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00:06:30.320OK, so I need to get more boredom in my life. That was like 10 years ago. Apparently boredom is back, though, from what I hear, Brett. It's very big on socials. I guess the people, you know, who were 10 years old when that book came out are just sort of facing that issue now.
00:06:43.160So then like after sort of thinking about that, you know, I think we've seen in the last sort of decade since that book came out a greater understanding of the connection between how our brain works and our body functions.
00:06:56.480And so for me with this new book, like I couldn't understand why I was so damn tired at the end of a day sitting on my laptop.
00:07:09.880And that was the question I basically was trying to solve that ended up in this book.
00:07:15.420Was there a particular moment where you had like you can think about where it's like, boy, you know, sitting at this computer all day, this probably isn't good, not only for my brain, but just for my overall physiology and health?
00:07:28.340Yeah, well, I felt it. And, you know, I think for a lot of us, things came into very stark vision during the pandemic.
00:07:35.180You know, it was literally that moment where I was on my laptop for work, on my phone, checking in on my family, ordering groceries online.
00:07:41.860You know, Netflix was the only way to entertain ourselves. And I was bone numbingly tired. Like I was safe. I was healthy. I had no reason not to feel like I couldn't spring out of my chair. And so to me, that felt like a paradox. Like I just couldn't understand how you could get more tired from doing nothing.
00:08:01.820And, you know, the last time I took biology was in high school.
00:08:04.740So my favorite thing is to track down the absolute experts in whatever field I'm curious about and have them explain it to me and then sort of bring that back to, you know, us normies and try to make some changes based on what we – the science – you know, a lot of science is locked up in journals.
00:08:21.360And my idea is like, well, let's get it out there and let's apply it and try to change the way we live based on what we know works.
00:08:28.460So let's do a sort of a big picture overview of the state of Americans sitting at their screens and just staring at them all day. How much are Americans doing that?
00:08:40.120Yeah, it's not good, Brett. It's not good. By some estimates, the average American sits 187 days out of the year, so more than half the year, nine to 10 hours a day. We know also that the average American is interacting with media about 12 and a half hours a day.
00:08:59.460So, I mean, that includes like double screening, right? So I don't know about you, but my life revolves around chairs and sitting. In the morning, I check my phone and where do I go? I go to the office to sit at my desk to look at two different screens. Then I come home. I check my phone again to make sure I know where my daughter is. I listen, you know, while I take the dog out for a walk, I meet my husband. We're rewatching Mad Men on the couch.
00:09:24.580Like, essentially, we have built our lives around sitting and screens, and it's really not that different for older or younger people either.
00:09:34.080Like, kids are on laptops in the classroom.
00:09:37.400They come home to do their homework on their laptops.
00:09:42.880Older adults, how do they stay connected?
00:09:45.780A lot of – there's amazing online courses they can take, the WhatsApp family chat groups.
00:09:50.620And I say that not as judgment, but just as a fact that this is our connected society. But it just annoyed me that at the same time that screens have become so ubiquitous, it's now estimated the average 19-year-old moves as much as the average 60-year-old.
00:10:07.700Type 2 diabetes in young people have doubled. And it is estimated that by the end of this decade, 500 million more people will have at least one more chronic illness. And many of those are preventable. So I think we talk so much about the mental health effects of being online, but we have been missing a key part of the equation, which is the physical health effects, the effects on our bodies.
00:10:34.580Yeah. So being sedentary increases your risk of diabetes. What else is it doing to us?
00:10:40.120Yeah. So, I mean, obesity, that's sort of a catch-all term from essentially metabolic
00:10:44.800dysfunction for some people. Other people, it's just lifestyle, as you mentioned, diabetes.
