You hear a lot today about how our ample screentime is affecting our mental health. But how is it affecting our bodies, and how is that impact on our bodies affecting, well, our mental health?
My guest today will unpack the ways that digital technology is sapping our vitality, and offer a simple protocol to get it back. Her name is Manoush Zomorodi, and she’s the host of the TED Radio Hour and the author of Body Electric. In our conversation, Manoush explains why a day spent sitting in front of screens can leave you exhausted, even though you haven’t really done anything, and how small bouts of movement throughout the day can counteract that drain and keep you feeling energized and focused. She shares how much activity you need to offset periods of being sedentary, and how to realistically incorporate these movement breaks into your routine. We also get into the specific effects digital technology is having on our eyes and ears — and what you can do to prevent the damage.
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Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. You hear a lot today about how ample screen time is affecting our mental health, but how is it affecting our bodies and how’s that impact on our bodies affecting our mental health? My guest today will unpack the ways that our digital technology is sapping our vitality and offers simple protocol to get it back. Her name is Manoush Zomorodi and she’s the host of the TED Radio Hour and the author of Body Electric. Manoush explains why a day spent sitting in front of screens can leave you exhausted even though you haven’t really done anything, and how small bouts of movement throughout the day can counteract that drain, keep you feeling energized and focused. She shares how much activity you need to offset periods of being sedentary and how to realistically incorporate these movement breaks into your routine. We also get into the specific effects digital technologies having on our eyes and ears what you can do to prevent the damage. After the show is over, check at our show notes at aom.is/bodyelectric. All right, Manoush, welcome back to the show.
Manoush Zomorodi:
It is so great to be back. It’s been a while, Brett.
Brett McKay:
It has — 2017 was the last time we talked. It’s been nine years and it was about your book about boredom, Bored and Brilliant, about how boredom can be good for us. You got a new book out called Body Electric: The Hidden Health Cost of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Wellbeing. And yeah, you’re exploring the health cost of always being on our screen sitting down looking at iPads. What led you to explore this beat for the past few years?
Manoush Zomorodi:
Yeah, so I’ve been a journalist for 30 years, but my sort of specialty about 15 years ago became tech and business and everyone was talking about upgrading and valuations and all those things, but I was looking around and seeing that my technology, this sounds so quaint now, but my new iPhone was changing the way I did everything. It was changing the way I parented. I could be at the playground and on a call at the same time. Is that good? We don’t have to debate that right now, but for me, it was becoming really a anthropological experiment that was happening on us. And one of the things I noticed was that I started to think differently. So in terms of the first book, I would notice that I was having trouble sort of being more creative than I used to be. And I sort of looked around and thought, what is different now?
And the difference was that whenever I had a crack in my day, a spare moment, waiting in line for coffee, waiting for the subway, I could be productive. I could look at my phone, I could check the headlines, the weather, ping my husband, you name it. And it made me wonder what were the effects of never being bored? And as a Gen Xer, I was told, oh, only boring people get bored. But what if being bored was actually a good thing, this thing that we thought was terrible and to be avoided at all costs. So that led me down this road to understanding the neuroscience of boredom or what really cognitive neuroscientists call mind wandering. So boredom as a gateway to mind wandering, which activates a particular network in the brain that is responsible for our most original thinking, problem solving and something called autobiographical planning.
This is telling ourselves the story of our life, creating a narrative, and that helps us then set goals and work towards those goals. So to me, mind-blown. Okay, so I need to get more boredom in my life. That was like 10 years ago. Apparently boredom is back though from what I hear, Brett, it’s very big on socials. I guess the people who were 10 years old when that book came out are just facing that issue now. Then after thinking about that, I think we’ve seen in the last decade since that book came out, a greater understanding of the connection between how our brain works and our body functions. And so for me with this new book, I couldn’t understand why I was so damn tired At the end of a day sitting on my laptop, I was like, I haven’t done anything. Why am I physically exhausted? And that was the question I basically was trying to solve that ended up in this book.
Brett McKay:
Was there a particular moment where you can think about where it’s like, boy, sitting at this computer all day, this probably isn’t good. Not only for my brain, but just for my overall physiology and health?
Manoush Zomorodi:
Yeah, well, I felt it, and I think for a lot of us things came into very stark vision during the pandemic. It was literally that moment where I was on my laptop for work, on my phone, checking in on my family, ordering groceries online. Netflix was the only way to entertain ourselves, and I was bone numbingly tired. I was safe, I was healthy. I had no reason not to feel like I couldn’t spring out of my chair. And so to me that felt like a paradox. I just couldn’t understand how you could get more tired from doing nothing. And the last time I took biology was in high school. So my favorite thing is to track down the absolute experts in whatever field I’m curious about and have them explain it to me and then sort of bring that back to us normies and try to make some changes based on what the science, A lot of science is locked up in journals and my idea is like, well, let’s get it out there and let’s apply it and try to change the way we live based on what we know works.
