How does sitting all day impact your stress? As you may have heard in pop culture, sitting is the new smoking. I hadn’t heard that. The science shows that sitting, it’s not just that exercise is good for you and moving is good for you for your stress, anxiety, burnout. It’s that sitting is actually bad for you and it can increase your sense of anxiety, stress and burnout. Wow. I wanted to share a couple of pretty alarming statistics about sitting. There was a study of 800 people and the ones who sat the most, this is like knock your socks off data, the people who sat the most had 112% higher risk of diabetes, 147% higher risk of heart disease, a 90% higher risk of death from heart disease, and a 50% higher risk from death overall. All to say that sitting is actually bad for our health, our well being, and as it turns out, your stress and burnout. How does sitting trigger stress? The data suggests that when you are sitting for prolonged, long length of time, you know, you’re stewing in your own emotions, sort of speak. And so it’s that getting up and moving creates a whole cascade of positive biological changes to your brain and your body. And when you’re sitting for long periods of time, that doesn’t happen. It also has a cardiovascular benefit, or rather it’s detrimental to your cardiovascular health to just sit because a body is meant to move. Your body is a the greatest machine. And so use that machine to do what it’s meant to do. It doesn’t have to be, you know, you don’t have to become an Olympian, but certainly getting up and moving a little bit every day, even if it means five minutes between your zoom meetings. Get up, take a walk, stretch, sitting for prolonged periods of time because think about it, we sit all day at work, then you sit all day at work and then you sit in a car going back home and then you sit on your sofa all day. So our, the human body hasn’t been designed to just sit all day. We are meant to move and move our bodies. As a doctor, what do you recommend? My watch has that stand up thing. I love it. And I don’t realize how, how much time will go by and it’s like, oh, I haven’t stood in 2 hours. Holy cow. I love that. I would say there isn’t necessarily a prescription like a dose relationship for sitting and when to stand up. And what’s the dose of standing and sitting? Just do it when you can. You have a 2 hour meeting. Can’t stand up right after that 2 hour meeting instead of sitting on your Slack channel and responding to emails or doing all of those things, get up and walk around. There is something to be said, right? Like Plato, Aristotle, all of these Greats talked about the benefit of a walk, that mental health benefit of taking a walk. So it doesn’t have to be this long, profound walk. Just get up and stretch your body, do some gentle stretching, some exercising, connect your breath to your movement, to your posture. This is really important because that’s like a way to tap into your mind body connection as well.