'Active' sitting is better for brain health: review of studies

Posted by mikhael 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by goda90 1 day ago

"Passively watching TV" feels like a common target for brain health/strength/etc discussions. I'm curious if there's been any studies into the differences that engagement with television programs can have on the brain. There's been a whole breadth of television programming over the decades. I think it would be wrong to treat it all as equal in regards to how it impacts your brain.

Comment by dexwiz 1 day ago

I don't even think it's the same across viewers. When my partner and I watch some shows, we make prediction for the plot and evaluations of characters. We even have a bet book where we record and score predictions for some shows. It's makes watching much more engaging, especially if the creators hide details and foreshadowing in the background. But you don't even need high quality content to do this, just tighten the restrictions. Law and Order and Hallmark movies only get 30 seconds of content before we make predictions.

It's much more stimulating than just passive consumption. If I don't do this I feel like brain turns to mush after a few hours of TV.

Comment by collinmcnulty 1 day ago

My wife and I do this for Survivor and The Amazing Race. We’re very engaged, debating strategy, making predictions. And then we watched with other people and they just … watched.

Comment by huhkerrf 1 day ago

I've seen people be smug that they read books and don't watch TV before, but this is the first time I've seen someone be smug that they watch reality TV better than someone else.

Comment by collinmcnulty 16 hours ago

You're right, this does come off as smug. It was really more of a culture clash; they were annoyed at us for talking over the show, and we didn't realize that not everyone talked over it. We enjoy engaging with the shows this way, but no disrespect or superiority was intended.

Comment by dexwiz 1 day ago

Below Deck is our guilty pleasure for reality TV. We make predictions on who is going to get with whom, at what stage in the season certain people implode, who will get fired. I think Aesha from Below Deck was on the Australian Amazing Race. Also the show has an upstairs/downstairs dynamic we like. It's similar to shows like Downton Abbey.

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Comment by GoToRO 1 day ago

Gambling for movies?

Comment by dexwiz 1 day ago

Haha, it's just for bragging rights.

Comment by mrguyorama 23 hours ago

Writing down predictions with some weighting for confidence is a great way to find out directly just how goddamned bad humans are at predicting things and how good we are at forgetting all the bad predictions we make.

Or just otherwise forcing yourself to be accountable for your predictions is a great way to moderate your ego.

Comment by ofalkaed 1 day ago

It comes down to your level of engagement, if you are interested in and knowledgeable about any of the arts which comprise TV/Film (acting, directing, set dressing, etc) you are very likely to more actively engage with TV than the average person does with literature.

Comment by moravak1984 1 day ago

I was an avid reader, then I had to stop due to eye problems and because I did not want "staring at a thing" to be my hobby when it was also my day job as a data scientist.

While I still spend a lot of my working life staring at a screen, taking acting and filmmaking as a hobby has enabled me to enjoy many other aspects. Even if the plot/character is lousy (e.g. "Heated rivalry") I enjoy looking at the director's choices and analyzing them. My wife jumped ship and every time we watch something we have a discussion about it, which is something I had never done with books.

It truly is the level of engagement, not the medium.

Comment by amadeuspagel 14 hours ago

When I talk to people about videos we both watched, I'm struck by how much more they remember. Meanwhile I can lecture about any book I've read while other people can barely scrap together a sentence. Different mediums engage different brains.

Comment by ozim 1 day ago

I think there was some study where it was somewhat confirmed that watching people exercise had some beneficial effect without doing any exercise yourself.

Comment by NedF 1 day ago

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Comment by nbosse 1 day ago

I'm confused by this... It seems to me like the relevant part is "playing computer games is good" not "the type of sitting you do matters". Playing computer games while standing might be even better

Comment by helph67 1 day ago

"A professor at the Institute for Work and Health found that people who stand throughout the day at their jobs have a 2.2 times higher risk of developing heart disease than those people who sit during the day." https://www.ergolink.com.au/blog/standing-vs-sitting-at-a-de...

Comment by gamerdonkey 1 day ago

I was a little miffed that this blog didn't include a link to that particular study, especially with how vague the citation is, so I went and found the original publication[0].

