Sitting vs. standing: an urgent need to rebalance our world

ABSTRACT

During their activities of daily living, humans run, walk, stand, sit and lie down. Recent changes in our environment have favored sedentary behavior over more physically active behavior to such a degree that our health is in danger. Here, we sought to address the problem of excessive time spent seated from various theoretical viewpoints, including postural control, human factors engineering, human history and health psychology. If nothing is done now, the high prevalence of sitting will continue to increase. We make a case for the standing position by demonstrating that spending more time upright can mitigate the physiological and psychological problems associated with excessive sitting without lowering task performance and productivity. The psychological literature even highlights potential benefits of performing certain tasks in the standing position. We propose a number of recommendations on spending more time (but not too much) in the standing position and on more active, nonambulatory behaviors. There is a need to inform people about (i) harmful consequences of excessive sitting and (ii) benefits of spending more time performing active, nonambulatory behaviors. One clear benefit is to reduce detrimental health consequences of excessive sitting and to provide potential additional benefits in terms of productivity and performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Excessive sitting
• health problems
• standing position
• performance
• productivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Here and throughout the manuscript, we make the distinction between work productivity analysed in long-term exclusively (weeks, months, years) and task performance analysed in short-term exclusively (seconds, minutes, hours).

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific funding from agencies or organisations in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors