Probably ever since our ancestors conquered fire and the wheel, the human body and technology have intersected. Today, that means a lot of sitting at computers and looking at screens. So what does that mean for our health and today’s workforce?
That’s a subject you have heard explored often on the TED Radio Hour Tuesdays at 1 p.m. on WAMC.
Now, TED host Manoush Zomorodi has launched a new podcast called “Body Electric,” a special six-part series that also includes a research component from Columbia Medical School.
I should note that we are talking over Zoom, screens be damned.
Yes. And we are seated.
Right. So what got you interested in all this? Because I was thinking about my own Fitbit and step counter and that kind of thing that I'd still, I think, prefer this lifestyle to chasing mammoths down on the plain.
Well, I can understand that we certainly have a longer life expectancy now. And you're right, that is something that we have seen time and time again, with every economic era, our bodies adapt, whether that means running on the plain, we're lithe, we're limber so we can catch our supper. But here we are. And it's amazing. 92% of jobs require digital skills. 85% of jobs are sedentary. And we're just starting to learn the long-term effects of how this on-demand, act more efficient in every way you possibly can affects on our health.
And is a slow-moving health crisis and I think a productivity problem for employers. And let's talk about what it feels like on a daily basis, right? Maybe you have a backache, or you have blurry eyes, you may be feeling exhausted after hours on your computer. And we all sort of think, like, well, there's no alternative, right? The economic era that we're in right now, the Information Age requires that we can turn our bodies to keyboards and mice and tiny screens and big screens. And when we want to take a rest, we get off one screen and we go to another and really now researchers are understanding that this is leading to rising rates of diabetes. In the last 20 years, the rate of young people with Type II diabetes has doubled. It's estimated that by 2030, 40% of the population will be nearsighted. And our bodies are adapting to our economic era. One historian I talked to said think of it as the Anthropocene body that we are getting right now.
I already have second thoughts on the standing desk I'm so proud of, but your project includes a research component with Columbia Medical School. What are you hoping to find out?
I read about this study that they did that went kind of viral back in January, where they found that moving every half hour for five minutes, you know, and not doing jumping jacks, just moving your body, strolling, had incredible effects on people's blood pressure, their glucose levels, their mood and their ability to concentrate. They also found that working out in the morning, and then sitting on your bed all day at your computer, that didn't cut it. If you have a standing desk, you know, if it's working for you great, but it's not gonna mitigate those effects.
So I reached out to the to the research team at Columbia. And I was like, I want to participate in this. And I'm a person who moves a lot. But I went one day and I sat andthey monitored everything about me, like my glucose, my heart rate, everything for one day, and I sat at my desk for eight hours and did my work. Then I came back a week later, and I moved. They put me on a treadmill at 2 miles per hour, every half hour. And the results were pretty astonishing. My blood sugar was cut nearly in half, my blood pressure was down five points. And my mood was so much better. And it just made me think, you know, well, of course I could do this in the lab. But how do we take this into the real world. Because boy, do we need it.
So we are partnering with Columbia University Medical Center. With are asking listeners, come and try it out. Let's see if we can take what we've learned in the lab and actually put into our real world settings. Can teams that are working from home, maybe gonna get up on aZzoom every 25 minutes and shuffle back and forth? Maybe people, if they're meeting in real life, they'll start walking around the conference room gently. How can we start to rethink the way that we see movement in our daily lives. So if you're listening, and you think you'd like to give it a try, please head on over to npr.org/bodyelectric. There is a deadline, though. This is real science. So they are closing the signup period on Sunday at 11:59 p.m. But the series is going on for the next six weeks. And we are exploring all the different ways that our body is adapting to our habits, our technology, and the way we live right now.
To what extent do you think that these practices are fixable or adjustable? I mean, a bus driver can't stand up every half hour. If you are expected to look at email right before bed and the first thing when you wake up, you're not cutting down on the screen time. So I mean, individually, it seems like this is kind of a tough hill to climb, so to speak.
Absolutely. And I think that this economy is geared towards sitting. I mean, you think about it, when we start school, what do we learn to do? We learn to sit still and listen to the teacher. I think Keith Diaz, the head researcher at Columbia is saying exactly that, that if you are in a position of power, if you are an employer, if you are a line manager, it's it behooves you to think very hard about how you encourage your employees to get through their day, because the effects on their productivity could be hurting your bottom line, not just in terms of health care costs down the road. But I'll use myself as an example, my ability to concentrate and my rating of my work was significantly higher, even with all those interruptions. So maybe we think, you know, grind through, work harder, longer, get it done, but the quality of our output may not necessarily be in line with the quantity of time we put staring at a screen.
