Welcome everyone.

Thank you so much for being here.

You're in for a total treat.

I had the the honor of interviewing this woman next to me, Manoush Zomorodi on "Forum" on, was it Wednesday of last week?

And it was such a good conversation.

I was telling her I get to also interview her on Monday at the Commonwealth Club and if I'm not convinced to do her protocol after reading her book and interviewing her three times, well then shame on me.

Again, like I said this is Zamush or sorry, Manoush Zomorodi.

She's the award-winning host of the "TED Radio Hour".

You have probably heard her and also the author of her new book, "Body Electric".

We'll hear all about the protocol I was just talking about.

I am Lesley McClurg.

I am a health reporter here at KQED and occasionally get to, to host "Forum".

So thank you all for being here and Welcome.

Lesley, you're an amazing host of "Forum", by the way.

We had so much fun the other day.

I don't know if you got to listen, but I felt like when we met in person, I was like, "I am so sorry that you are stuck with me for three events.

I feel like we're married for a little while."

I'm in.

And then I'll go, you know, go on back to the East Coast.

That's right?

Where is the honeymoon?

No, we're on the honeymoon.

We just get the good ride and then I'll send her back to do the hard work.

There are.

Yeah, exactly.

So we're gonna talk about sitting and screens.

That's kind of the heart of, of your book.

How and why did you decide to write about specifically sitting?

I imagine you were really feeling the pain of it.

I mean weren't we all fitting, feeling the pain?

Okay, so I want you to, I know we try not to talk about it, but cast your mind back to the pandemic, right?

And there's that moment where you're like, "Wow, everything is online.

I can look at my phone to talk to my family.

I can do work on this other screen.

I'll relax with this bigger screen, Netflix at night and then maybe I'll do all three at once."

And that felt kind of, you know, for those of us who were lucky to be healthy and in a safe place, that felt kind of amazing to me.

I was like, "Look at us.

We just switched on over and things keep going.

And then there was that feeling where you'd close maybe one of your screens and all you had the energy to do was go over to the other screen and my shoulders felt like they were up by my ears.

I was so, like, couldn't focus anymore.

My eyes hurt.

I felt so tired and I just could not understand why I felt so exhausted when literally I had not moved for six, seven, eight hours straight.

And unfortunately when the world opened back up again, that feeling did not go away and it made me more determined though to understand biologically what goes on in our bodies when we sit and interact with screens for hours and hours because to me it felt incredibly physical.

We'd heard so much about the mental health effects of being online too much or social media, but this felt different to me.

And so is the problem those four screens that are in front of you or is the problem that we're in this position all day?

Well, as with science, it's nuanced, right?

That's the thing.

And so I wanted to find out, and I was actually listening to "Morning Edition", as you do, and I heard this report by Allison Aubrey about research that had come out by a physiologist at Columbia University Medical Center a guy named Keith Diaz who had found that the sort of easiest way to mitigate the effects of sitting for a long time was to take a five minute movement break every half hour.

And we're not talking like burpees or sprinting or anything crazy.

Walking two miles per hour for five minutes had outsized effects.

It slashed people's blood sugar, it slashed their blood pressure.

He had sort of found the magic formula.

So I called him up and I was like, "Why?

What, what does this do?"

And he explained to me that when we sit, we essentially put our bodies into a position if you think of like a garden hose, right?

We're kinked at our torso and we're kinked at our knees.

And like if you kink a garden hose, what happens?

The blood backs up and it causes pressure.

So that's the same sort of thing that's happening to our bodies for a long time.

The other thing is that when we sit, we don't stimulate our muscles and muscles need to be stimulated in order to suck in the blood sugar and the oxygen and push both up to the brain.

Of course, the brain is the thing that we're using when we're sitting and looking at screens all the time.

We're switching, switching, switching using glucose, glucose, glucose, burning through glucose, burning through oxygen, leaving behind some CO2, build up the CO2.

That's when you get that foggy can't concentrate feeling, can't pay attention to anything feeling.

So the system is actually, you know, when it works, which is when it's being used as we are biologically supposed to be moving around, then it's, we don't even think about it, but take it away and we start to feel very exhausted, tired, like we can't concentrate.

And I'd love to add one more thing, which there's a relatively new area of research into something called interoception.