00:10:49.460I think, you know, what we're leaving out though when we talk about the illnesses is the sort of
00:10:54.100mental health effects that come from these physical chronic illnesses, right? So we're
00:11:00.500seeing rising levels of anxiety, inability to concentrate, depression, etc. And I think we
00:11:08.680think, oh, that's because terrible things are happening in social media. But actually, a lot
00:11:13.800of that is related to sitting and looking at screens as well. So when I went to talk to
00:11:20.440scientists to try to understand, like that was the question for me. I was like, what is happening
00:11:24.360in my body when I am sitting and staring at a screen for hours on end. And what I was told was
00:11:31.440really three things. So I can go through those if that's OK. OK. So the first one is that when you
00:11:37.680sit, you are bent at your waistline and at your knees. Right. And so think of a garden hose like
00:11:45.180when you kink a garden hose and it gets the water gets backed up in it. The same thing is essentially
00:11:51.380happening at your legs and at your torso. And what is happening then is that there is less
00:11:57.260circulation. And your leg muscles, I had no idea, are doing incredibly important work. And they need
00:12:04.560blood flow and oxygenation to do this. They are flushing out glucose constantly. They are pushing
00:12:11.520oxygen up your body, up to your brain. But they need to be stimulated in order to do that. If you
00:12:18.460don't do that, that is when you start to see blood pressure rising, blood sugar rising, and do it
00:12:25.140long enough, those chronic health issues start to creep in. Then the other thing I learned was,
00:12:30.080you know, when we sit, we don't breathe properly. Our diaphragm is contracted, essentially,
00:12:36.100and full breaths. Again, this is oxygenation. When you don't get enough oxygen into your brain,
00:12:42.840this is called neurovascular coupling. Usually the neurons up there can flush out the CO2.
00:12:47.860if you keep the circulation going, but if you don't, what does CO2 do? It makes you feel sleepy,
00:12:53.720foggy, tired, that sense like you can't concentrate. It's a metabolic thing that
00:12:59.700is happening. It is within your body. And then the third thing is kind of new and interesting.
00:13:05.700I started to learn about a relatively new field of study called, a sense called interoception.
00:13:12.320So I had never heard of this. I've heard of like introspection or, you know, perception,
00:13:16.480But interoception is the study of the signals that our body is sending us internally.
00:13:23.420So some of those are subconscious, like our body tells us to breathe.
00:13:40.180But what I had noticed and what newer studies are starting to also show is that when we are locked in on screens, we ignore what our body is telling us.
00:13:52.340It might be telling us we need a break or we need to just get some air, some fresh air, or we need to move our body or we're getting anxious or we can't focus.
00:14:03.360And I think certainly I saw this in myself and I hear from a lot of other people like I just got to power through.
00:14:13.860And like, oh, what's that other thing?
00:14:15.180And then suddenly, you know, you have 87 tabs open and you're kind of spinning your wheels and you're sort of getting things off your checklist and you feel like you're working really hard.
00:14:25.380But the next day you come back and you're like, wow, that was total crap that I actually produced yesterday.
00:15:24.680And these sort of more subtle, I would say, ancient signals that we're getting from inside, they get drowned out pretty easily.
00:15:35.200What's interesting about your book is that you highlight that people have been noticing the ill consequences of being sedentary thanks to our new form of labor all the way back in the 19th century.
00:15:47.560In the 21st century, it's a lot more acute because it's all digital.
00:15:51.440but people in the 19th century they're shifting away from agrarian to more sort of knowledge work
00:15:57.480that we think of today or even just working in a factory where they might be sitting down but
00:16:02.180moving their hands what were these people these writers and thinkers noticing about how that
00:16:07.940change in work was affecting our bodies but also maybe their souls even yeah i love that you picked
00:16:13.600up on this and that is where the title actually comes from body electric is based on the poem by
00:16:19.200Walt Whitman. And like back in the 1800s, there was this move from, you know, you could used to
00:16:25.600be able to or you used to have to use like a thresher to, you know, thresh the wheat. And then
00:16:31.760there the Industrial Revolution begins. We start to have engines and combines and people can sit
00:16:37.860and do this labor and there's increased production. And in order to manage this increased production,
00:16:43.420to account for it, to ship it to the right places, to create, you know, essentially supply chains,
00:16:50.980we needed clerks. We needed people who managed systems, who managed other people. And as we all
00:16:58.700know, that requires sitting at a desk, not at a laptop back then, but certainly at ledgers.
00:17:04.620And so there was a sort of a spate of poetry and people noticing that the clerks' vitality,
00:17:12.940I guess is the best way to put it, was diminished, that they were of slighter stature, that they were pale, that they were, as one newspaper put it, tired, not tired because of their work, but tired with their work.
00:17:27.600And Whitman is saying his poem, The Body Electric, is actually an ode to the human physique at its ultimate, when it is relishing the world, when it is using its muscles, when it is breathing the air, when it is in the sunshine and outdoors.