Brett McKay:
So let’s do a sort of a big picture overview of the state of Americans sitting at their screens and just staring at ’em all day. How much are Americans doing that?
Manoush Zomorodi:
Yeah, it’s not good, Brett. It’s not good. By some estimates, the average American sits 187 days out of the year, so more than half the year, nine to 10 hours a day. We know also that the average American is interacting with media about 12 and a half hours a day. So I mean that includes double screening. So I don’t know about you, but my life revolves around chairs and sitting in the morning, I check my phone and where do I go? I go to the office to sit at my desk to look at two different screens. Then I come home, I check my phone again to make sure I know where my daughter is. I listen while I take the dog out for a walk. I meet my husband. We’re rewatching Mad Men on the couch. Essentially, we have built our lives around sitting and screens, and it’s really not that different for older or younger people either.
Like kids are on laptops in the classroom, they come home to do their homework on their laptops, they’re texting with friends, they’re watching YouTube, older adults, how do they stay connected a lot? There’s amazing online courses they can take, the WhatsApp family chat groups. And I say that not as judgment, but just as a fact that this is our connected society, but it just annoyed me that at the same time that screens have become so ubiquitous, it’s now estimated the average 19-year-old moves as much as the average 60-year-old and type two diabetes in young people have doubled. And it is estimated that by the end of this decade, 500 million more people will have at least one more chronic illness and many of those are preventable. So I think we talk so much about the mental health effects of being online, but we have been missing a key part of the equation, which is the physical health effects, the effects on our bodies.
Brett McKay:
So being sedentary increases your risk of diabetes. What else is it doing to us?
Manoush Zomorodi:
Yeah, so I mean obesity, that’s sort of a catchall term from essentially metabolic dysfunction for some people. Other people, it’s just lifestyle. As you mentioned, diabetes, I think what we’re leaving out though when we talk about the illnesses is the sort of mental health effects that come from these physical chronic illnesses. So we’re seeing rising levels of anxiety, inability to concentrate, depression, et cetera. And I think we think, oh, that’s because terrible things are happening in social media, but actually a lot of that is related to sitting and looking at screens as well. So when I went to talk to scientists to try to understand that was the question for me. I was like, what is happening in my body when I am sitting and staring at a screen for hours on end? And what I was told was really three things.
So the first one is that when you sit, you are bent at your waistline and at your knees. And so think of a garden hose when you kink a garden hose and it gets, the water gets backed up in it. The same thing is essentially happening at your legs and at your torso. And what is happening then is that there is less circulation and your leg muscles, I had no idea, are doing incredibly important work and they need blood flow and oxygenation to do this. They are flushing out glucose constantly. They are pushing oxygen up your body, up to your brain, but they need to be stimulated in order to do that. If you don’t do that, that is when you start to see blood pressure rising, blood sugar rising and do it long enough, those chronic health issues start to creep in. Then the other thing I learned was when we sit, we don’t breathe properly.
Our diaphragm is contracted essentially, and full breaths. Again, this is oxygenation. When you don’t get enough oxygen into your brain, this is called neurovascular coupling. Usually the neurons up there can flush out the CO2 if you keep the circulation going. But if you don’t, what does CO2 do? It makes you feel sleepy, foggy, tired, that sense you can’t concentrate. It’s a metabolic thing that is happening. It is within your body. And then the third thing is kind of new and interesting. I started to learn about a relatively new field of study called a Sense called interoception. So I had never heard of this. I’ve heard of introspection or perception, but interoception is the study of the signals that our body is sending us internally. So some of those are subconscious. Our body tells us to breathe. We’re not usually aware of that or heart rate speeds up if we’re anxious about something.
But then there are other times where we are more aware of it or we should be more aware of it. Like, oh, my stomach’s growling, I should go eat. But what I had noticed and what newer studies are starting to also show is that when we are locked in on screens, we ignore what our body is telling us. It might be telling us we need a break or we need to just get some air, some fresh air, or we need to move our body, or we’re getting anxious or we can’t focus. And I think certainly I saw this in myself and I hear from a lot of other people, I just got to power through. I just got to keep going. I got some stuff on my list. I’m just just going to put in one more hour. I can get this done and like, Ooh, what’s that other thing? And then suddenly you have 87 tabs open and you’re kind of spinning your wheels and you’re sort of getting things off your checklist and you feel like you’re working really hard, but the next day you come back and you’re like, wow, that was total crap that I actually produced yesterday. So to me, I was like, oh, okay. So they’re really good biological reasons why I’m tired and cranky and anxious and can’t concentrate.