So interoception is the body's way of telling you what you need.

Like that could be, you need a snack, you need to take off your sweater, it's getting hot in here, or it could be you need to get off your screen.

You're exhausted, you're tired, you're anxious.

And there's new research into finding that our interception, we, we don't pay attention to it, right?

We're so busy scrolling, we're so enthralled with what's going on on our screen that we ignore the signals that we need in order to give our bodies what we need.

You have a passage you've chosen.

There's so much good research in this book and there's so many examples.

If you're not convinced by the end, and I, you will be convinced by the end of reading this book, but will you go ahead and, and tell us about the bus drivers?

Oh yeah.

I love this story.

So I'm gonna give it to you.

This is so good.

It's not a Glynn Washington kind of story if you were here a minute ago, but it's, it's equally nerdy and good.

Okay.

So this is like the 1950s.

I'm taking you back to post-war London, all right At first glance... Oh, picture... Yeah, let's set the scene.

Picture red double decker buses going around everywhere.

The city's coming back like, you know, into action.

Everybody's using public transport and okay, you have that in your mind.

Here we go.

At first glance, bus drivers and conductors seem to live similar lives.

They were all men, mostly from the same working class neighborhoods with similar diets and access to healthcare, but their jobs could not have been more different.

Drivers spent 90% of their shifts sitting behind the wheel.

Conductors, meanwhile, were in constant motion, climbing the narrow stairs between desks, punching tickets, helping passengers on and off.

When the researchers... This is... These are researchers of the UK's Medical Research Council.

When the researchers analyzed health and sick leave records for 31,000 men aged 35 to 64, the difference was startling.

Drivers were far likelier to suffer from heart attacks than conductors.

The protective factor, maybe it was as simple as those stairs.

The countless times conductors hauled themselves up and down each day.

Encouraged by the results, the scientists broadened their scope to thousands of other civil servants, including postal workers.

At the post office, some employees delivered mail on foot or by bicycle while others spent their days at desks.

Again, the pattern held.

When the findings were published in 1953, they were groundbreaking.

Dr.

Jeremy Morris, the epidemiologist leading the work, was eventually credited with establishing the first scientific link between physical activity and heart health.

It sounds obvious now, but at the time, his conclusion was a revelation.

Movement wasn't just a nice to have, it could be a matter of life and death.

I love that passage because we're all like, "Duh, right, now?"

But at that time it, nobody knew, nobody thought of anything.

And so I'm thinking, you know, where are we right now?

What are people, what passage will they be reading from a book ha, ha ha, in 50, 60, 70 years where they're like, "Can you believe people had no idea that AI dot dot dot or whatever it might be?

I just think that's so interesting.

I think we're in a moment we, where we are not talking about the things that we're leaving behind because we are so tied to our devices.

I think it's one thing to be a conductor though and tell the conductor or a job where you're naturally moving.

You and I, we have desk jobs.

Yep.

And I have tried this.

I, you know, felt like I should at least try this before I talked to you three times and it's five minutes to walk around the KQED - KQED building.

But for me to motivate to get up, when I'm in the middle of writing, you know, my emails or doing, I'm on deadline for a story, you're telling me I'm on deadline on a story and I'm going to get up and walk around the building.

Convince me why I have to do that even if I'm on deadline.

Okay.

I am going to convince you because I convinced 20,000 other people to do it.

So after I called this physiologist, Keith Diaz, he actually was kind of depressed.

He's like, "Yeah, I found the formula, but nobody's gonna do it.

Like, what does it matter?"

I was like, "But it does matter.

This is, you found the formula."

And he said, "Well, why don't you, before you, you know, get all excited, come on up to the lab and give it a try."

So I went up to his lab and I had one day, my normal day where I was on my laptop doing my thing.

I had a couple breaks to go to the bathroom, eat lunch.

But you're still, mostly you're just sitting there still?

Doing my thing on my laptop.

Exactly.

And then the other day, I came back and his technician would tap me on the shoulder and lead me over to a treadmill in the corner that he, they would put two miles per hour and I would walk five minutes per half hour and they were monitoring all kinds of, you know, biological markers for me.

And I was like, "I don't think there's gonna be that much of a difference because I'm a relatively healthy person.

My blood sugar was cut in half.

