More than 80 percent of jobs in the U.S. are mostly sedentary, according to the National Institutes of Health. Most of us plop down in front of a computer for eight to 10 hours a day with little to no movement before we move to the couch and sit before an even larger screen. While COVID brought the era of walking pads and under-the-desk treadmills, most people are still sitting for hours at a time and it's negatively affecting our mental health.
But there's hope yet. Just 15 minutes of exercise per day can help offset the negative effects of sitting at a desk for hours at a time, a recent global State of Mind study published by ASICS reports.
According to the study, when office workers added as little as 15 minutes of movement into their regular work day, their mental state improved by 22.5 percent and their overall State of Mind scores increased from 62/100 to 76/100.
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The State of Mind scores were calculated based on the cumulative mean scores across nine cognitive and emotional traits, each of which was marked out of 10.
The traits were broken into two categories-cognitive and emotional-and included the following:
"We have shown previously that just 15 minutes of exercise in leisure time can result in a meaningful improvement in people's State of Mind scores," said Dr. Brendon Stubbs from King's College London, who oversaw The Desk Break Experiment. "But what surprised us with the Desk Break experiment was how powerful the 15-minute movement breaks were in improving wellbeing and reducing stress. It even changed people's perceptions of their workplace for the better."
Take a tally of the people in your life who are nine-to-fivers working from their desks. It's safe to assume most of them take their lunch midday around 12 or 1 p.m. which means they're going hours at a time without any movement. According to the research, just two hours of continuous sitting plummeted State of Mind scores and increased stress levels.
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This isn't the first study to show that sitting for hours at a time is bad for our health, either. According to another study published in January 2024, individuals who mostly sat at their jobs were found to have a 16 percent increased risk of death and a 34 percent increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease in comparison to those who weren't sitting for hours during the day.
Moral of the story? Get moving! Even if you have a job that requires you to be at your desk all day, invest in a walking pad for under your desk, add a Peloton to your Christmas wishlist, or turn on a podcast while you take a quick walk on your lunch break. Trust the experts; your mental health will thank you.
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