00:17:45.400And that sort of joie de vivre, unfortunately, was not really to be found for people who were stuck at desks indoors, even nearly, well, 150 to 175 years ago.
00:17:57.240yeah yeah there's a line from whitman he wrote an article in life illustrating 1856 talking about
00:18:03.540clerks at their desk he said this i thought was really good described them he said a slender and
00:18:08.540round shoulder generation of minute leg chalky face and hollow chest great description so sad
00:18:15.020right and what's interesting too is a lot of these writers and thinkers around the same time
00:18:19.560like late 19th century early 20th century not only were they noticing it affecting
00:18:23.400people's bodies, but it gave rise to this idea of neurostenia, which was basically like you were
00:18:30.560just overly anxious, you were depressed, and they developed all these health cures for neurostenia.
00:18:37.380And the health cure was like, well, you got to get out to go to some sanitarium
00:18:40.360and get fresh air and take cold baths. It's basically the same stuff we're doing in 2026.
00:18:51.880Yeah. Well, you know, it's like you just want to feel something, right? You just want to feel
00:18:56.640alive, like touch grass, I guess. What's old is new again. Okay. So sitting down, looking at a
00:19:02.400screen, not great for us. You feel crappy. You feel tired. Diabetes. You feel creaky and cranky.
00:19:08.440But then you came across this study by this guy named Keith Diaz. Yes. That offered a really
00:19:15.000simple solution to this problem. What is that? Almost too, yeah. Yeah. What is that solution?
00:19:19.860Too simple. So I was walking my dog, listening to the news, and I heard about this study that had come out. This was January 2023. And it was a physiologist at Columbia University Medical School. And Keith's sort of mission in life is to try to understand what is the minimum amount of movement that the human body needs in order for a sedentary, and I would add, screen-filled life not to kill them prematurely.
00:19:47.660And what Keith had found in his lab was that five minutes of gentle movement, so about two miles per hour, not fast, on a treadmill for every half hour during extended periods of sitting offset the harms of high glucose, blood pressure.
00:20:11.380They were able to concentrate and it improved their mood.
00:20:14.280And when I heard that, I was like, wait a minute. It can't be that easy. That's it? Just move gently for five minutes every half hour? And then I was like, oh, wait a minute. That's kind of often actually – would people actually do that? Would they be able to interrupt all their sedentary screen-filled lives to add this sort of five-minute break within their day?
00:20:39.040And so I reached out to Keith and I was like, what do you think? Think people could do this? He's like, I don't think people can do this. And it makes me depressed because, you know, it doesn't matter if I can show something in the lab. If this doesn't actually translate to real life, it makes no difference.
00:20:55.120So you and Keith decided to do a big study to see if people would do it, which we'll
00:21:20.860So I was like, great, I will be your lab rat.
00:21:23.580So for a week before I went to the lab, I wore a heart rate monitor, a very sort of fancy accelerometer, pedometer, glucose monitor, the whole jammy.
00:21:33.480And then I went up to his lab and I spent two days there.
00:21:36.980So the first day they had me in a room.
00:21:49.400But basically I just powered through for eight hours.
00:21:52.380And all the while, they were collecting my blood sugar data, my blood pressure, heart rate, and I was filling out regular surveys regarding my mood and ability to focus.
00:22:03.760And then the second day when I was there, every half hour, Keith's lovely assistant guided me over to a treadmill in the corner, and she'd type in 2.0 miles per hour, and I would take a sort of gentle stroll for five minutes.
00:22:19.580And again, they measured all of those things.
00:22:21.920And when they compared the two days, it was kind of crazy, actually.
00:22:26.700My blood sugar was cut nearly in half.
00:22:29.180My blood pressure dropped by five points.
00:22:52.880And when I saw those results, I was like, well, this is too powerful not to try to get regular people to do this, especially since it is something, you know, you don't need money to move for five minutes every half hour.
00:23:07.940And maybe there could be effects even if it was not quite that often.
00:23:12.320So, yeah, so Keith and I, we took our teams at NPR and at Columbia and we launched a global clinical trial.
00:23:20.120This was exciting for me as a journalist to do a proper medical study, and we had 20,000 people sign up, which was really cool.
00:23:28.980Did people see benefits, and were they able to integrate these short walks into their daily routine?
00:23:35.700Yeah, so what we did was we had them choose a cohort.