My blood pressure dropped by five points.

My attention span lasted the whole day, my mood was fine.

And bizarrely, despite all the interruptions, I measured my productivity as higher and the, the value of my work as higher, the quality of my work.

So when that happened, I was like, we gotta see if people can do this.

So you might have been in the study, I don't know.

We reached out to public radio listeners and 23,000 people signed up.

We had to close it down.

Columbia's servers, like, exploded.

And we had people try for two weeks to take these movement breaks and they could try to do it five minutes, every half hour, every hour or two hours, because we wanted to test feasibility as well.

Of the people who committed taking mo - to take movement breaks, 80% managed to stick with it, 82% actually really liked it.

They saw up to 28% reduction in fatigue levels.

We heard people who their aches and pains went away their mood was so much better, a little bit of optimism came back, which, you know, you guys are news junkies, you know how hard that is.

And most importantly to me, because I think this is a workplace culture thing productivity actually rose by 4%.

It's minimal, but it didn't go down and people rated, again, the quality of their work is higher.

So what I wanted to understand was what was the Jedi mind tricks that people played on themselves?

How did they integrate movement breaks into their lives?

What was the mindset that they needed to shift in order to think movement isn't something I have to do, but it's something I get to do because I feel better in my body, it makes me do my work better.

I actually like being alive.

And I'll actually potentially do more.

I think that seems - Totally.

Culturally the thing that we've got to shift, right?

Is because you sit there and you're thinking, "I can't take five minutes right now.

I've got to get this done."

But at the end of the day, taking that, say, 30 minutes of your day, if you take five breaks or eight breaks or whatever, that, that time will actually lead to more productivity if you take time away from your desk.

That is correct.

So in the end, people mostly, they didn't take 16 breaks a day.

They took on average four to five breaks and they saw those same sort of mental health b- benefits.

However, you know, Keith would make me, make sure that I say, "If you want the full benefits regarding blood pressure, blood glucose in particular, it needs to be more regular than that.

Let's go through some of the body parts, because you basically, the bo - the book takes you from, as you say, top to tail in terms of you, every single one of our body parts is impacted by sitting still, especially if we're sitting still in front of a screen.

So let's just start with the eyes.

What are we doing to our eyes if they're fixed at that distance for long periods of time?

Yeah.

I actually spent some time talking to Dr.

Maria Liu, who's an ophthalmologist here in the Bay Area.

She is a powerhouse.

She's in Berkeley.

She was one of the first researchers to prove that the reason why higher rates of myopia were happening, more nearsightedness in young people, even in children, was because of a behavior, not just genetics.

Like people were always like, "Oh, she needs, you know, she can't see the book in front of her.

It's just like her parents."

But actually, no, she showed, it's kind of crazy how she did.

One of the studies she did, she had chicks and she fitted them with teeny, tiny contact lenses.

I know, right?

Chickens?

Yeah, like little chicks with teeny, tiny contact lenses, scientists and she made them all nearsighted to see what happened to the shapes of their eyeballs.

And what would happen is they would be nearsighted so they could only see in front of them so they would stop looking into the distance and their eyeballs would change shape and become sort of, oh, now it sounds funny, egg shaped.

I never made that connection before.

And that was what she was also seeing in her patients.

So in China, this was actually something that people had been tracking.

They had seen that when the cultural revolution happened and people were going, academics were just like, it was really important for kids to really study hard, get jobs, you know, get the grades up, all the rest of it, myopia skyrocketed in China and they were trying out sort of different treatments that actually turned back the clock.

So reshaped the eyeball, sleeping in contact lenses that could reshape the eyeball so that kids didn't end up needing glasses.

So this was heretical when sh - when Maria came here to the Bay Area, they were like, "What are you even talking about? "

Now, of course, it is being integrated.

I, I have talked to some ophthalmologists who are like, "What are you talking about? "

Other people are like, "Of course."

And then there's atropine d- drops that you can take as well.

The bad news is once your eyes are fully cooked as an adult, there is no going back.

But our eyes keep growing well into our 20s, even our 30s.

So if there is a young adult you know who is spending a lot of time inside on a screen, convince them to take eyesight breaks because they can still postpone the, the amount of time until they go nearsighted.