Of note, they have a "Setting the record straight" addendum[1] that includes a couple important quotes:

"Misconception #1: Office workers should now be confused about whether they should sit or stand, and about whether sit/stand stations are a good idea. They shouldn’t be, says Smith. The study’s main finding was about workers who are required to stand for long periods (i.e. five hours or more) throughout their work shift, without opportunities to sit. Extending this to any worker who stands (e.g. an office worker using a sit-stand desk) is not correct. This is because office workers who stand at these types of workstations likely have the option to sit down when they get tired or when they feel pain in their legs and back."

and

"Misconception #2: We no longer have to worry about the negative health effects of prolonged sitting, thanks to this study. Not so fast, says Smith. There was nothing in this study to refute the research on the health consequences of a sedentary lifestyle. Much of that research is about sitting too much throughout the day—at work, while commuting and at home. This study only focused on prolonged sitting and prolonged standing at work.

"And even within the study, another finding about prolonged sitting at work got lost in the coverage. Yes, prolonged standing occupations were linked with twice the risk of heart disease as prolonged sitting jobs. However, prolonged sitting jobs were still linked, among men, with a 40 per cent higher risk of heart disease compared to jobs that involve a mix of standing, sitting and walking."

[0]: https://www.iwh.on.ca/newsletters/at-work/90/standing-too-lo...

[1]: https://www.iwh.on.ca/news/study-on-prolonged-standing-and-h...

Comment by notahacker 1 day ago

"workers who are required to stand without opportunities to sit" sounds like it's little to do with posture and everything to do with the kind of jobs that don't let people sit typically being lower paid gigs for a different demographic...

Comment by roughly 1 day ago

As they say, any health study that doesn’t control for economic status is just studying the effect of economic status.

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Comment by janwirth 1 day ago

It's also possible that these jobs tend to be shift work that completely mess up your sleep cycle. Shift workers have ~10 years lower life expectancy.

Comment by tartoran 1 day ago

I was thinking about posture as well, including building bad habits, possibly affecting breathing too which would turn everything around on its head, raising blood pressure and inflammation, affecting sleep and then causing avalanche cascading side effects throughout the human body.

Comment by lanstin 1 day ago

I have for about 15 years used a stool to sit on at work, rather than a desk chair that I can slump in. I have found I feel much better - the stool forces my upper body to be actively held up and balanced; also, when I do go to meetings, instead of being annoyed at sitting in some dumb conference room, I am a little happy to be able to slump like a normal slouch.

I put a zafu (kapok filled, and not too full so its soft/adjustable) on the stool, and adjust the desk height so I don't have to reach up at all to touch the keyboard.

I also do a lot of zazen on a zafu (with legs crossed) so keeping my torso upright is pretty ingrained into my body.

This is just anecdata, but my dad suffered with back pain his entire life (included multiple herniated spinal disks), knock wood, I haven't. If I skip the check on the keyboard height and find I am reaching up for a while, I will get shoulder soreness, but so far early enough to function as a warning to lower it.

Sitting upright as tho you are a world honored one does I think affect the entire mind/body system in a healthy way :)

Comment by tartoran 1 day ago

Spot on. I used to have back pain and all sorts of discomfort throughout body, neck shoulders, etc. until I figured out how to properly sit. Luckily I haven't had any issues lately, I'm in my mid 40s and have been in a much better shape than I was in my mid 20s. I don't use a stool necessarily but I try not to use the back support too much and for me the sitting area must be rigid, any cushion can mess up with my sitting position.

Comment by anon7000 15 hours ago

Bingo. As they say, “motion is lotion.” Staying in any position for a long time (even a “good” posture) is going to cause problems. Better being active if you’re passive, resting if you’re active, moving around, taking breaks, and basically just switching it up. All more important than doing one static pose or repetitive motion for an entire day.

Comment by hirako2000 1 day ago

Thank you, the nuance makes all the difference.