00:23:38.460So you could decide to move for five minutes every half hour, five minutes every hour, or five minutes every two hours.
00:23:45.940Because not only did we want to measure the effects, but we really wanted to understand the feasibility of it.
00:23:51.460Like, you know, who who managed to stick with it the most?
00:23:55.020And I was really surprised. I mean, keep in mind, of course, Brett, that like this is a self-identifying audience, right?
00:24:01.520Like their public radio. Yes, for sure. Like they're like, I have this problem. I want to do something about it.
00:24:06.680So we have to have that caveat. However, of the people who signed up and started the two-week period of integrating these breaks into their lives, 80 percent stuck with it, which I was quite surprised about.
00:24:21.580They saw, on average, a 25% decrease in fatigue levels.
00:24:27.640Anecdotally, they told us about aches and pains going away, being able to concentrate again.
00:24:33.300There was reports of better mood, essentially, not only just being able to focus.
00:24:39.340And surprisingly, 82% said that they found it doable and they liked taking the breaks.
00:24:47.400So to me, I was like the data, you know, was clear. Oh, and I should say there was a dose response relationship. So the people who took the breaks every half hour saw greater decreases in fatigue, greater increases in concentration and mood.
00:25:04.380But the difference was pretty slight. So for the book, I just thought, you know, we have we know broadly what the data say.
00:25:11.840But what I wanted to understand was how did people do it in a world that is in schedules and, you know, universities and offices and lives built around screens and chairs?
00:25:24.920What did they do in order to succeed? That's where I was like, how did they hack their lives to be able to do this without being annoyed by it and without upending all the things that they needed to do? Like, how did they deal with the interruptions?
00:25:41.080Because I should also add, Brett, like this did not impact productivity. To me, that was the most surprising. I expected people to be like, well, I didn't get as much done, but I felt better. That was not the case. In fact, we saw a slight improvement in productivity, which is actually what I had observed when I went and did it in the lab.
00:26:02.420So I just found that every time I took a break, I did not look at a screen while I took my breaks on the treadmill.
00:26:08.860But I noticed that I would – at first I was annoyed because I was like I was in the middle of something.
00:26:15.600I'd be like, okay, when I get back to my desk, I really need to answer that one email and I need to say these three things.
00:26:22.000And I would just get back and be super efficient and focused and get it done instead of faffing around and not reading all the way to the end of emails and clicking over to check one thing.
00:26:51.180And I think that's what a lot of people saw is that the quality, maybe the quantity was less, but actually if the quality is better, then you're not spinning your wheels like you often do.
00:27:01.400We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:27:04.640I think just about everyone has a story about getting hit with some random bank fee.
00:27:09.260When I was younger, I'd occasionally overdraw my account and I'd get slapped with an overdraft fee and it just made an already dumb financial decision even more expensive.
00:31:52.840So what I ended up doing was going through and creating sort of three buckets.
00:31:57.180One was younger people, students and educators.
00:32:01.260And we could not let people under 18 into the study, but there were a bunch of teachers who tried to do it with their classrooms.
00:32:08.320Then I had the middle group, which was information workers, knowledge workers, people who generally make a living off of sitting and looking at a screen.
00:32:16.560And then the third group, which was older adults who maybe were retired and thinking more about the longevity and health effects.
00:32:23.820For students, some of it was – I can put it to you two ways.
00:32:29.180One was there were teachers who really felt very frustrated because there is no mandate for recess in schools.
00:32:37.080And so it is really left up to teachers to figure out how to get movement integrated into their classrooms.
00:32:44.380And it's not a nice to have, right? There is a ton of research that shows that movement helps students learn better. There is a direct correlation between those things. And the teachers see it, too. You know, it's not just the kids are wiggly. Their bodies are growing and need the circulation and they need the oxygenation.
00:33:04.480So some teachers, they turned it into like a science project in their class. They were like, look at this weird NPR project. This was a teacher, a high school teacher. And she said, we're going to do this to understand data collection. We're going to do this to experience it ourselves and track ourselves. And then we're going to talk about the placebo effect and see if that has anything.
00:33:25.200So they turned it into a science project, which I thought was such a creative way of doing it.
00:33:30.000But I also heard a lot from professors who maybe would have powered through a three-hour workshop who then integrated breaks into their workshop and found they had a better time teaching, their students were more attentive, and on the whole, people actually retained the information better.