Going outside, Maria says, is crucial because you need to be able to look into the horizon to reset your brain and your eyes that you need to see into the distance.

In addition, eyesight im- improves with sunlight.

They're not entirely sure whether it's the vitamin D or the, the s - no one's really entirely sure what the thing is that makes it so beneficial, but it's absolutely necessary.

That was a long answer to your question.

What about the constant stimulus that's coming into our ears?

You know, we're living with our earbuds, we're getting notifications, we're listening to podcasts, we're listening to music.

I have teens in my house, you know, they, they would prefer most of the time to, to shut me out and put their earbuds on.

What is that constant audio stimulus doing to us?

Yeah, there's an amazing study going on right now that you can join.

It is the University of Michigan in partnership with Apple where they, you can download this app that they have and they are measuring the amount of noise that people are surrounded by.

So the world is getting noisier essentially, but they also are measuring not what you're listening to, but how long you're listening and at what volumes.

And Dr.

Rick Neitzel there sort of explained to me that all that stimulation affects the cilia, which are the tiny little hair cells in your ear that, you know, turn sound waves into electrical signals and send it up to your brain.

They get tired.

They need breaks.

I mean, they... So he said, "The best thing you can do for yourself is give yourself like some timeouts, some quiet time just to let the cilia reset."

And my mind cast back to a 1995 Guns N' Roses concert where I couldn't hear for three days and I just can't imagine what I did to my hearing.

And he said, "Yeah, it's, you know, it's, it's just little things that build up over time to the point where you don't quite hear nature anymore or you strain to hear a conversation and we are seeing that happening at younger ages."

There is no definitive research yet into listening with noise canceling headphones for hours and hours, but there's some suspicion or a hypothesis that it might disrupt the way that the brain processes sound by being in that kind of silence for so long.

So stay tuned on that one or don't, right?

Yeah.

And so you talk about, you know, the, the ways that we're taking in all this information, it's more, it's more and more.

Talk about the importance of being still.

I mean, you, you tried this by floating in a tank, but - Oh yeah.

Talk, talk about the importance of why we need to turn down all of the sound and all of the stimulus.

Yeah.

So as much as I talk about movement another researcher at USC, Dr.

Sahib Khalsa, studies interoception, which I talked about before, he's specifically been looking at how people's interoception is it's, whether it's too high that they're feeling, you know, if their heart races, they feel anxious and it, maybe it's just because you ran up the stairs, you're not gonna have a heart attack or for other people they don't get much of a, a sensation at all.

A friend of mine whose kid is autistic, she said, "He doesn't know when he needs to go to the bathroom.

He doesn't know when he's hungry, so he has an aide who, you know, puts him on a, a schedule essentially."

So he has been studying people who have anxiety disorders and eating disorders and wh- what is going on with their sense of interoception.

And one of the treatments they've been testing out is to lie in one of those pod, those saline pods that there are.

That's the Bay Area, you all know what that is.

There's one right down the street.

Is there... Okay, there you go.

And they're seeing positive, you know, this idea that you are there, you're not taking anything in in a sensorial way, you are resetting the conversation between your mind and body.

And I was like, "Okay, so let's say we don't have a floating pod near us.

Wha can we do? "

And he said, "Honestly, the best thing is to give yourself, again, a timeout, go into a room, shut the blinds, no sound, no light."

And he's like, "Don't pressure yourself to meditate.

The idea is just to lie there and not take anything in, to do less for at least like a half an hour, 45 minutes, ideally."

I mean, I know that's hard if you've got little kids especially, but I took his point that, you know, we're, we're like, "I gotta do more, I gotta do more and I'm talking about these movement breaks, but once in a while you just gotta do much, much less."

And you talked about how in the first few minutes, I think you felt quite bored.

Like there's an, there's an initial sense of like, "What am I doing?"

You wrote a whole book about the importance of being bored.

So talk about how boredom fits into this hole.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

So my first book was out in 2017 and it was also based on another public radio experiment, which was about asking people, "Would you get bored with me for a week?"

Which seems actually makes sense now because boredom is having a moment.

I think I was 10 years too early.

And the reason why that one came about was because I noticed that all the moments in my day when I used to, like, I don't know, look up at the sky or look at people's shoes on the subway, I was filling each of those moments with productivity.

I could text my husband, I could check the weather, I could look at the headlines, I could answer an email.

