Sitting & Your Brain: Time To Take A Seat?

Sitting is, as a very strong general rule of thumb, bad for the health.

We’ve written about this before: Stand Up For Your Health (Or Don’t) ← our main feature on this also includes more things you can do if you must sit, to make sitting less bad!

But that’s about general body health. What about the brain specifically?

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin…

Active sitting vs passive sitting

Of course, exercise does benefit the brain too. After all, what’s good for the heart is good for the brain (see: What’s Your Vascular Dementia Risk?, and not just that, but also, there are additional brain-specific (not merely indirect vascular benefits) reasons to exercise, for example: How Exercise Rewires Your Brain for Better Mental Wellbeing

Exercise can even increase cognitive function: How Your Exercise Today Gives A Brain Boost Tomorrow

So, what about sitting? And what’s this “active sitting”?

No, it’s not about holding a “Roman chair” pose, nor is it about doing ab exercises on a Swiss ball (but you can sit on one if you like, like in our featured image today)!

Rather, it’s about one’s mental state.

Researchers (Dr. Cynthia Chen et al.) analyzed 85 studies including 1,575,657 middle-aged and older adults across 30 countries to examine how specific types of sitting relate to cognitive function, making a key distinction between:

• Active sitting (engaging actively with something that requires something from you mentally)
• Passive sitting (like watching TV)

Of these, the data showed…

• Passive sitting findings: of 43 studies on television viewing, 65% found a negative association between prolonged television viewing and cognitive function.
• Active sitting findings: of 58 studies examining activities such as reading, playing cards or puzzles, computer use, and driving, only 8.6% found negative associations, with most instead linking these activities to better executive function, memory, and cognitive flexibility.

You may be wondering: why is reading better than watching TV; aren’t they basically the same activity in a different medium?

And the answer is: no, not really—though it can feel like it, it’s not what’s actually going on in your brain!

Think about it this way:

• When you watch TV, you’re seeing images and hearing sounds and you passively experience what the TV show wants you to passively experience
• When you read a book, you’re seeing a complex series of symbols that you simply have a lot of practice at decoding and converting to ideas, sounds, images, and more, while adding in a lot of personal creativity too (especially if it’s a fiction book*)

*The same happens sometimes when reading non-fiction. For example, in a previous 10almonds article, this writer once described how she wondered if she could still do a handstand, kicked up against the wall, found she could, but she was wearing a dress and the dress fell down obscuring her vision and causing her to tumble to the ground in a heap laughing. And upon reading that, you, dear reader, will have added in creativity of your own in order to visualize it (because you’ve probably never seen me, the dress I was wearing, or the room in which I did that). Or when we tell you what is going on with red blood cells, or asparagus, or different colored urine, or the cholesterol levels of supercentenarian women in Sardinia, you’ll always be visualizing something more than we’ve said (unless you have aphantasia and cannot visualize anything, of course). And you’ll be doing it all from decoding many thousands of weird little coded symbols (i.e. typographical characters, e.g. letters, digits, punctuation marks, etc) on a screen.

How this is useful: the idea here is that health advice could move beyond merely “sit less”, and towards encouraging more mentally engaging seated activities to support long-term brain health and potentially reduce dementia risk.

Notably, this is still not an exhortation to sit more!

Just, if you are going to be sitting, try to make it count.

You can read the paper itself, here: Individual sedentary activities and cognitive function in middle-aged and older adults: A systematic review

What traditionally sedentary activities are most beneficial?

We’ve previously written about some…

On reading specifically:

• Reading: Better! (Reading As A Cognitive Exercise) ← there are specific tips here for ensuring your reading is (and remains) cognitively beneficial
• How Reading Changes Your Brain, Unnaturally ← more on why this works the way it does

On language acquisition/use specifically:

• Bilingualism: An Underrated Tool Against Alzheimer’s ← you don’t even have to learn the second language to a high level, to benefit; what matters in this case is that you are developing those parts of your brain
• Language Fluency Beats General Intelligence & Memory For Longevity ← this one’s about fluency in your own native language

On other cognitive exercises:

• How (And Why) To Train Your Pre-Frontal Cortex
• Let The Games Begin (But It Matters What Kind)

On learning in general:

• Curiosity Kills The Neurodegeneration

…All of which things can be done while sitting and will still be brain-beneficial if you do!

(But please do still get up and move around often if you can!)

Want to learn more?

You might like this very good book we reviewed a while back:

Death by Sitting – by Carolyne Thompson

…but you may well find you don’t read it all in one sitting (because you just might get the urge to get up, stretch your legs, walk around a bit, etc) 😉

Take care!