00:33:49.640So there's a lot more into that. And my whole thing is that I think we need to teach interoception at a much younger age, teach really little ones to start to listen to what their bodies are telling them because they are surrounded by screens all the time.
00:34:03.680So that's part of that chapter. Information workers, I really went deep in trying to understand scheduling, right, because that's the thing. And what you saw, of course, was that the people who are in power, those are like team leaders or executives, they set the tone.
00:34:20.280They can say instead of half hour meetings, we're going to schedule 25 minute meetings.
00:34:25.400So you get that five minute break or 55 minute meetings instead of an hour.
00:34:29.560They can say it's OK to not have your Zoom camera on and move if you need to move during a meeting.
00:34:37.700Go for it. Some people who maybe were not in charge could just say like, oh, I need to turn off my screen.
00:34:43.120I have terrible Wi-Fi. And then they would do their movement break, which really cracked me up.
00:34:46.980And then they would start to create rules. Like another boss said, when we're having an internal meeting, anyone is welcome to move during a meeting as they need to. But if we're with clients, like, let's make sure we don't do that because it's not socially acceptable, right?
00:35:00.720I think once a team decides that it's OK for heads to be bopping up and down on a Zoom, then it's not a big deal. But it really needs that cultural sort of shift that we are able to do better work and we have higher job satisfaction and also potentially less sick days. So the wins are big.
00:35:22.340And then older adults had a completely different issue because what I heard from a lot of retired people was actually they were more active during the day.
00:35:29.900They were volunteering or helping out with grandchildren or whatever.
00:35:34.500But come, say, 4 or 5 o'clock, there was sitting for the next six, seven, eight hours, you know, watching TV, Netflix, scrolling on their phones.
00:35:45.760And those were the hours that they needed to insert interruptions into.
00:35:51.880I mean, one of Keith's other studies, I should add, for people who replaced half an hour of sitting with movement decreased their risk of an early death by 18 percent.
00:36:03.440So we're not talking about huge changes here.
00:36:06.380We're talking about just getting more movement into your life.
00:36:10.080And if you need to start by looking at your phone while you're doing that, you know, whatever.
00:36:21.580I take a morning walk every morning mile. And then I take another walk mid morning. But after
00:36:27.260read your book, I was like, I need to start taking these five minute breaks. So I just set a timer
00:36:31.600every 25 minutes. I get up. It doesn't matter if I'm in the middle of something. I'll go take a
00:36:36.900walk for five minutes. Or if I can't take a walk, I have a problem going outside and taking a walk
00:36:41.480when it's really cold outside. I'm kind of a wuss. So I'll just do jumping jacks. I'll move. I'll
00:36:46.180just kind of look like a weirdo, like moving my arms up and down doing 1980s or Robux. Yeah,
00:36:50.560that counts yeah totally and i think what you're doing is is exactly right like is it time to move
00:36:57.820yes but if you are like i'm in the middle of something and i am in flow well then like okay
00:37:03.160fine don't take a movement break it's no big deal what i sort of am sick of a little bit is this
00:37:08.800idea that we are so all or nothing like we're either on the the traveling soccer team for our
00:37:15.060kids or they don't play soccer at all what about just going out in the backyard and kicking the
00:37:19.180ball around more often like we don't need to be training for a marathon or just sitting on our
00:37:25.240butts like what if we just got up and you know i like to do this works for me i get up and i just
00:37:31.100walk around there's a big conference table and i walk around that for a couple minutes and
00:37:34.960and then i get a glass of water and i go back to my desk and it helps yeah a lot you're kind of
00:37:40.540like a prisoner that gets you like yard time just walk around the yard for i try not to think of
00:37:46.240myself as a prisoner but yeah that's what i was thinking the other day when i was taking a walk
00:37:49.420just around in my driveway because i needed to yeah why not why not it worked yeah but what's
00:37:54.200interesting too you highlight a lot of people may be listening to this like okay yeah you can get
00:37:57.220these health benefits by taking these five minute breaks but it's like well i exercise every day i
00:38:01.280had this hard workout for an hour i do crossfit i do a run but you highlight research that that's
00:38:08.040probably not enough if you're sitting down the rest of the day it's definitely not enough and
00:38:13.180It's so unfair. It sounds so unfair. So Keith told me about his own journey when there started to be research into this idea that even if you do a morning workout or you go for an evening run, if the majority of your day is then spent sitting and looking at a screen, it doesn't matter.