And it made me wonder, like, well, what happens if we don't have those little moments throughout our day when we're just thinking when I'm bored and my mind just sort of wanders.

So I fell down a different rabbit hole into how boredom can be a gateway to what's called positive constructive mind wandering.

And it turns out that mind wandering, it uses a network called the default mode, which is actually where we do some of our most original thinking, problem solving.

We come up with creative ideas and we do something called autobiographical planning.

So this is when we look back at our life, we take note of the lows, the highs, we tell ourselves the story of who we are, how did we come to be sitting here today and then we imagine the future, where could we go?

How will we get there?

So it's sort of like time travel, which is sort of cool.

And so I don't know if you're, if you're not on TikTok, you might not know that boredom is having like a moment right now which is fascinating to me because 10 years ago I remember going on a, on book tour and this kid looked so mad.

He was sitting there and I was like, "What's up?"

He's like, "My mom made me come here."

I was like, "Oh, well, you don't feel like you need to be here.

You get bored all the time."

He's like, "I actually have no idea what you're talking about.

I have never experienced that feeling of boredom that you're talking about. "

I was like, "I'm glad you're here."

That was exactly it.

It was like not something that he even knew was an option to just lie there and not, because he had his phone all the time, right?

And I think we're actually there with movement in some ways.

It's like in, nobody talked about getting into nature until the industrial revolution happened and people were surrounded by not nature.

So, or, or like that David Foster Wallace commencement speech where he tells the story of the fish who's like, "How's the water?"

And the fish is like, "Water?

What is water?"

I feel like we're at that moment with movement where we have, we've made so little space for it in our lives that we have to call it something, be intentional about it, use language and bring it back into our lives.

A long, boring walk, man, it's weird to say for those of us of a certain age, but I think there are younger people who need reassurance that these are wonderful things and it feels uncomfortable and that's kind of the point because then you get to the good stuff once you stick with it.

I mean, it gives me a little bit of a hope because I imagine some of you in this room have had this experience where you're, you know, at the end of the day, you just feel terrible.

And I definitely about a year ago decided maybe I just can't work on computers anymore.

Like maybe I just can't do this anymore because the screen is, I just, I feel dizzy, I feel nauseous, I feel like I can't focus.

And so maybe if I just take these walks, I could potentially like my job again.

So in that sense, you give me some hope.

Well, it, that's funny because you're re- reminding me of this, one of the, you know, I spent the last, after we did the public radio project, I spent the last three years going through 20,000 people's like written responses to questions and trying to understand like were they, if they were retired, how did they manage to get movement breaks?

What were the challenges that they faced versus say a college student, but you're reminding me of a janitor who was retired and said, "I thought retirement was gonna be amazing, but all I do is like, it's great, but I'm on like the WhatsApp family chat a lot and I take a class online and I'm not moving and my job was moving."

So his answer was to go back to work.

He went back to work part-time.

But for information workers like you, like me, like probably a lot of us here, I think, you know, we have to look at athletes, right?

Athletes know that rest is just as important to doing their job the best they can or people who airline pilots or, or cellists, right?

Like their body is just as integral to the work that they do to make a beautiful sound or to keep people safe.

And I think as information workers, we have left out our bodies.

We are not just like brains on meatsticks, you know what I mean?

We, we are a system and it's important for us to treat our bodies with as much respect if we want our brains to be constantly performing at such a high level.

Which the culture definitely pushes us to do.

Speaking of retired, I imagine there are people in this room who might don't, that don't sit at a desk all day long, but they might be sitting reading a book for hours or maybe they're watching their favorite Netflix series for hours.

So is it just as important even if you're not in front of a screen that's this far away to get up and move every half hour?

Yeah.

Okay.

So what I, I'll just summarize, but what I heard from a lot of retired people was that they were actually quite active during the day and that was a lovely change from their day work previously, but the, what happens is they would come home at four or five, you know, and then spend the next six, seven, eight hours sitting, whether that was taking a class or watching a show or reading a book or whatever else they might be doing.

And so for some people, that was when they started to integrate the movement breaks and that made a huge difference for them.

I will say though, there's really interesting new research that says that not all screen time is bad in terms of preventing dementia and keeping our, your cognitive sharpness going.