Brett McKay:
And speaking to that, sort of not being able to pay attention or read your body signals. That’s another thing I’ve noticed when I sit down a lot is that I don’t really pay attention to whether I’m hungry or not. And so it’s like I’m not really hungry, but I’m like, well, I’m kind of bored and I need something to kind of power through this, so I’ll just eat some Reese’s peanut butter cups,
Manoush Zomorodi:
I will eat and have absolutely no recollection of having eaten an entire bag of, well, in my case, it’s popcorn, but it’s amazing. And of course, that’s what our technology is designed to do, to keep us focused, to keep us swiping, to keep us clicking through, to keep us there. That’s the whole point of it. And these sort of more subtle, I would say, ancient signals that we’re getting from inside, they get drowned out pretty easily.
Brett McKay:
What’s interesting about your book is that you highlight that people have been noticing the ill consequences of being sedentary thanks to our new form of labor all the way back in the 19th century. In the 21st century, it’s a lot more cute. It’s all digital. We’re at a desk. But people in the 19th century, they’re shifting away from agrarian to more knowledge work that we think of today, or even just working in a factory where they might be sitting down but moving their hands. What were these people, these writers and thinkers noticing about how that change in work was affecting our bodies, but also maybe their souls even?
Manoush Zomorodi:
I love that you picked up on this, and that is where the title actually comes from. Body Electric is based on the poem by Walt Whitman, and back in the 1800s, there was this move from you could used to be able to, or you used to have to use a thresher to thresh the wheat. And then the industrial revolution begins, we start to have engines and combines and people can sit and do this labor and there’s increased production. And in order to manage this increased production to account for it, to ship it to the right places to create essentially supply chains, we needed clerks. We needed people who managed systems, who managed other people. And as we all know, that requires sitting at a desk, not at a laptop back then, but certainly at ledgers, there was a spate of poetry and people noticing that the clerk’s vitality, I guess is the best way to put it, was diminished.
That they were of slighter stature, that they were pale, that they were as one newspaper, put it tired, not tired because of their work, but tired with their work. And Whitman is saying his poem, the body electric is actually an ode to the human physique at its ultimate when it is relishing the world, when it is using its muscles, when it is breathing the air, when it is in the sunshine and outdoors. And that sort of joie de vivre unfortunately, was not really to be found for people who were stuck at desks indoors even nearly, well, 150 to 175 years ago.
Brett McKay:
There’s a line from Whitman. He wrote an article in life illustrating 1856, talking about clerks at their desk. He said this, I thought it was really good, described them. He said, A slender and round shoulder, generation of minute leg, chalky face and hollow chest. Great description.
Manoush Zomorodi:
So sad, right?
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And what’s interesting too is a lot of these writers and thinkers around the same time, like late 19th century, early 20th century, not only were they noticing it affecting people’s bodies, but it gave rise to this idea of sinia, which was basically like you were just overly anxious, you were depressed, and they developed all these health cures for neuro sinnia, and the health cure was like, well, you got to get out to go to some sanitarium and get fresh air and take cold baths. It’s basically the same stuff we’re doing in 2026.
Manoush Zomorodi:
So true. They were doing cold plunges back then. Well, it’s like you just want to feel something, right? You just want to feel alive, like touch grass. I guess what’s old is new again.
Brett McKay:
So sitting down looking at a screen, not great for us, you feel crappy, you feel tired, diabetes, you feel creaky and cranky. But then you came across this study by this guy named Keith Diaz that offered a really simple solution to this problem.
Manoush Zomorodi:
Almost too simple. So I was walking my dog listening to the news, and I heard about this study that had come out. This was January, 2023, and it was a physiologist at Columbia University Medical School. And Keith’s sort of mission in life is to try to understand what is the minimum amount of movement that the human body needs in order for a sedentary, and I would add screen filled life not to kill them prematurely. And what Keith had found in his lab was that five minutes of gentle movement, so about two miles per hour, not fast on a treadmill for every half hour during extended periods of sitting offset the harms of high glucose blood pressure. It made people feel less fatigued. They were able to concentrate and it improved their mood. And when I heard that, I was like, wait a minute, it can’t be that easy.
That’s it. Just move gently for five minutes every half hour. And then I was like, oh, wait a minute. That’s kind of often actually, would people actually do that? Would they be able to interrupt all their sedentary screen filled lives to add this sort of five minute break within their day? And so I reached out to Keith and I was like, what do you think people could do this? He’s like, I don’t think people can do this. And it makes me depressed because it doesn’t matter if I can show something in the lab if this doesn’t actually translate to real life, it makes no difference.