00:38:31.600Like don't give up your workout. Obviously, you're building muscle, cardiovascular strength, all the rest of it. But it is not enough to offset the harms of sitting for long stretches for the rest of your day or evening. And he just said to me, he's like, this was shocking to him. He's like, we had been taught when we were getting our PhDs that exercise is the ultimate medicine, that it is the cure for everything.
00:38:56.620So to then read that you could, you know, check it off your list first thing, but it doesn't make a difference the rest of the day, that just sort of shocked him.
00:39:05.240I mean, I guess the good news is, is if you haven't been moving at all, you are going to see benefits just by starting to take five minute walks.
00:39:13.460Or as you have said, you know, if you can't walk, there's options with your arms.
00:39:17.840The point is to get the blood flowing and raise your heart rate just a little bit.
00:40:21.940just standing unfortunately is not the answer it's so sad again yeah but the answer it's easy
00:40:29.740it's just five minutes of gentle movement every 25 minutes if you can't do that at least an hour
00:40:34.860every two hours i mean just move more just move yeah exactly what we ended up finding was that
00:40:41.300most people you know if you if you hate the timers there's another thing like some people
00:40:46.620would just set a goal like i'm going to take four or five minute breaks today and then just when it
00:40:50.640pops up and it feels doable you know what i mean and i think what what i also found so interesting
00:40:56.220and there's starting to be more research into this this is not in the book because the research is
00:41:00.260very preliminary but this idea that the number one thing people did was set timers in order to
00:41:06.240get themselves moving and that makes sense right you can't remember to get up you're in the middle
00:41:09.680of something but what ended up happening and i've seen this in myself and it sounds like you probably
00:41:15.000do too, is that your body begins to send you pings and messages that like even if you don't
00:41:23.400set the timer, it'll start to say like, yo, I'm feeling a little rough around here. Can we please
00:41:28.920get up? Can we please get up? And many people told me that by the end of the two-week study,
00:41:33.980they didn't need to use their timers anymore. And I was just talking to some researchers at
00:41:38.700the NIH who are looking into this idea of interoception and motivation and how the body
00:41:46.620begins. They think it has something to do with sort of circadian rhythms, but not what has to
00:41:51.440do with, you know, night or morning or anything like that, but that the body gets itself on a
00:41:55.900sort of rhythm and it begins to anticipate and alert the brain that it wants something or needs
00:42:02.580something, which I think is really interesting. Yeah. And as you increase your movement,
00:42:06.860you increase your interoception so you were able to notice those urges to move more totally and
00:42:14.460like keith said to me he's like you know i feel like we don't want like people walking around in
00:42:19.920circles like robots like that's not the goal but i think for younger people if you tell them you
00:42:25.400know this will help with your anxiety your ability to focus we hear a lot about people having more
00:42:32.520depressive symptoms, this will help you feel more positive. And then for people, you know,
00:42:39.340of a certain age, I'll include myself. I've started thinking about chronic illness. I don't
00:42:43.780want a chronic illness. And if this is something I can do that makes me feel better and protects my
00:42:50.260health for longer so I can live not just longer, but live well, then why the hell not? Yeah. One
00:42:56.840bit of advice I'd give to people who want to start this, and you talk about this in the book,
00:43:00.220is don't use your smartphone or smartwatches nudges that they have. I think the Apple watch
00:43:06.940has this where like, if you haven't been moving for a while, it's like, get up and move.
00:43:10.440I actually, I talked to someone, it was a psychologist who brought up research that
00:43:14.620those nudges, like those automatic nudges, they actually backfire because you start to resent
00:43:19.920them. It's like, I don't want to do that. And I noticed that with the Apple, because I set that
00:43:23.240up in the Apple watch, Apple watch when I first got it was like, oh, I can have it remind me to
00:43:27.200move when I haven't been moving. And I would just be like, dismiss, dismiss, dismiss, shut up for
00:43:31.220the rest of the day. So if you want to set up a nudge, like you have to like make it yourself,
00:43:35.680like set up a timer. So don't, don't rely on the AI to tell you to move. And the way I like to
00:43:40.880think of it is that setting it with intention is you're making a contract with yourself, right?