So if you are going to spend time on a screen, it's recommended that you do something interactive so that it... Watching TV for hours is the worst.

But if you're doing something interactive, if you're looking for something and researching something and adding some, you know, a message to the comments, keeping it not, you know keeping away from the outrage - Keep your political correctness.

Yes, exactly.

That actually can be great for your cognitive sharpness to a certain extent.

I mean, obviously if you're doing that for five, six, seven hours, then you've kind of depleted the, the reasons.

But the right combination of interactive screen time and movement breaks is chef's kiss.

Now to the other end of the, the age spectrum.

So for kids, we've got kids who are sitting in school all day long, often coming home and doing homework, then maybe jumping on their phone for hours and chatting with their friends on Discord or something.

What would you say to them, because I imagine moving is maybe even more important for younger folks?

Yeah.

So I, I am just sort of tired about the negativity around kids and teens and screens.

I think shaming someone never really has a great result.

And so what I would love to do is sort of flip the way that we talk about it instead of like, "Oh my God, you have too much screen time.

Did you get outside today?

Did you move?

Do you wanna go for a walk around the block with me?

I'm gonna take the dog.

I'm gonna take the imaginary dog."

Whatever sort of works to just get people moving a little more, let's fill that space.

I think starting at a younger age too, talking about interoception, you know, I don't... My kids were a nightmare after iPad time, right?

Like you feel like you're giving them a treat and then you get rewarded with a like grouchiness like you wouldn't believe.

So if I had to do it over again, I'd be like, "Okay, so how do you feel right now?"

You feel relaxed, you're mood's pretty good.

Okay.

All right, cool.

You get half an hour of iPad time.

How do you feel afterwards?

Terrible.

Okay, then maybe next time, let's try 20 minutes.

I think, you know, we're experimenting.

Every body is different, every our, our, what we enjoy is different, our genes are different, everything is different.

So we have to be constantly experimenting and noticing and talking within families about screen time feeling good or bad.

I think that's a part of the conversation, not automatically it's bad, because that's just not the case for a lot of kids.

Do we know what it's doing to their little bodies?

Well, so this comes to my w - to their bodies?

Yeah.

I mean, do we know at all that sedentary time?

Yeah.

You've done all This research on adults, I just wondered, is it the same?

No, absolutely.

I mean, there have been, the FITKids study in 2014 and study after study since then that shows that movement is actually imperative for learning, processing and remembering information.

And so despite the fact that we are taught you, from kindergarten onwards that you sitting and looking ahead is what diligence looks like, interactive movement would actually help a lot of kids.

So I spent some time with math and movement teachers.

Have you ever seen that where you're like, you learn like two times two is like where you actually use your body to learn.

We also visited a school in Washington DC where they just inter- interweave movement throughout the day.

The desks are constantly, they're moving the desks into different formations.

They are going outside all the time.

I mean, it's hard.

I feel for teachers, they're being asked to, you know, keep up test- testing standards.

The class sizes, at least in New York City, are huge.

And it's really, really hard.

But I think the worst thing you can do, and there are some states that now have laws, not many though, where it, it is illegal to withhold recess as punishment.

And I think, you know, all those years where they would, the bad kid had to sit head down in the dark, like at my school that they were, the teachers were making their own lives worse.

That kid needed to run around more than anybody else needed to run around.

And, and I think us adults, we could use some recess too.

Timeouts.

What about the way... So is there something we can do if we're gonna sit there all day long in front of our screen, is there a way that we should be sitting and a way that we should be breathing?

Yeah.

So okay.

So I always think of like a boiled shrimp or a cashew is what I look like when I'm like there.

So when I talk to breath specialists, they're like, "Yeah, so when you're bent like that, you're actually constricting your diaphragm, which means that you can't get enough air into it, which means that you start taking shallow breaths.

Shallow breaths lead to less oxygenation, which leads to inability to concentrate, anxiety, et cetera.

So really the best thing you can do, go ahead, let's do it.

Let's take a deep breath.

It would feel better to stand up though, wouldn't it?

Let's do that.

And like get fold if you can fold diaphragmatic.

We're a litle late though.

We, we should have stood Up about 15 minutes ago.

Oh, that's better late than ever.

Perfection is the enemy of doing anything, I feel like, right?

