast majority of adults and children need to do is move more and sit less.

This is an opinion and analysis article and the views of the author are not necessarily those of Scientific American.