Being Sedentary

What sitting still actually does

Sitting isn’t a posture problem. It’s a muscle problem.

Your legs and glutes are the largest muscles you own, and after a meal they’re where most of your blood sugar is supposed to go. Moving them opens that door without needing insulin to do it. Sit for three hours and the door stays shut: blood sugar stays higher for longer, and your body spends the afternoon working harder at a job it would otherwise do easily.

Which is why the fix is smaller than people expect. A Melbourne study at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute interrupted people’s sitting with two minutes of light walking every twenty minutes. Post-meal glucose dropped around 24%, insulin around 23%.¹ Two minutes. Light walking.

The structural side is slower and more familiar. Hips held at ninety degrees for eight hours. A mid-back that stops rotating because nothing asks it to. A neck holding a head that’s drifted forward of where it sits best. None of it is dramatic on any given Tuesday, which is precisely how it accumulates.

And the part most people don’t connect to their desk: movement is one of the better things we have for mental health. A 2023 review pooling 1,039 trials and 128,119 participants found physical activity highly effective for symptoms of depression, anxiety and distress, and concluded it should be a mainstay rather than an optional extra.²

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