Comment by goda90 1 day ago

I can think of a lot of confounding factors for that. Are they just looking at standing desks, or also at the numerous blue collar and service industry jobs that demand long hours of standing at machines and registers? If it's just the former, then there's the question of what kind of people choose standing desks over sitting desks. Is it people worried about their health but don't take the time to exercise outside of work and think standing will be enough? If the latter applies, then there's facts about the stresses and complications of being less financially secure, such as less access to healthcare, longer working hours, poorer diets.

Comment by kilington 1 day ago

Certainly but correlations not working make it unlikely that sitting is a dominant factor in current health problems. Looking at the details described it makes sense that sitting is a form of idleness and idleness is possible in a standing job. Therefore idleness could more reasonably be the dominant factor with other correlations then contributing more for idle standers than idle sitters, etc.

Comment by mathgeek 1 day ago

> Sitting and standing for long periods have their pros and cons so which one should you choose?

False dichotomy. Choose moderation if and when you can, like most things in life.

Comment by eatsyourtacos 1 day ago

It's probably more "active" sitting. If you are a gamer (especially computer gamer), you are generally not just sitting back "relaxing". Your body is more engaged and you are constantly moving your body in some way.

Sitting and watching tv you can literally be completely still for long periods of time.

Comment by iammjm 1 day ago

Consider StarCraft: Brood War, a legendary real-time strategy game. To be played well, it requires between 200-400 actions per minute (APM), with some players going even beyond 500 APM. Some games last for more than an hour. Players use both the mouse and the keyboard. There's always more to do than you can realistically do. You are always putting out fires, managing your economy, producing units, securing income, carrying multiple attacks at once, fighting tactical battles, and executing strategic goals. Yeah I'd call that a pretty active sitting :)

Comment by mna_ 1 day ago

Let's be honest, most of those actions are useless keybashing and clicking. It's easy to get a high APM.

Comment by valenceelectron 1 day ago

This is certainly true in the beginning of a game. Players claim to do this to warm up. However, in a busy confrontation there is no reason to spam any actions that are not directly contributing towards your endeavor. If you spam useless actions during a fight, your opponent who does not will best you.

Comment by DrewADesign 1 day ago

In Smash? Sure. In StarCraft? I’ve never measured it, but I wouldn’t say ‘most’ by any stretch.

Comment by iammjm 1 day ago

The game's been played competitively for more than 25 years now, people still earn their living plying StarCraft. You wont find a single one of them with APM below 200. Having their livelihoods and legacies depending on this, do you think they'd be repeatedly doing something useless instead of optimizing?

Anyways, I think you are missing the point that this thread is about active sitting. I imagine there isn't much difference to the meaning behind movement: movement is movement, meaningful or not.

Comment by p0w3n3d 1 day ago

Depends on the game. I'd say I have two modes of sitting when programming, one is passive and my muscles ache. Another is active, when I try to use belly muscles (abs?) to keep my posture etc but... When I fall deeply into thinking I will eventually release muscles and feel worse later.

I wonder if there could be an application that would encourage active sitting

Comment by layman51 1 day ago

This is what I was thinking about too. I thought that "Active" sitting was going to be something about making sure you're not slouching, but rather adjusting yourself every so often to make sure you're sitting up straight instead of slouching off the chair.

Comment by PaulHoule 1 day ago

I am thinking about stance while sitting lately. I am breathing and speaking more from my belly and that starts with posture which is neither slouched forward or back.

Comment by tartoran 1 day ago

Me too and it's something I've become more aware as I got older. In short the lesson I learned is be well stacked and relaxed at the same time with the gaze forward. Also be able to freely move around around a fixed point if needed (the sit bones connecting to a sturdy surface of a chair). I find that swivel chairs or too soft of a chair could mess up stability/proprioception. A fixed/rigid chair at the right height helps me plant my feet better into the ground, forming some a sort of a tripod for better stability. Also an eye level monitor and a keyboard in reach without having to stretch out the arms helps keep a better posture. Another thing I practice is not leaning on the backrest too much. I noticed my kid shifting to bad postures when doing homework. Just gently telling him about it from time to time and making him be aware of his improved and what a correct posture should be seems to have improved his habits.

