Why Sitting May Be Bad for Your Brain
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It looks nice on paper but I have trouble focusing so when I actually get in the zone I tend to forget and hours go by, I only stop when I'm actually experiencing pain (an stimulus which reminds me to get back to reality).
Any tips?
My tip: drink a LOT of fluids. You will have to keep going to the bathroom which is a natural break point, and not something as abrupt as an alarm; the urge to pee sort of creeps on you, so you can stay in the zone until you really gotta go. The hydration is good for your brain/body anyway, so win-win.
Found that lack of fluids (water!!!) was the source of many of my headaches, so I came at this solution from that angle.
As an aside, this does require you to chunk your work differently. I've found it's a great practice to use such opportunities to keep up with the communication part of your work, so that when you hit the desk again, your mind & messaging apps are clear of those social notifications
I can't find the quote (Shakespeare maybe?), but paraphrasing it says the worst time in ones life is the moment between deciding to do something and doing something. The goal is to get rid of that moment in between.
Work on decomposing work into a bunch of independent steps, and stop when you finish a step. For me it seems to work best when there is one clear course to work on next (easier to retain it when I interrupt myself).
Another trick is drink more fluids. Your bladder will tell you when it’s time to take a break.
I no longer do it by a schedule because my mind will tell me when I should go, but to begin with I would just set an alarm and go get up every 2 or 3 hours, and if you're close to finishing something important (say 10 minutes), finish it first and then go.
I do two small sessions a day (targeting hamstrings and groin). any basic yoga video would walk you through warming up and hitting these.
(phone camera is too much of a hassle)
"The quality of evidence is low to very low for most interventions, mainly because of limitations in study protocols and small sample sizes."
And still people keep doing shit like this, performing studies with fifteen people??
[1] https://www.cochrane.org/CD010912/OCCHEALTH_workplace-interv...
For example: researchers have the budget/resources to to a preliminary study. They use the interesting results of this study to secure funding for a larger sample size study.
Btw, a small sample size study isn't useless necessarily. You can refine methodology, with less on the line. You can also (more or less) validly exclude certain conclusions, to avoid wasting resources on a wider study.
The problem is with pop science headlines, like it is in any other journalistic field. I think it's less of a problem though, than many think. Publishing in the popular press needs to be understood as "academics working on X" not "X has been proven."
Writing a headline that misrepresents a single study's conclusion as "proven" or what "scientists say" -- especially when the conclusion is contradicted by most others on the subject -- should be considered by journalistic ethics watchdogs as an extreme violation bordering on an outright lie.
The media seems simultaneously bewildered as to why the public no longer trusts it, while incapable of recognizing and responding properly to obvious breaches of the public trust like inflated science headlines.
The only thing to do is individual. Take "facts" with a grain of salt, at the very least until you have read the article. Do not take headlines as facts.
You can just read academic journal abstracts, if you want a more academic and precise reading materials.
There are trade offs between rigour and the digestible content intended to be browsed over coffee.
One consequence of social media is that headlines now have outsized importance in relation to the substance of actual articles.
Headlines, thanks to links and embedded snippets, get dispersed to 1000x more eyeballs than the articles themselves. So when they contradict or misleadingly oversimplify (which is often, especially since they are often written to draw clicks) it's the headline version of the truth that wins out, while the actual readers are left to chime in with "Hey, that's not what the article actually said..." in the comments below, swept away in a sea of respondents who commented only after reading the headline.
Journalistic ethics haven't caught up to this. They're still playing by the rules of legacy media, where you can bend the truth a little to make a joke or to draw people in. The problem is that in the digital age, that unfortunately amounts to spreading a falsehood that usually overshadows the facts of the piece.
Some things everyone here should know (like correlations and what they mean). Other things many won’t know, like certain statistics methods, base rates for a given thing, etc.
It’s easy for two people to read the same study and come out with totally different conclusions based on their individual context.
The study only shows that blood flow to your brain drops when you are sitting for a long period of time. So I think 15 people is a huge sample in this case.
The study doesn't even has any conclusions. So I think 15 people is fine.
The next step could be gathering data from thousands of people to check weather this causes brain damage in any form. But that's not what the study was about. Only the title of the article suggests this.
for something along the lines of basic organ system operation like blood flow, you need only a small sample to show that there is an effect.
example: a sample of 12 people would be more than enough to prove that people bleed if they are cut. you could look at a sample of 10k people just to be sure -- but you're not going to learn anything new. the experimental measurement of the variable is too high level.
the point of this study is to corroborate past research and provide another avenue of future investigation. if a future study finds that the inverse is true, we now have reason to be suspicious of that study's conclusions.
It is not about the health benefits of reducing time spent sitting, but about the effectiveness of methods of reducing the time spent sitting.
