Can’t stand to sit anymore

For a lot of former office workers, home is the new office (at least for now). 

Month after month of working from home has led to the realization that there’s only so much time anyone can spend sitting on a couch hunched over a laptop before the back, neck, and shoulder pain sets in. 

And so, people are setting up non-couch home workspaces to replicate some of the physical features they miss from working at the office. And companies are chipping in.

Unsurprisingly, people want good staples for their home workspaces. A survey we ran back in April and May found that the top desired upgrades for people working from home were an ergonomic chair and a standing desk.

Standing desks have been gaining popularity in recent years, boosted by the catchy-but-extremely-questionable slogan “sitting is the new smoking.” Media comparisons between sitting and smoking rose 12-fold between 2012 and 2016, and the consensus from researchers is that the slogan’s biggest effect is trivializing the risks of smoking.

Still, even if it’s nowhere as bad as smoking, we all know we shouldn’t be sitting as much as we do. Sitting for extended periods is linked with increased risks of physical and mental health conditions. This is true even for people getting the recommended levels of physical activity when not sitting (a daily run can’t save us here!). And most of our unhealthy sitting accumulates during the workday.

While we sat around a lot before COVID, we’re sitting even more now. One recent before-and-after survey of college students and employees found that people are sitting eight hours more per week since the start of remote work and learning. 

Simply getting a standing desk into our homes likely won’t help us though. While the effects of standing desks can be pretty big to start, they seem to fade over time. And standing desks alone have weak effects on downstream health outcomes.  

We can’t fight an enemy we don’t understand. So, first let’s take a look at patterns of sitting and standing throughout the workday. Then, armed with that knowledge, we can start to take some guesses about simple interventions that might get us out of our chairs. 

Image source. Standing desk? Check. External monitor? Check. View? Check. This worker is ready to read that screen. Vari ready. 

Measuring the time dynamics of sitting at work

A nice study (h/t cool husband Ross Otto) that came out just this summer looked at the dynamics of sitting and standing while working. 

Previous research typically summed the amount of time people sat during a workday (spoiler alert, it's a lot!), while this study examined transitions between sitting and standing throughout the day. This back-and-forth matters, as most adults stand up from sitting at least 45 times a day.

The study included data from 156 UK-based employees in different lines of work—university employees, call center agents, and varied desk-based workers. Everybody in the study wore an activPAL monitor around their leg for seven consecutive days. They also reported the time they started and ended work each day, so that researchers could examine how active each person was during that time. In total, the study recorded around 30,000 posture changes during work hours. Quite a data set!

To analyze the data, the researchers used survival analysis. It was originally developed to predict the timing of death but has subsequently been applied to many other problems. Here, it was used to predict the likelihood of a transition from sitting to standing and from standing to sitting. For example, if you are sitting down, what is the hazard– the conditional probability (given you have not stood up yet)—of standing up, per unit time?

The researchers examined possible predictors of the hazard of standing up and sitting down, including time of day and physical fitness.

The findings 

Like previous studies, this one found that people sat a lot more than they were active. On average, workers sat for 5.31 hours and were active for 2.18 hours during a workday.

The patterns of sitting down and standing up differed: people were much quicker to sit than to stand. Around half of the time, people sat down within 1.8 minutes of standing up, and stood up within 5.6 minutes of sitting down.

Once people stayed seated for a few minutes, they were then likely to sit for a long time--15% of sitting periods were longer than 30 minutes. 

There was an interesting time-of-day difference: people were faster to switch back-and-forth between sitting and standing later in the day.

Why? Fatigue is a likely explanation. A recent theory is that fatigue signals we should stop what we’re doing and switch to another, less demanding task. Perhaps later in the day, tired workers slowed down and got up to chat with a coworker, print something, or get a glass of water.

The fact that people do more standing later in the day makes standing a rare healthy behavior that’s morelikely when people are fatigued. In contrast, people are more likely to eat unhealthy snacks later in the day, and to work out less intensely when mentally fatigued.

During the workday, standing up seemed to start a virtuous cycle of standing up. When people were less sedentary in the previous few hours, they were faster to stand up when they were sitting and slower to sit down when they were standing.

One interesting non-effect was that people’s fitness didn’t predict the timing of standing up or sitting down. People who engaged in more physical activity, who had a lower BMI, or who were younger didn’t differ in their patterns of sitting or standing at work.

How might we minimize sitting during the day?

To sum up what we now know: we tend to stand up more easily later in the workday; standing up leads to more standing up; and once we sit for a little while, we’re likely to sit for a long while.

A few ideas for how we might apply this knowledge to increase work-from-home standing:

• Since we tend to sit more early in the day, the biggest focus should be on increasing standing in the morning. What if we set the standing desk in the “up” position for the start of each workday? Since we’re not as fatigued early in the day, we’ll likely spend more undistracted time at the desk, and we’ll get some time in standing. Since standing seems to start off a virtuous cycle, we might be more likely to continue standing up later in the day.

• Build in a morning walking break. What if you get your second cup of coffee outside of the house and get a walk in during the time you’re most likely to be sitting down? Again, the virtuous stand-up cycle might kick in after that.

• An automated solution that’s not for the faint of heart. A standing desk that lets you know when you’ve been sitting too long from the workplace masterminds at Herman Miller. People can set goals for how long they want to stand (or sit) and “when it’s time for them to stand up or sit down, according to their goal, the desk’s controller will subtly vibrate, like the alarm function on a wearable fitness tracker.” Not sure if it comes with a snooze feature.

Good luck to all of those trying to stick to their standing desk goals and take solace in the fact that the afternoon fidgeting and trips to get a cup of water are as healthy of a fatigue response as we’ve got.