Its difficult
to know when to set boundaries around your health at work because
the decline is so gradual. Allowing stress to build up, losing
sleep, and sitting all day without exercising at all add up.These
words, written by Travis Bradberry, remind us that several things
can affect our health, including sitting too much. The truth is,
sitting all day is damaging to the body and mind. In todays world,
many jobs are highly sedentary and do not require workers to move
around much. Although sitting is the most common way to work in an
office, there are many serious health risks to sitting all day and
there are desks and equipment that can help reduce the amount of
sedentary time at work. People working in offices are required to
sit throughout
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According to
Tom Rath, author of Eat Move Sleep, Sitting is the most underrated
health threat of modern time (as cited in Stearns, 2016, p.12).
Researchers are unsure how long people can sit without any
consequences to their health, but know that two hours is too long
(Lytle, 2017). According to James Levine, an endocrinologist at
Mayo Clinic, sitting for even one hour straight is too long
(Stearns, 2016). The workplace is a cause of the sitting disease
(Selby, 2015). This is not only because a chair and table are the
number one workstation for the office, but also because
technological advances have led workers to rely on desktop
computers (Karol and Robertson, 2015; Studebaker and Murphy, 2014).
Sitting limits blood flow to the lower body (Komath, 2016). High
sitting chairs, where feet do not touch the ground, cause people to
rest their feet on a stool or other part of the chair, which does
not allow for posture changes (Corlett, 2009). Many business
leaders, including Lucas Carr, an assistant professor of health and
human physiology at the University of Iowa, believe that workers
should not be required to sit in a chair all day (Lytle, 2017).
Carr says, We were not designed to sit all day. We were designed
to move (as cited in Lytle, 2017,
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Participants in
one study felt sore during the first several weeks using the
sit-stand desk (Dutta, Walton, and Pereira, 2015). Sore muscles
mean loss of productivity, which is a risk each company makes when
purchasing the desks (Karol and Robertson, 2015). Workers take time
to transition between their normal way of working and the new,
active way. The work station design must allow the worker to reach
all the tools he or she needs (Corlett, 2009). This means a corded
phone or computer may not reach the height of the standing desk.
True, there are ways to fix that problem, but companies do not want
to create more problems trying to fix one problem. Workers also
have less work space available with this type of desk and because
they are taller, workers lose their privacy (Dutta, Walton, and
Pereira, 2015). Although there are some concerns about the desks,
participants in a study said, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks
associated with space limitations (Dutta, Walton, and Pereira,
2015,
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