I’m often asked: “Is there a recommended time for sitting at my desk? What should I do if I’m “in the flow“?“
I sympathise with the patients who ask me this question. There has been a plethora of articles of late about too much sitting: sitting is the new smoking! Or is just that the Standistas are shouting more loudly? And what about sit-stand desks?
Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) said: “Never sit for longer than half an hour.“ 400 years later, the NHS agrees with him. I do too – half an hour is a good goal to aim for.
Sitting for too long constricts our breathing, our bowels and our hips joints.
The Get Britain Standing website has research showing that sitting for more than 4 hours a day can:
- Slow down our calorie burning (which could add inches to your hips)
- Disrupt your blood sugar levels (which can contribute to diabetes and dementia)
- Switch off the leg muscle pump, so important to help your blood circulating around your whole body. This can increase your likelihood of getting varicose veins and/or piles: most unpleasant and painful. (If you are unfortunate enough to get either, Calc Fluor – one of the tissue salts available at most health food shops – can work wonders. It’s also really helpful for those cracks around the fingers that some people get in the winter.)
And all that sitting, by folding us up for too long, can have the effect of shortening the front of your body so that it’s harder to stand up straight, which can add decades to your posture. If your chair has the option to tilt the seat forward a little, that is a good idea as then your hips will be more open than they would be on a regular chair – using a sitting wedge has a similar effect.
Upping your water intake will mean you need to go to the loo more often – also useful exercise, especially if you don’t use the nearest one but if possible go to one on a different floor – this applies whether you work in an office or at home.
And if you use the productivity tool Pomodoro, you have your 25 minutes of desk-bound tasking, and then a 5 minute break. A useful time to stand up, walk around, have a stretch.
So, the second part of the question – what do I do if I’m in the flow?
One useful tip, after say 25-30 minutes (when the timer you have set on your phone to remind you to stand up goes off), is say to yourself something along the lines of: “When I come back to this in 5 minutes, I will easily be able to pick up the thread, and focus anew on this task. In the meantime my subconscious is still thinking about this, and will have come up with some fresh insights as to how to go forward.“ A small dose of self-hypnosis works wonders.
Or, if you do have the luxury of a sit-stand desk, then raise it (the work of a few seconds) and carry on working, with that timer going off again every 25-30 minutes, so that you are switching between sitting and standing.
Too much standing still can cause problems too, with aching backs, hips, calves and feet. This is where a comfort mat can be helpful, or even a wobble or rocker board – to keep your joints moving and responsive. Now, there are even treadmill desks available, which sound amazing if potentially distracting. I look forward to having the opportunity to try one sometime!
A halfway house between the two would be to use a perching stool (or a bar stool) at a raised desk or workstation, a midpoint between sitting and standing, so that you don’t have so much weight on your feet, and also aren’t folded up too much, as you would be sitting in your office chair – or even a height adjustable stool.
There are also nifty desktop gadgets that you can put your laptop on which you can raise up and down – again, the Get Britain Standing website has some good resources and suggestions.
If you don’t have a sit-stand desk, maybe you have a nearby surface you could move your laptop or writing pad to eg the top of a filing cabinet. I have seen people who have a small table perched on top of their desk, to the side of their main work area, and they simply move their laptop from one to the other – this does of course need a desk big enough to do this! In a hotel room recently, the window sills were a perfect height and depth for me to work at my tablet standing up at least some of the time. Result.
Please let me know if you have any questions about this, or if you have any sitting strategies that you have found helpful – thank you!