Sitting All Day Is Killing You — Here’s What to Do About It: Manoush Zomorodi

Editor’s Notes: Journalist and author Manoush Zomorodi digs into how our screen-heavy, sit-all-day routines are quietly remolding our bodies, driving exhaustion and soaring rates of preventable chronic illness. Drawing on new research and a 20,000-person “Body Electric” experiment, she shows how brief movement breaks woven into your day can boost mood, energy, and even markers like blood sugar and blood pressure — without hurting productivity. (Jan 5, 2026)

TRANSCRIPT:

The Screen Exhaustion Epidemic

MANOUSH ZOMORODI:

Do you ever close your laptop at the end of a long day and feel like you have just enough energy to crawl over to the couch to scroll on your phone or watch a show or maybe both at the same time? Yeah, during the pandemic, that was all I wanted to do and I couldn’t understand why I was safe. I was healthy. Why didn’t I want to close my laptop and go dance around the living room? Where did all my energy go?

I’m a journalist. My specialty for the last 10 years has been trying to understand how our tech habits change us as people. And so I decided I was going to find out why sitting in front of a screen makes us feel so exhausted. Because we have all heard about the mental effects, right? But what about our physical health?

The Alarming Physical Impact

Well, as I quickly learned, looking at screens has not only reshaped our days, it is reshaping our bodies. According to researchers at Johns Hopkins, every day the average 19-year-old moves about as much as the average 60-year-old. Over the last 20 years, rates of type 2 diabetes in young people have doubled. Three in four American adults has a chronic illness. Many of those are preventable. At least one chronic illness.

And the WHO says that this is a global problem. They predict that by the end of the decade, which is not that far away, this lifestyle will likely lead to 500 million new cases of preventable conditions like heart disease, obesity, and diabetes, costing governments $27 billion a year.

Typing, swiping, scrolling, sitting. This is the rhythm of our modern life. But I don’t know about you, I can’t throw away my phone, right? I can’t go off the grid. So how can we stay connected without slowly destroying our health?

Meeting Keith Diaz: A Game-Changing Discovery

That was the question running through my mind when I came across this guy. Keith Diaz is a physiologist at Columbia University Medical Center, and he has spent his entire career trying to figure out how little can we get away with moving so that sitting doesn’t kill us, basically. And in 2022, he published a small study that gives us a great idea. He found that just five minutes of gentle movement every 30 minutes had dramatic effects. It slashed blood sugar and blood pressure.

ALSO READ: TEDx Talk: One Change by Sarah Britton (Full Transcript)

In another study, he found that inactive people who traded 30 minutes of sitting for 30 minutes of movement every day could lower their risk of a premature death by 18%.

And so maybe you’re like, yeah, I worked out this morning, so I’m good. Or maybe you’re like, phew, I’m so glad I got that standing desk. I’m so sorry, but no. If you sit or stand for the majority of your waking hours, your health is in jeopardy too. Don’t stop working out, Keith told me, but he said what you have to do is break up these long stretches of sedentary screen time.

Testing It Myself

When he told me this, I was like, really? How big a difference can these movement breaks make for someone who is relatively healthy? I decided I would join the study. So one day, I went to his lab and I sat and worked on my laptop for eight hours straight. The next day, I took those movement breaks every half hour or so. They checked all my vital signs, and the results were actually quite extraordinary. My glucose was cut nearly in half. My blood pressure was down by five points, and my mood was so much better.

The science was clear, but what did it matter if no one could actually do these movement breaks? It was easy in the lab. Somebody tapped me on the shoulder and led me over to the treadmill.

The Body Electric Study

So we decided to ask people out in the world, out in real life, to see if they could do it. Our teams at NPR in Columbia combined forces to create a podcast and a global clinical trial called the Body Electric Study. Over 20,000 people signed up. We had to cap it at 20,000 people.

They could choose a movement dose. They could move five minutes every half hour, five minutes every hour, or every two hours. They could dance around the house. They could pace on calls. They could walk the dog. They could take out the trash. It didn’t matter. They just had to break it up, break up those long periods of sitting.