H - I love that somebody was like, " Yeah, perfection, boo.

"Okay.

Deep breath, one more and then let it out.

Oh my God, your brain is so oxygenated.

I can just totally tell.

And then we might as well just add some like muscle stimulation here.

You had a snack earlier.

Let's get the glucose going up to your brain.

So I'm gonna just show you, this is the Zoom and shuffle as I call it.

On my calls with the TED Radio Hour team, we do not put the cameras on because my hope, maybe they're not, maybe they're just lying down taking the call, but I am moving during a lot of the calls.

As much as I possibly can, I move my calls not on Zoom, but I take them as a phone call so I can pace and walk as much as I can.

That's brilliant.

It's so stupid and easy and it makes such a huge difference.

I'd be like, " I just walked a mile on the 20 minute call.

"Uh, other things you can do is you can reset Google so that it makes every call... Good job, everybody.

It makes every call or meeting 55 minutes instead of an hour so that you build in that extra five minutes right there.

And I think the key thing that we found with people who succeeded with keeping movement breaks going is that they didn't see it as like if they, if they were in flow or they were really feeling like they were concentrating, it's fine.

So you don't take a five minute break.

Like, you listen to your body, it tells you that you wanna keep working, so keep working.

Like I think we live in a culture where we're like, " Well, I have to do it all or nothing and that's the way it is.

"And no, it's your life, your body, you get to decide, you, you can figure this out.

And, and then maybe later when you're like, " Oh, I'm so foggy headed.

Okay, I'm for a walk.

"And that was the thing that we also saw is the number one way people made it work, and this isn't surprising, is that they set timers to take breaks, to remind themselves.

But we heard from so many people that by the end of the two weeks, they didn't need the timers anymore.

Their interoception had sort of kicked back in.

One guy was like, " I don't really need it at all, actually, because now my body's like, Yo, get up, you gotta move.

That's enough.

"Um, I was recently at the TED conference and I was kind of like a squirmy eight year old boy.

I could not sit for 45 minutes is my body's, that's my sweet spot.

It's not half an hour and I'm okay with that.

I was, I was telling Manoush too, I, you know, it's difficult to think about how you're gona weave this into your culture, into your work culture, right?

And recently on a, on a Zoom call with, with all my colleagues, I just started doing squats in the middle of the, of the meeting.

I love that.

And at the end, my boss said," Okay, everybody stand up.

Let's do some squats.

"And so you never know how you're, you know, how your editor, whatever's gonna, how they're gonna respond.

Somebody told me the other day, they were like, I was at the airport and I just started walking around the waiting area instead of sitting and he's like, " You... "People were like, " Oh. "

Okay.

It's, it is like contagious, right?

In a good way, people want to start moving when they see you moving.

They start to feel schluggy is the word that my husband uses or they get shpilkes.

I imagine some people that's a good... I imagine some people in this room have a standup desk.

What if you just stand up and sit down a lot?

Oh, yeah.

Well, okay.

If your standing desk is in a trigger for you to move more, great.

But as Keith said, standing desks alone are just stillness in a different way.

Unfortunately, there have been, there was a, a meta analysis that found that st - at a sit - if you stand at a standing desk for longer than two hours, you actually increase your risk of cardiovascular issues, blood clots, and varicose veins.

So that's fun.

Sorry about that standing desk.

I know.

Not great for there, Mark.

No.

I have one more that people got really mad.

Dan, I was on Dan Harris's podcast the other day and they, the problem with short form video is they put a clip, right?

And people are like, " What are you even talking about?

"And the clip that they put was where I said even if you work out in the morning, if you continue to sit and look at a screen all day, you still are you're still facing similar harms and people got very upset because no one likes to be told that their workout in the morning doesn't count.

However, that is the case study after study, there's a more recent Norwegian one that I am gonna link to in the comments to show them that if you work out in the morning, that is great.

You are building your cardiovascular capacity, you are getting muscle strength I'm really working on my rhomboids to hold me up better, all those good things, exactly.

But if you then sit for seven, eight, nine, 10 hours a day, as many people do, it doesn't matter.

You still are in that stillness position, you still have the kinked garden hoses, you still are not sucking in the glucose and pushing up the oxygen.