What we want to do with this research is, let's experiment. Let's find out which teams it does work for, let's find out for which people it doesn't work. And what is the point when they're like, You know what, this just isn't possible. All of that is fodder for researchers as if it doesn't work at all. They're saying, well, we don't want to spend time finding ways to mitigate the effects of our sedentary lifestyle, if they're not going to work in the real world, help us figure it out. So I think that's the opportunity here. We're saying, like, we know what can work, we just don't know if we can do it. Let's figure it out together. And let's learn about ourselves and our habits in the meantime.
You know, for a lot of people, the nature of work really changed with COVID. And suddenly, people, in many cases, were at a kitchen table on a laptop for a year or two without going outside suddenly. Did the COVID-19 experience shape your thinking about this at all?
Oh, my gosh, absolutely. On the one hand, I just I felt, you know, thank goodness, we have these devices, right? Like, this is our lifeline to the outside world, my entire team was able to put out a show without a hiccup because of technology. But something else happened to me is I actually started integrating a lot of walking into my days, partly because I needed to get away from my family, I needed a break, I need to get out of the house. But I stopped working out. And this was the first time in my life that I wasn't working out and then working on my computer. And I actually felt better. But I thought, you know, maybe I'm not getting the health benefits of that I used to be getting when I was working out and talking to Keith, he's saying, you know, you are actually. Maybe you're not going to build certain muscles. I think for a lot of people, they think, Oh, I gotta kill it at the gym for it to even count. And that's not necessarily true. So it was awakening for me that I need this movement. I really also appreciate all this technology. But clearly there is a conflict with what the human body craves and needs, with the way that we have developed our technology. And so as we look to this next chapter of tech, I think we also have a lot to tell the designers of this technology about what we need, whether that's AR or VR, all these headsets that maybe we'll be using, let's talk now, let's tell them now what we need for them to integrate into it for our health.
I wonder if there was a time in human recent human history when we sort of had the balance right, between making technology work for us and not being enslaved to it in a way that's detrimental to our health. Because we don't obviously want kids working 16-hour days in a meatpacking factory anymore. But on the other hand, someone in the episode makes the point that, you know, if you used to vacuum the floor, and now a robot does it for you, that's a whole lot of activity that you're not getting anymore.
Yeah, we humans love to take things to extremes, don't we? You think about the industrial age, people would lose a limb, they would be subjected to all kinds of chemicals in those factories. One of the historians also told me that 16-year-olds were a foot shorter back then. But on the other hand, they didn't have necessarily the rates of nearsightedness that we have, or diabetes, or all of these other things. Look, we have modern science, we've had penicillin now, people are living longer. But what are we doing with that time? So was there a time that we got it right? Oh, I don't know. And it's a seesaw, isn't it? We fix one thing, and then we break another. As humans, we never seem to get the balance., right. But what's great about us is we're always looking for the balance, always trying to improve things. And then you know, Zoom, it's amazing! Zoom, oh my gosh, please get me off. We never find always too much or too little, never just right.
So give us a preview of what's coming up in the next five episodes of the series.
Yes, so we talk to an optometrist who opened the first myopia control clinic in the United States. So this is a doctor from China who learned about ways to treat nearsightedness so that kids actually stopped going nearsighted so that they don't have to wear glasses. But when she came to the United States, her colleagues didn't believe her that treatment was possible. And we are going nearsighted because the human body adapts that if it needs to look close up at a screen or a book for long periods of time, it will stop being good at looking far away, which is its own problem. Myopia can lead to blindness, it's a global problem. But there are ways to cure it. And she has great advice for parents about what to do with your kids and their eyesight.
We also talked to a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh who is mapping out new connections between our core muscles, our adrenal glands, and stress and our brain. So understanding how stress and our body and our posture all impact each other. We also talk to another neuroscientist about what I like to call the mind-body-tech connection. You know, we hear about these rates of depression and anxiety, especially in in girls and young women because of some connection to social media. And he talks about something called interoception that the body's ability to essentially sense its way that it interacts with the world. And some people just get overloaded, and they're starting to understand why it tips into really serious consequences. And we also visit a school where they don't have desks and they spend a third of their day moving and they do things like math-basketball, and I just find them incredibly inspiring. And maybe we can all get some lessons there.
So two things I'm not good at.
We're on a journey and we'd love people to come with us.