00:43:45.560Like you're saying like in one hour, I will take a five minute walk. And instead of being like
00:43:51.200stupid machine, you're like, Oh yeah. Okay. I made a plan. Better get up and go. That's not to say
00:43:56.400it'll be easy. Like there are some days where I'm like, I don't want to, I'm comfortable in my chair,
00:44:00.980but I feel better every single time. So something else you do besides exploring these overall
00:44:08.800systemic health benefits of moving gently several times throughout the day, you also talk about what
00:44:15.060staring at our screens all day is doing to our eyes and to our ears. So how are screens messing
00:44:22.300up our vision. Well, I did not know that they are changing the shape of our eyeballs. So our eyes
00:44:30.320are extremely malleable and cooperative. If you tell them that you want to look at something that
00:44:37.160is close to you a lot, they will conform. They will change shape and become sort of egg-like
00:44:44.160shapes and you will go nearsighted. And what they've seen is that in the past few decades,
00:44:49.140This is happening to younger and younger kids and more and more kids.
00:44:54.080I think there's some statistic that it's like one out of three kids is now nearsighted.
00:44:58.620And I spoke to Maria Liu at Berkeley who has been studying exactly – because for the longest time people thought, oh, if you're nearsighted, it's genetics, like tough luck.
00:45:09.200And she was convinced that it was actually lifestyle and behavior that were these soaring rates that she saw in her native China that were starting to come to the U.S.
00:45:21.060And so she went into the lab and she actually fitted chicks with contact lenses that made them nearsighted and then tracked how their eyeballs changed shape.
00:45:31.820And we see the same things in humans that the more you stare at a screen, the better your eyes will get at doing that.
00:45:38.160It's basically saying to your eyes, I don't need you to look into the distance.
00:45:42.300And so they lose the ability to do so.
00:45:44.600The good news is that as long as your eyes are still growing, and this is actually into
00:45:50.020your 30s, there are treatments now that will reverse the effects.
00:45:54.560You can literally turn back the clock.
00:45:57.080And you need to combine that with things like going outside.
00:46:01.380I was like, like looking at the window.
00:46:03.120She was like, no, you have to go outside.
00:46:05.940Your brain, when you're inside, knows that there are walls and it won't be able to get the full horizon effect that your eyes need.
00:46:17.240They're not entirely sure why vitamin D and sunlight are so powerful for healthy eyes.
00:46:24.420But that combination of being outside, looking into the horizon, scanning the horizon and doing it regularly tells your eyes that they need to be good at looking close and far.
00:46:37.320All right. So, I mean, this is especially if you're a parent of young kids, make sure they're not just looking at screens.
00:46:42.800Make sure they get outside and look at the horizon.
00:46:44.640If you're over 30 and you're already nearsighted, it seems like the clock has already ran out on you.
00:46:49.160If, kind of. If you, yeah, but it does matter. Like if you're in your 20s,
00:46:54.020you got to be on top of it. You know, if you work inside or you work in a lab or whatever,
00:46:57.940you will go nearsighted faster. So, you know, to me, I was like, wow, I,
00:47:02.720I could have done something. I could have staved it off, but you're right. Once your eyes stop
00:47:06.940growing, you're sort of cooked. Yeah. But it's still good for you to get outside when you're
00:47:10.400on that walk. Don't look at your screen. Look at the horizon. You might not be able to change the
00:47:15.180shape of your eyeball if you're 45, but I think it's still good for you. I mean, I got football
00:47:19.440shaped eyeballs. I'm in astigmatism, but I still like to get out there and scope out the horizon.
00:47:24.140It does feel nice on the eyeball. And there's a good reason why it feels nice. There's actually
00:47:28.200been research into animal eyes, certain mammals. They have seen that sunlight that hits the back
00:47:35.020of their retina releases serotonin. They have not been able to show this in humans because it's hard
00:47:40.600to prove. But like you say, I don't know about you, but when I get some sunlight, like, you know,
00:47:45.180Just feels good. Yeah. What about your health? Because what a lot of people use their digital devices for is to listen to stuff.
00:47:55.340You know, they're always walking around with, you know, AirPods in their ears.
00:47:58.000Yes. So there has been a really fascinating study going on between Apple and a Michigan researcher named Rick Neitzel.
