Our necks, our backs, our eyes, even our lungs are feeling the ever-increasing adjustment to screens. Email, spreadsheets, Zoom meetings, viral sensations — they're all taking more of our workday and more of our day away from work. Screens can change how we live, and screens can change how we feel.
Manoush Zomorodi, the host of NPR's TED Radio Hour, wondered about just how much screens were affecting our health. That curiosity led to her book, Body Electric: The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being. She says it was her own well-being that provided the impetus to write it.
Zomorodi: Oh, Kyle, it was all about me, of course. I was so fed up with feeling so tired and drained at the end of the day. I would close my laptop and feel like I had just enough energy to crawl across the floor over to the couch to watch some Netflix and scroll on my phone — sometimes both. And I just couldn't understand: if I was sitting and working on a screen, why did I feel so physically exhausted? I had heard, like everybody had heard, that sitting is the new smoking, but I couldn't understand A, what was going on biologically, and B, where screens fit into the picture. And the more I talked to people, the more people were like, I am so darn tired, what is going on? And then I also looked into the data, and we see that three out of four Americans have at least one chronic health condition. Type 2 diabetes in young people has doubled over the last 20 years. We've all heard about people feeling more anxious and depressed recently. And so that was sort of what kicked me off to try to understand what was going on in my body and all of our bodies.
Kellams: I think those of us of a certain age can remember our parents, who were working long before screens were part of daily life, also being tired. So what do screens do to us that they didn't do to our parents or grandparents?
Zomorodi: So the first thing is, if you think about when I first started working in an office, I would walk over to the coffee machine. I would go over to talk to one of my colleagues. Screens have made it so that we have cut out every single little bit of movement that used to be in our lives. We sit for 90% of our day in most jobs. That has increased rapidly over the last few decades. And then I started to learn about something called interoception. This is a sense that cognitive scientists refer to where the body lets the brain know what it needs. That could be, you know, your body telling you to take off your jacket, or take a deep breath because you need a little extra oxygen. But we can stop hearing what we need because we are looking at a screen. One study found that the more time people spent looking at a screen, the less they sort of obeyed what their body was telling them they needed in terms of movement, in terms of getting up and stimulating their muscles. Screens — we're so captivated by what's going on there. They keep us glued even when our body is saying, I need a break, I need to get up and go.
Kellams: It's interesting. It sounds like being in a casino. I know that casinos have been designed to not let in sunlight or have clocks, so you forget what else you need to do other than gamble.
Zomorodi: Yeah, that's a comparison that has been made — over a decade ago by Natasha Dow Schüll. She's a researcher at New York University who has talked about the same sort of effects of lulling you into a sort of repetitive tasks. And actually, the more I learn about that, the more we do get stuck into certain ways of working. There's another researcher by the name of Gloria Mark at UC Irvine who has found that nearly 50% of the interruptions that affect us on a daily basis aren't from people around us or notifications on our phones. We actually do them to ourselves. We get into this sort of pattern of checking Twitter or checking our email, checking short-form video, and then our brain gets stuck into that and we start interrupting ourselves and can't sit down to do focused work.
Kellams: In Body Electric, the case is made that screens can have an effect on our eyes — understandable — posture, certainly understandable. But our lungs? Is doomscrolling the new smoking?
Zomorodi: OK, so we need to talk about what happens when you sit for too long looking at a screen. Dr. Keith Diaz is the physiologist with whom I partnered. He's at Columbia University Medical Center, and as he explained it to me, you have to think of your legs as like garden hoses. When you sit for a long time, you kink your legs at the torso and the knees — think of when you kink a garden hose, the water starts to back up, right? It builds up pressure. The same sort of thing is happening with your blood flow in your legs. When you sit for long periods of time, pressure starts to build. That's your blood pressure starting to build, and your leg muscles don't get stimulated. When they are not stimulated, they can't do the job of sucking the glucose out of your blood and processing it. They can't push oxygen up to your brain. So if you don't have enough oxygen in your brain, CO2 begins to build up. And what happens then? That's that foggy feeling that you get. You can't focus. You start to get tired, your blood sugar might start to rise, your blood pressure starts to rise. And over weeks, months, years of a lifestyle like this, that is where those chronic illnesses like diabetes, hypertension and obesity start to come into play. And then just on a daily basis, that explains a lot of why you feel tired, like you want to eat some chocolate, why you feel like you can do nothing other than answer emails with a yes or a no. That deep work — we need oxygen in our brains to do it. It is that simple.
Kellams: All right. To combat these symptoms, do we need to radically change how we work, how we live?
Zomorodi: Well, no — that was the crazy finding. It turns out that what we need is regular, interspersed moments of movement throughout our day. Not a mega workout in the morning, just gentle movement. Dr. Keith Diaz in his lab found that five minutes of gentle movement — strolling, not burpees or sprints — every half hour largely offset all of those harms from sitting for long periods of time. So he and I and the team at NPR partnered, and we invited listeners — maybe your listeners, Kyle — to join a clinical trial to see if people could actually get these movement breaks into their lives. They could move for five minutes every half hour, every hour or every two hours. We had over 20,000 people sign up. Those who committed to taking the movement breaks — 82% stuck with it. They saw, on average, a drop of 25% in fatigue levels. And actually, despite all the interruptions, productivity rose slightly, which I found fascinating. But I guess if you're thinking better, you're getting more done. We had people who said that their back stopped hurting. They got back a little of their optimism that they'd been missing. They slept better. There was just a sense that bringing the human body back into movement, into the world, made such a difference. And we didn't say people had to get off their screens. They could do what I call the Zoom and shuffle, where you stand up and you shuffle side to side while you're on a Zoom call. You could take a call and walk around your living room. But a lot of people did say, you know what, I took those minutes to get off my phone. And people who got outside actually had an extra boost as well.
Kellams: What's encouraging about this is there's nothing wildly innovative here. We've known for some time that we need to move.
Zomorodi: I think that's exactly right. You've really put your finger on it. And I've been thinking about the story where you say to the fish, how do you feel about water? And they say, well, what's water? Or people who never said, oh, I've got to get back into nature, before the Industrial Revolution. We are at a point where technology has taken out very basic things like taking time to think, like getting up and going for a walk. We now have to be more intentional with the vocabulary we use, with integrating movement into our schools, into our workplaces. If you are an older adult in particular, you need your screens to stay connected to the world — no doubt. But more than ever, we need to bring back what the human body needs. And if we have to talk about it like it's something new and exciting, well then that is what we have to do. Our health depends on it, mentally and physically.
Kellams: Name of the book is Body Electric. It's been so wonderful spending a few minutes — but not too many — on a screen with you, Kyle.
Zomorodi: That's all it takes. Thanks so much.
Zomorodi's new book is Body Electric: The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being. The book is available now. We talked via Zoom last week.
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