Comment by yunwal 1 day ago

They mention reading as an example of active sitting despite the fact that it requires no more motion than changing the channel (or whatever the modern day equivalent is).

Comment by amadeuspagel 14 hours ago

When I read this title I imagined active sitting to mean something like sitting in a rocking chair. To call sitting active because someone is using their brain seems even more stretched. We already know that you need to exercise your body and brain. Do we really need a term for different kinds of sitting to make us feel better about at least using our brain while our body decays?

Comment by rippeltippel 1 day ago

Breaking news! Using the brain is better for brain health than not using it.

Next: Playing chess on one leg is better for brain health than sitting.

Comment by graypegg 1 day ago

It's a !! Science Alert !!

I feel like I've seen enough of these "X is good/bad for Y" articles on these popsci explainer sites surrounded by the same ads for an entire lifetime. Not that I don't think this is actual research, it's just the canonical link we end up with here on HN is probably... not the ideal one.

I wanted to grab the journal link, but going back to the article now, I'm trapped in a "keep reading" loop that blocks the article, so I can be told "Mouse Study Suggests Nose-Picking Has a Surprising Link With Alzheimer's". If I could use an adblocker on the work PC I would.

Comment by tartoran 1 day ago

It's not directly obvious that sitting in a certain way activates the brain more (it probably does if any balance center is activated), but sitting in better posture does have a lot of benefits from breathing better, not having muscles worn in overdrive to try to compensate and so on.

Playing chess in one leg is a curious thing to me, I think it would initially affect the player's performance but that's just a guess.

Comment by dizzard 1 day ago

This article has nothing to do with sitting.

Comment by tasuki 1 day ago

I read it sitting. Does that count?

Comment by nikkwong 1 day ago

Original source:

https://news.uq.edu.au/2026-01-not-all-sitting-same-when-it-...

> "...Passive activities such as watching television have been linked to worse memory and cognitive skills, while ‘active sitting’ like playing cards or reading correlate with better brain health, researchers have found."

...Do these researchers even read this to themselves aloud before hitting publish? It's confounding that they would find "sitting" to be the active ingredient pushing the outcome differential. Obviously, if you remove the bodily posture from the action that the user is engaging in, you would observe the same outcome the researchers did—meaning sitting was not operative here (..duh).

Breaking news at 11: the brain works best when it’s actually used.

Comment by zemvpferreira 1 day ago

It's malice, not stupidity. They know people will click stuff that says sitting is good. Sounds controversial just to think about it.

Comment by IndySun 1 day ago

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13872877251394751

Based on this report.

Comment by Nevermark 1 day ago

I have an “ADHD” Pipersong desk chair so I can go through a random-walk sitting position open-ended training circuit while I work. Without even thinking about it.

Comment by pedalpete 1 day ago

That this is the state of "science" is very disappointing, and whenever I see the domain sciencealert, am pretty much trained that it is going to be nonsense.

Sadly, other science publications seem to be following a not dissimilar trend.

Comment by IndySun 1 day ago

Sciencealert seems to summarise academic studies using tabloid journalists.

Comment by ramon156 1 day ago

the journal that's linked seems "okay"... definitely nothing groundbreaking but any research on Alzheimer is better than no research

Comment by Brajeshwar 1 day ago

Don’t do that. Don’t give me hope.

Comment by daedrdev 1 day ago

Maybe in the future people will focus on solving problems some AGI can solve better to keep themselves in shape, like how exercise is a modern invention

Comment by mhog_hn 1 day ago

Still in awe that AGI is happening

Comment by jesse_dot_id 1 day ago

It's not happening.

Comment by PlatoIsADisease 1 day ago

As soon as my kid was able to play video games, we basically banned him from watching tv.

His only tv was phonics and numbers, which helped significantly because when he started playing minecraft on creative, he had to sound out the items he wanted to search for.

I didn't have any science, it was intuition.

I suppose next step is to figure out which video games are best. We basically don't let them play Idle games, but I'm starting to think platformers might need to be banned too.

Comment by efilife 22 hours ago

just ban breathing next

Comment by griffinlam 1 day ago

Very inspiring