So the study you cited does not support your assertion about health effects:
> There is a Cochrane review [1] on the health effects of reducing time spent sitting at work
If you have studies that does invalidate the health benefits of standing vs sitting I am very interested to read them and find out more.
As for "invalidating the health benefits of standing vs sitting", here is a well-designed study [1] (N=7300 and 12-year span) that found
"""
Occupations involving predominantly standing were associated with an approximately 2-fold risk of heart disease compared with occupations involving predominantly sitting. This association was robust to adjustment for other health, sociodemographic, and work variables.
"""
I.e. I think we can reasonably claim that the jury is still out on the health benefits of standing desks etc.
OTOH, that increased exercise is a good thing is undisputed.
I'm also fascinated to see: "Cardiovascular risk associated with occupations that involve combinations of sitting, standing, and walking differed for men and women, with these occupations associated with lower cardiovascular risk estimates among men but elevated risk estimates among women."
I would have guessed that mixed position, moderately-active work was drastically better than anything else across all groups. I'd be surprised if the paradoxical gender result holds, normally those imply a weak or confounded effect, but even if it's simply neutral that means my expectations were massively wrong.
When you sit all day these muscles get inhibited/weak. When they're weak, you're more likely to have lower back pain. I sit a lot so I try to counteract that (as best as can be done) with some targeted glute med stuff after work.
Check out http://posturedirect.com/is-sitting-destroying-your-butt-mus... for some more detail.
3 months ago I started a body weight program, and this has done wonders for my lower back. There is still work to do, but the improvement has been consistent. I’m looking forward to how it (and me generally) will feel in a year!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-7ZWPCWv0U&
I had rounded shoulders and anterior pelvic tilt myself due to lack of exercising and too much desk work but not as much as the guy on the thumbnail. I just exercised for about a year and my posture fixed itself but I started from a better starting point with no actual pain.
Btw if you decide to do some research yourself about the issues you have, don't just follow the first video you watch but instead spend some time learning the subject. There are plenty of different issues people have that require different treatments( hence an entire profession being based around fixing them).
I was where you are now, started lifting and my back pain was completely gone within 2 months. I have been totally free of back pain for over 5 years now, going from not being able to lift a 60lbs barbell without pain to deadlifting 500lbs.
That said, I don’t know your situation and you definitely should see a specialist. Maybe you did bust something in there.
And yes, too much weight + bad technique can indeed fuck you up. Take it slow, eat a lot, rest a lot.
A couple of years later, I saw a licensed massage therapist who after looking at my back for a minute, diagnosed exactly what had been wrong with me previously (my spine had become somewhat crooked, almost S shaped) and that it was visible that I'd had successful treatment to correct it.
Chiropractic has become highly controversial for two main reasons.
The first is that it claims its treatments (muscular-skeletal adjustments) can bring about healing of a wide array of illnesses in the body beyond just back pain. The basis of the claim is that by straightening the muscular-skeletal structure, they remove blockages in blood vessels and nerves, and the resulting improvement in blood flow and nerve signalling leads to improvements in organ function, immunity, tissue healing/growth, cognition, etc.
The second is that one of its major treatments, the vigorous "neck-cracking" adjustment of the cervical spine, can occasionally cause a rupture to the main artery to the brain, leading to haemorrhage that can result in severe disability or mortality.
Skeptics will argue that it's impossible that muscular-skeletal adjustments can heal other illnesses in the body. I gather some of them will dispute that muscular-skeletal misalignments can cause significant blockages in nerves and blood vessels, whereas others will deny that removing said blockages can lead to other health improvements. For what its worth, it seems the linked article lends some credence to the notion that muscular-skeletal alignment can influence other aspects of a person's health.
Regarding the neck adjustment risk issue: opponents of chiro will concede that ruptures are very infrequent (estimates vary from once per several hundred thousand adjustments, to once per a few millon), but conclude that given the absence of benefits, it's not a risk worth taking.
My own experience with chiro is mixed. I have used it a lot in the past, and I no longer do. I do believe that in some cases, serious misalignments in the muscular-skeletal system can cause nerve and blood-vessel blockages and lead to other impairments in the body. However I haven't found chiro to be the best way to relieve the pain or misalignments I'd been carrying; I've recently had better success with osteopathy and myotherapy (a form of massage focusing on the myofascial system).
I have found some chiropractors (more than half those I've seen) to be over-confident about the benefits of their treatments. But then a handful of chiropractors (practitioners of a particular mind+body healing technique) have been the most valuable practitioners I've seen, of any kind.
I have had neck adjustments and never had a problem, but I wouldn't encourage others to do it or allow it do be done to my children, and these days I avoid having it done, preferring to focus on relieving muscle tension through myotherapy.