Mental Health May Be Affected By Too Much Sitting

Hours and hours of sitting are what work means for many people. This comes with rare pauses for a walk around the block or down the hall.

Among researchers, this has become a growing concern even though it is very easy to dismiss this as a routine part of adult life. It has been suggested by studies that your lifespan could be shortened and all sorts of damage to your body can be caused by spending hours in a chair.

Mental Health May Be Affected By Too Much Sitting

Prolonged sitting has been linked with diabetes, poor heart health, depression, weight gain, and cancer.

The great pandemic sits down in the name given to this phenomenon.

Daily commutes have been turned into shuffles between rooms at home by the Covid pandemic. Netflix has replaced the time spent playing outside or at the gym. People have gotten accustomed to sitting more.

A new study has suggested that sitting may be putting people’s mental health at risk.

The co-author of the study, Jacob Meyer said that they knew that Covid would affect their behavior and what they could do in lots of weird ways that they could not predict and also said that it was funky.

He works at Iowa State University.

A pair of studies were led by him in order to find out how inactivity during the pandemic has changed the way people feel, think, and see the world.

More than 3,000 people across the country participated in the survey.

On average, it was found that there was a 32% decline in activity after the Covid restrictions took effect in people who had gotten the 2.5 to 5 hours a week of moderate to vigorous physical activity that was recommended.

According to the findings that were published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health last year, these people were more anxious, depressed, and lonely.

Weekly surveys were filled out by the same people between April and June 2020 for the new follow-up study.

Over this period, it was typically seen that people’s mental health improved.

Meyer said that people had adjusted to life in the pandemic, but these symptoms did not recover in the same way for people who continued sitting down a lot.

The journal Frontiers in Psychiatry contained the new study.

Meyer said that they knew that mental health was associated with people’s physical activity and screen time changes. He admitted to not being able to see large population data react to an abrupt change like this before.

He said that proof that sitting causes depression is not provided just because there was a link between sitting and mental health.

He said that it was possible that people who were depressed just sat more often than those who were not, or that people who sat more became more depressed than those who did not, or there could even be other factors at play.

He said that it was certainly worthy of investigation and that it is really important to be aware of some of the subtle changes that have occurred during the pandemic along with how they might be beneficial or detrimental as we look to the other side pandemic life.

By getting up and moving, long periods of sitting are broken up. This is very important in the meantime.

He said that if you are not walking around the office to get to a meeting, this can be incorporated by taking a small walk before the Zoom call.

He suggested that people should take a small walk around the block before and after the workday to mimic the commute.