00:48:07.820This is the Apple hearing study where they have tens of thousands of people enrolled through the iPhone.
00:48:13.380So they've been able to track noise exposure, you know, how long they're listening to something, the volume, also the external noise.
00:48:21.680So do people put on noise canceling? Do they raise the volume in order to counteract?
00:48:27.000You know, they're walking by a construction site or something like that.
00:48:30.140And Rick told me, you know, because I was like, well, you just need to turn down the volume, right?
00:48:35.160He was like, yeah, not only that, though, it's the duration of listening.
00:48:40.220Your ears, it turns out, also need breaks.
00:48:43.580So you know that feeling when, I don't know about you, Guns N' Roses, man, would come out and you couldn't hear for a couple days?
00:49:02.360But if you do that often enough or you wear down your cilia and you never give them a break, once they die, they do not grow back.
00:49:10.920So they are seeing and expect to see more levels of people losing their hearing at much earlier ages.
00:49:17.240And, you know, for a while, people were like, well, why didn't we see that when we first started when, you know, had consumer devices like the Sony Walkman?
00:49:24.120And they think that the reason why that didn't really have that much of an effect or damage people's hearing was because the battery life was so crappy.
00:49:33.800And now, of course, we charge our phones and we listen nonstop.
00:49:41.500Something is being used in your body when you are exposing yourself to exterior sound, information, vision, and your body just needs to regroup.
00:49:50.740And hearing loss, I think they're starting to see more hearing loss in younger and younger people because they're always got their AirPods in really loud.
00:49:57.280But hearing loss can eventually contribute to dementia down the road.
00:50:01.180That's right. And also it's related to people losing their balance and falling.
00:50:05.740The vestibular sort of feeling of being able to hold yourself without falling over.
00:50:11.820So, yeah, there's very good reasons to protect your ear health.
00:50:15.260And there's actually this has not been shown yet, but there's suspicions that having noise canceling on all the time might disrupt some sort of connection between your ears and parts of the brain.
00:50:29.840They're not entirely sure. So for comprehension, but that's very preliminary.
00:50:35.000You also talk about how our digital lives are impacting our sleep. So how are our screens messing up our sleep?
00:50:42.400Well, I mean, I thought it was, I was like, it's going to be blue light, right? Blue light is the devil. And actually, they don't think that blue light is the problem. It's so minimal. What blue light does in terms of, look, there are some people who would say, no, I'm very sensitive to it. Absolutely. And children absolutely are sensitive to blue light.
00:51:03.100But on the whole, the new thinking is that rather than the devices themselves messing with our sleep, it's the fact that we are displacing our sleep with time on screens.
00:51:15.540So somebody can't sleep. What do they do? They look at a screen.
00:51:19.420It's not necessarily the screen that's making them unable to sleep. It's because they turn to the screen or we have the phone on next to us and it's not, you know, looking at the phone right before we go to bed necessarily that's making it impossible for us to sleep.
00:51:35.460You know, I have my phone on next to my bed because I'm a nervous wreck.
00:51:38.920I have elderly parents and I have teenagers, but I did learn to set it up so they are the only people who can call me in the middle of the night.
00:51:46.520So it's this idea that, you know, just one more show, just like let's keep playing game and you lose track of what time it is.
00:51:53.920It is displacing the amount of sleep that you got.
00:51:56.700And it's not necessarily the screens itself.
00:51:59.280Yeah, we had a chronobiologist on the podcast a while back ago. He mentioned that. It's like it's not like the light from a screen is not enough to disrupt your circadian rhythm. So you don't have to wear those goofy Elton John blue blocker glasses.
00:52:13.580is. But yeah, just. But you need to know yourself, right? If you're a person who loses track of time
00:52:18.680or you can't help but be like, oh, my God, I wonder what happens in the next episode.
00:52:23.140Like you need to know that. OK, this is a problem for you. Turn it off. Don't blame the screens,
00:52:30.120though, for you're not sleeping well. Blame yourself, essentially. And then the other way
00:52:35.080that screens can mess up our sleep or just being on screens all day is we're not moving and being
00:52:39.400Being sedentary can also mess up your sleep because you're not building up sleep pressure.
00:52:43.740Like your body needs movement to feel like you're tired at the end of the day.
00:52:46.540And if you don't, if you're just sitting around all day, your body's like, well, I'm not tired.