Standing up for your health means there’s no such thing as a safe seat
A Different View with Dave O’Connell
Bad news for couch potatoes; the latest deadly threat to long life is sitting down. This previously innocuous pursuit is now being blamed for one in every nine deaths in the UK last year.
Obviously, this doesn’t apply to those who sit down for a few minutes between triathlons or just going about their business; it refers to those of us who sit for six or more hours every day.
Which doesn’t mean you’re an advocate for the sedentary lifestyle; it just means you have a desk job and while death may be a side-effect of doing your work, trying to type standing up might see you live longer – but you’ll be crippled with back pain.
The solution is to stand for some of the time – or more precisely one hour in six – and walk to and from your desk to offset the gravitational pull to your ever-expanding posterior.
Ironically this might be of benefit to smokers who were once allowed to kill themselves at their desks – but now they have to walk outside into the fresh air, so that they can destroy both it and themselves.
There are many enlightened employers out there who have done away with seats and who have jacked up the desk to allow you to work on your feet.
But no matter how much they tell you it’s good for you to do this, you will never lose the feeling that you had back in your schooldays where standing up behind your desk was a punishment for acting the goat during English class.
Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary was accused by the cynics of trying to make more money by introducing ‘standing seats’ on short-haul flights; now it might be that he was only trying to help us live longer while making a few bob for himself in the process.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.