And you guys, I was so excited. I was like, we are going to launch a movement for movement. Yeah, I’ve got away with words, but I am not going to lie. Those first few days were so tough. It takes a lot of intention and a little rebellion to upend a world that is quite literally built around screens and chairs, but when people figured it out, when they started getting those breaks into their lives, they started having breakthroughs.

ALSO READ: Science of Sleep: Dr. Michelle Olaithe (Transcript)

They told us that they felt less pain. They told us that they had more energy. They said that they felt more positive about life in general. In the end, of the people who started taking movement breaks, 80% managed to stick with them for two solid weeks, and yes, this was a self-reported study with a lot of very motivated participants. Hello, public radio, but still, the data showed that the more often they took breaks, the better they felt.

People who went outside got an extra boost.

Some people lost a few of those stubborn pounds, and most people actually liked taking the breaks, but the biggest surprise to me was that the breaks did not hurt their productivity. People said they got back to their desks, and they were able to focus, and they felt that the work they did was actually of better quality, so this research is going through the scientific process right now, but Keith explained to me some of the reasons why these gentle breaks can have such an outsized impact.

Why Movement Breaks Work

So when we sit, our arteries get bent at our hips and our knees, kind of like a kinked vacuum hose. Blood starts pooling in our legs, and our muscles stop contracting, but leg muscles need to move, be stimulated in order to clear out fat and sugar and reduce blood pressure. If they don’t over months and over years, that’s when those chronic conditions can start to creep in.

And then there is our posture. Sitting compresses the diaphragm. We start taking shallow breaths. Shallow breaths lead to less oxygen going into our blood and up to our brain. Less oxygen in our brain means we get tired and lose focus. Feel free to take a deep breath right now if you want to.

And that is where screens come into the picture. So screens can mess with something called interoception. Interoception is the body’s way of telling you what it needs. It needs a snack. It needs to go to the bathroom. It needs to move. The more we focus on screens, the less we listen to the signals that our body is sending us. Your body could be begging for a break, but what do you do? You keep scrolling past the anxiety, scrolling past the exhaustion. That eventually can lead to burnout, yes, and again, those chronic conditions.

How to Start Making a Change

So how can you start making a change and feeling better? Well, first, think about your most sedentary stretches of time, and then make yourself a mantra. So like if you are a student, you could say, “I’ll take an extra lap around the quad before class instead of checking TikTok so I get to class with more oxygen in my brain and I can actually focus.”

ALSO READ: The Food We Were Born To Eat by John McDougall (Full Transcript)

Or if you work from home, you could decide that “on long Zoom calls, I will march in place in order to manage my glucose and avoid the post-meeting crash.” If you’re a parent, you could say, “I will take a lap around the soccer field once so that I have enough energy to get through the dinnertime chaos.”

You can have a dance party while you microwave your leftovers. You can walk the concourse instead of sitting and waiting for your flight.

A mix of all these habits will keep your muscles firing and your mood steadier. My favorite story came from a 43-year-old woman named Dana who works in HR. So Dana was a type 2 diabetic with all kinds of health issues. Her doctor told her she needed to take a long, brisk walk every morning, and she was doing this, but her numbers just were not changing.

So with her doctor’s permission, she decided to join the study. She started sitting in movement breaks between all of her meetings, and within a couple of weeks she told me her blood pressure dropped by 40 points, her cholesterol went down, and her doctor told her she could start tapering her insulin. She’s actually off all of her meds today. I know. Yay, Dana. We love you, Dana.

A Call to Action

So we know that too much time online is not great for our mental health, but it’s not just in our heads, it’s in our bodies. We need movement to be as much a part of our lives as screens are. We need our schools, our neighborhoods, our workplaces to give us time and space just to move.

You can help push this reset forward. Take movement breaks, and when people look at you like you’re weird, just tell them why you’re doing it, because you just want to feel a little better. Get them to put down their phone and join you. Start soon. Start small. Should we start now? Yeah.

Can we have some music? You could do… You could do the march. You could do the shuffle. You could put your hands in the air if you can’t get up. Feel it. You’re alive. You’re alive.