And, and actually, Keith, that's the story I tell in here is he was a, as a physiologist, he had been taught that exercise was the golden ticket, right?

It fixed everything.

And so when, you know, you probably remember when we start, first started hearing like sitting is the new smoking, that, that was part of the research that had started to come out and he was infuriated.

He was like, " What are you talking about?

Exercise is magic.

It fixes everything.

"So he spent years going through all the data trying to figure, like disprove it.

He was like, " I'm gonna show them wrong.

"And he couldn't.

He couldn't, it, it is what it is.

And so he, as he says, I love this, he's like, " So smoking breaks, let's take movement breaks, right?

I, I'm old enough to remember when it was totally culturally fine to be like, I'm just running out for a cigarette break and no one batted an eye that you were going out to kill yourself for five minutes. "

I remember my, one of my good friends was trying to quit in college and I was like, " What is the hardest part of quitting?

"And she's like, " It's recess.

"And so we just all meet.

Oh, I Love that.

Recess again.

So if, again, are you not convinced?

I mean, if you're not convinced, I don't know how... There's so much data in this book about the fact that you just, after this talk, walk outside and walk around the building.

It's five minutes and then go have a burrito.

I imagine - We could just Go like this when we're out there and walk together.

And it's a nice, deep breath, you Know, it's good to breathe.

Exactly.

I, Vince, that's what people really like is that they were breathing and they got to go outside.

Exactly.

I imagine some people came into your talk though because you are the host of TED Radio Hour and I'm just curious, is there a talk that sits with you that you still remember or an interview that you still remember?

Okay.

So I got a special treat.

The last TED conference, it was the last one that they were holding in Vancouver and I was invited to curate a session, which I'd never done before.

So I got to be like, " Hmm, who do I want, who do I, who, who do I want to give a TED Talk?

I, who do I want to put on stage and what's the story I want to tell on the stage?

"So we ended up calling it back to biological basics.

It was about a lot of the things that we just talked about here, but different sort of angles on it.

And so those are conversations and TED Talks that you're going to be hearing in the weeks and months to come as they roll out.

So one of them is Keith Diaz.

It was so great to be able to bring him to a bigger audience.

Another is Michael Snyder.

He's at Stanford here.

He's a wearables guy who's been studying different kinds of type two diabetes that they are able to now drill down into that there's not just like your type two diabetes.

There's like 40 kinds maybe and what we eat depends.

Like a banana for me may be perfectly fine but not for you fascinating.

Candice Odgers, she's a teens and screens researcher at UC Irvine who really is one of the biggest critics of the, the anxious generation and this idea that we've re- rewired a generation.

Her, she does, she spends a lot of time looking at how teens use phones and says that actually social media is the least indicative of mental health problems for teens.

The number one thing is how the adults in their life are, are faring.

So if you have a kid with a parent who is struggling with addiction or depression, et cetera, tho- those are the kids that you need to look out for.

And as she points out, there's about one mental health counselor per 500 students on average in the United States in schools.

So she has a really interesting sort of different take on the relationship between tech and, and the, and kids which is fascinating.

So many other great people.

Let me think of one more.

Who do I, who do I love?

Oh, well, my friend James, he he told a story about, he had two, he had a pair of twins, his kids.

I've known them since the kids were babies and one of the twins was diagnosed with a congenital heart disorder and ended up dying at the age of five.

It's heartbreaking, but he was con - he was so determined, he's like, "This is not a sad story.

Let me tell you a story about the beauty of life and how wonderful it was that we got even five years with this kid."

And it was incredibly touching even more so because the day before there was a woman who's an biogeneticist who has a company where they're looking to screen embryos and so his child would not... It was a real contrast there.

So, you know, what, we're, we're careening towards a future with AI and genetics and and I think neurotech is another thing that I'm really interested in that we're going towards.

And we have to decide, you know, what, what, what are the things that are human that we want to hold onto and what are the things that we want to supplement with technology?

And I think, you know, we're, philosophy is becoming more and more in ethics, becoming more and more a part of this techie conversation from what I can tell.

It's a fascinating time to be alive.

May we be moving towards more movement.

You can catch up with Manoush, and I think you're gonna go down to the lobby right now, books are for sale, and she will sign a copy and I highly recommend.

Thank you all so much for Joining us.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you, Lesley.