Our day-to-day lives can be pretty hectic, with work, family duties and other responsibilities to carry out.
Therefore, many of us will look forward to sitting down and relaxing whenever we can.
While it is important to take time for ourselves, a new study has revealed that spending too much time sitting around could be setting us up for an early death.
Research, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, found that being sedentary for long periods of time could actually increase the risk of dying by as much as 30 percent.
More specifically, the study showed that older women who sat for 11.7 hours or more per day increased their risk of death, regardless of whether they exercised vigorously.
As part of the research, a team examined measurements of sitting and daily activity collected from hip devices worn for up to seven days by 6,489 women, aged 63 to 99, who were followed for eight years for mortality outcomes.
In a statement, study co-author Steve Nguyen, from the University of California San Diego Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science, explained: “Sedentary behaviour is defined as any waking behaviour involving sitting or reclining with low energy expenditure.”
It is a health risk because it reduces muscle contractions, blood flow and glucose metabolism.
Study lead Andrea LaCroix, professor at the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health, said: “When you’re sitting, the blood flow throughout your body slows down, decreasing glucose uptake.
“Your muscles aren’t contracting as much, so anything that requires oxygen consumption to move the muscles diminishes, and your pulse rate is low.”
However, the study showed that exercise could not undo these negative effects.
Researchers found that whether women participated in low or high amounts of moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity, they showed the same heightened risk if they sat for long hours.
“If I take a brisk long walk for an hour but sit the rest of the day, I’m still accruing all the negative effects on my metabolism,” said LaCroix.
How to lower your risk of early death
Based on the research, LaCroix makes the following recommendation: “The risk starts climbing when you’re sitting about 11 hours per day, combined with the longer you sit in a single session.
“For example, sitting more than 30 minutes at a time is associated with higher risk than sitting only 10 minutes at a time.
“Most people aren’t going to get up six times an hour, but maybe people could get up once an hour, or every 20 minutes or so.
“They don’t have to go anywhere, they can just stand for a little while.”
However, Nguyen pointed out that not all sitting is the same.
“Looking beyond conditions like cardiovascular disease, we start thinking about cognitive outcomes, including dementia,” he said.
“There are cognitively stimulating activities that can result in sedentary behaviour, like sitting while studying a new language. Is sedentary behaviour in that context overall bad for a person? I think it’s hard to say.”
LaCroix added: “We’ve created this world in which it’s so fascinating to sit and do things. You can be engrossed by TV or scroll on your Instagram for hours.
“But sitting all the time isn’t the way we were meant to be as humans, and we could reverse all of that culturally just by not being so attracted to all the things that we do while sitting.”
