Guest Column: A Standing Desk Could Change Your Life

Guest Column: A Standing Desk Could Change Your Life

By David A. SbarraDepartment of Psychology
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David Sbarra, associate professor psychology and director of the doctoral program in clinical psychology, is proposing the University of Arizona needs a "Standing Revolution." (Photo: Beatriz Verdugo/UANews)
David Sbarra, associate professor psychology and director of the doctoral program in clinical psychology, is proposing the University of Arizona needs a "Standing Revolution." (Photo: Beatriz Verdugo/UANews)
Within a few weeks of installing a standing workstation, Sbarra's back pain and discomfort was gone. He says he sits and stands about 50 times a day and within a few months, has lost seven pounds. (Photo: Beatriz Verdugo/UANews)
Within a few weeks of installing a standing workstation, Sbarra's back pain and discomfort was gone. He says he sits and stands about 50 times a day and within a few months, has lost seven pounds. (Photo: Beatriz Verdugo/UANews)

When it comes to our health behaviors – diet, sleep, exercise, etc. – many of us know what we should be doing, but it's often hard to be so good. If you're anything like me, I know I should get seven to eight hours of sleep, but I sometimes (OK, quite often) feel it would be good if I stayed up late watching Netflix. I know I should not have a second dessert, but I frequently tell that part of my knowing-brain to just be quiet for a bit while I chow down.

When people get very stuck with health-compromising behaviors, the distance between what we know and what we feel can be an absolute chasm. All smokers know that smoking is bad, for example, but the difficulty in stopping rests in large part on how smoking makes people feel on a day-to-day basis.

Last year, I had the unusual experience of feeling something was no longer good for me but without knowing exactly why. My lower back started giving me all kinds of problems. I would come to work, slump in my chair for six to eight hours, then do it all over again the next day.

I had been doing this for years, and even though I tried to sit upright and have a good ergonomic work center, my back was killing me! I am not overweight and I get regular exercise, but I was at a loss for what the problem was. I felt the sitting was getting to me, but I didn't know quite why.

Around this time I found myself standing at the back of the room during a small work conference. (With all the other people who have sore backs.) A fellow scientist said something like this to me: "With all the data on sitting and health, don't you think it's stupid they make us sit all day at meetings about health and wellness?"

I nodded ardently so I wouldn't look like a fool, but I'll tell you honestly that I was quite late to the game learning about the mountain of research linking sitting to poor health. When I returned to my office, I quickly studied up on the relevant details. Here are a few of the important facts:

  • Time spent sitting is associated with increased risk for early death from all causes, and this association is independent of your body mass as well as how much leisure-time activity you get. You can read a good study on this topic here. If you spend more than half your day sitting, your health is at risk, and it appears this risk cannot be compensated for by an increased amount of leisure-time exercise.
     
  • My reaction to this data: Correlation does not equal causation! Perhaps people who sit more are ill in some way and are therefore likely to die from something other than sitting. This is a classic "third variable" problem. The best way to address this problem would be with a true experiment that randomly assigns people to standing desks, then tracks their health outcomes over time (relative to a "work as usual" condition). I could not find any good experimental data showing that randomly assigning people to stand more improves their health (although, small-scale studies do exist – see this link, for example). Without good experimental data, we'll never know what is causing what. However, data from large-scale correlational studies that statistically account for all manners of "baseline health" seems pretty darn convincing to me – see this link. I note this study, however, is about leisure time spent sitting. Surely, your back doesn't discriminate between time on the couch and time in your desk chair.
     
  • If you find the data convincing, it's still a bit hard to identify what exactly constitutes "prolonged sitting." As far as I can tell, the available data suggests that over eight to 10 hours of total sitting time per day is likely what's bad for us. This is all-inclusive … sitting in the car, sitting at work, sitting at dinner, etc.  A very recent study puts the critical number for women at 11 hours.
     
  • The totality of the evidence on sitting and health led the American Medical Association to adopt a firm policy statement in 2013 on sitting in the workplace, which you can read about in this Los Angeles Times article.

Once I learned all this, it seemed information about sitting and health was everywhere. My colleague down the hall had been standing for years. Even walking, treadmill desks appeared to be catching on at top speed.

Suspecting that my back problems might improve if I got up out of my chair, I contacted the guy who first told me about the standing desk movement. He directed me to Ergotron.com, where I shelled out a good chunk of change for a standing workstation to use in my office on campus. You can also build your own standing desk at a fairly reasonable cost. (See here.)

Within a few weeks, I was feeling much better. My workstation goes up and down fairly easily, so I sit, then stand, then sit, then stand about 50 times a day. I bend my knees a lot and sometimes step back from my desk to touch my toes and stretch a bit. Standing up at work has changed my life in many ways. I no longer feel the inertia of sitting – I feel energized for most of my day. And, every time someone new walks into my office, I have a giant conversation starter mounted on my desk.

Within a few months, I had lost seven pounds. I did not doing anything other than move my monitors to the workstation. However, because I am now up and down all day, I probably burn an extra 200-250 calories a day, and this adds up, as they say, over weeks and months.

Let me conclude with a "Big Idea." I propose the University of Arizona needs a "Standing Revolution." We aspire as an academic community for so many great things. Why not aspire to be one of the healthiest workplaces in the country? If we get up out of our chairs, that would be a huge step forward.


David Sbarra is an associate professor psychology and director of the doctoral program in clinical psychology. His research focuses on social relationships, stress and health. He teaches courses in health and psychotherapy.

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