Declare War on the Chair

The Blue Zones

In 2004, two demographers, Gianni Pes and Michel Poulain, identified an obscure region in Sardinia as the part of the world with the most centenarians. Not satisfied with a single find, they went on to discover another 4 areas. They were Okinawa, Loma Linda (California), Costa Rica and Icaria, a Greek island. These areas, now called the Blue Zones, shared 9 common lifestyle features. One of them was moderate, regular and prolonged daily physical activity. As a way of life.

In all these populations, their natural way of life was at least 10,000 steps every day – as shepherds, goat herds, farmers. No-one ever joined a gym, had a personal trainer, worked out or ran marathons. By contrast, our modern sedentary way of life places us in conflict with our natural physiology – not just from the relatively recent Neolithic farming conditions of 10,000 years ago but from 1.5 million years of human evolution as hunter-gatherers. The progression to modern life, if we can call it that, has been a sad story of physical and mental decline. It is estimated that more than 20 million people in the UK are physically inactive.  

Absence of physical exercise is a risk factor for disease, such as obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes. In turn, these degenerative diseases are a risk factor for brain health. For example, obesity increases the risk of Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) one of the strongest independent risk factors for neurodegeneration. Recurrent high blood sugar is associated with reduced grey and white matter volume in the brain.

So, what to do?  

We are currently advised to take 150 minutes of weekly moderate-intensity aerobic activity and two or more days a week of muscle-strengthening activities. It turns out that these activities are beneficial to both our physical health and brain health.

But even if we do all this, there is one other, must-know secret that science has revealed and that we must act upon. Being active is not enough – for the mind, brain, or body. It is persistent sitting down which is the real killer. Regardless of how much physical activity we do. It is the silent addiction. As a nation, we have developed a love affair with the chair. And the horrendous truth is that even if we exercise daily beyond the approved recommendations, prolonged sitting down wipes out the physical benefits of regular exercise.

Our brains too do not escape the ravages of a seated lifestyle. Sedentary behaviour is a predictor of Alzheimer’s – about 13% of Alzheimer’s cases globally may be due to inactivity. It is even estimated that a 25% reduction in sedentary behaviour would reduce Alzheimer’s prevalence by about one million cases across the globe.

Thankfully, science also tells us how to counter the deadly effects of our sedentary lives. The first step is, ‘get the message’. Your mantra must be – ‘sitting still is bad for me’. Once you understand this message, it will motivate you to make simple, easy, straightforward changes that will have profound, long lasting effects. Second step. Make a flexible anti-sitting plan – one you can stick to.  Remember it’s not what you do on a single day, it’s all the things that you do every day.  Start by monitoring your daily sitting time. Choose one day during the week and one weekend day. Use your stopwatch or a mobile phone to monitor how many hours and minutes you spend sitting each day. Once you have a pretty good average figure of how long you usually stay seated, aim to reduce it by 20% in 4 weeks. Third step, implement a daily plan of attack: firstly, make it a rule, do not sit when you could stand. This step which appears simple and straightforward, is in practice never easy to implement, for the simple reason that almost all of society is organised around sitting down. If standing is not an option, then you should do no more than one-hour of continuous sitting, max, whenever possible. Your rule should be to take a 10-minute movement break every 45 or 50 minutes. It can be anything: going to the bathroom, getting yourself a cup of coffee, or walking the stairs to raise your heart rate.  Try to make breaks enjoyable, purposeful and something you find interesting, such as chatting or making tea. The reason for this is that will-power alone will let you down – and these changes need to become permanent. 

With their purely natural levels of activity, the centenarians of the Blue Zones would no doubt smile at our preoccupation with exercise. Today, the endless inactivity of our lifestyles reduces our confidence, saps us of energy, makes us irritable or bad tempered and threatens both our physical and brain health. But poor levels of physical activity are only one part of an unhelpful modern lifestyle. We have to declare war on the chair.

Try these simple movements to improve your brain health:

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