Brett McKay:
So you and Keith decided to do a big study to see if people would do it, which we’ll talk about. But you actually first tested this on yourself to see does five minutes of walking every 30 minutes, does that actually change your physiology? And so you went over to Keith’s lab and hooked yourself up to some monitors to see what would happen?
Manoush Zomorodi:
I did. So he invited me. He’s like, well, why don’t you try it for yourself and see if you disagree with me that people can do this? So I was like, great, I will be your lab rat. So for a week before I went to the lab, I wore a heart rate monitor, a very sort of fancy accelerometer, pedometer, glucose monitor, the whole jammy. And then I went up to his lab and I spent two days there. So the first day they had me in a room. They were work on your laptop like a normal day all day, just work on your laptop. I had bathroom breaks, I had time to eat my lunch. But basically I just powered through for eight hours and all the while they were collecting my blood sugar data, my blood pressure heart rate, and I was filling out regular surveys regarding my mood and ability to focus.
And then the second day when I was there, every half hour, Keith’s lovely assistant guided me over to a treadmill in the corner and she’d type in 2.0 miles per hour, and I would take a sort of gentle stroll for five minutes. And again, they measured all of those things. And when they compared the two days, it was kind of crazy actually. My blood sugar was cut nearly in half. My blood pressure dropped by five points. My concentration was so much better, and I mean my energy levels and mood were just far superior. I mean, that was so obvious to me. I could feel it the day I didn’t move. I slithered back onto the subway to go home. I was exhausted the day I took the breaks. I was like, great. This was super fine. Okay, bye. I just skipped my way out. And when I saw those results, I was like, well, this is too powerful not to try to get regular people to do this, especially since it is something you don’t need money to move for five minutes every half hour, and maybe there could be effects even if it was not quite that often.
So yeah, so Keith and I, we took our teams at NPR and at Columbia, and we launched a global clinical trial. This was exciting for me as a journalist to do a proper medical study. And we had 20,000 people sign up, which was really cool.
Brett McKay:
And what were the results of that? Did people see benefits and were they able to integrate these short walks into their daily routine?
Manoush Zomorodi:
So what we did was we had them choose a cohort so you could decide to move for five minutes every half hour, five minutes, every hour or five minutes every two hours because not only did we want to measure the effects, but we really wanted to understand the feasibility of it, who managed to stick with it the most. And I was really surprised. I mean, keep in mind of course, Brett, that this is a self-identifying audience like their public radio. Yes, for sure. They’re like, I have this problem. I want to do something about it. So we have to have that caveat. However, of the people who signed up and started the two week period of integrating these breaks into their lives, 80% stuck with it, which I was quite surprised about. They saw on average a 25% decrease in fatigue levels. Anecdotally, they told us about aches and pains going away, being able to concentrate again.
There were reports of better mood essentially, not only just being able to focus, and surprisingly 82% said that they found it doable and they liked taking the breaks. So to me, I was like the data was clear, and I should say there was a dose response relationship. So the people who took the breaks every half hour saw greater decreases in fatigue, greater increases in concentration and mood, but the difference was pretty slight. So for the book, I just thought we know broadly what the data say, but what I wanted to understand was how did people do it In a world that is in schedules and universities and offices and lives built around screens and chairs, what did they do in order to succeed? That’s where I was like, how did they hack their lives to be able to do this without being annoyed by it and without upending all the things that they needed to do?
How did they deal with the interruptions? Because I should also add, Brett, this did not impact productivity. To me. That was the most surprising. I expected people to be like, well, I didn’t get as much done, but I felt better. That was not the case. In fact, we saw a slight improvement in productivity, which is actually what I had observed when I went and did it in the lab. So I just found that every time I took a break, I did not look at a screen while I took my breaks on the treadmill, but I noticed that I would, at first I was annoyed. I was in the middle of something, but then I would sort of strategize. I’d be like, okay, when I get back to my desk, I really need to answer that one email and I need to say these three things and I would just get back and be super efficient and focused and get it done instead of faffing around and not reading all the way to the end of emails and clicking over to check one thing. I just did the work.
Brett McKay:
When you’re on those walks, you’re thinking about your work a little bit in your head, like, okay, what do I got to do when I get back? And when you got back, you’re like, okay, I know what I got to do because I’ve already thought about it. And so you just were able to do it.
Manoush Zomorodi:
Exactly. Exactly. And I think that’s what a lot of people saw is that the quality, maybe the quantity was less, but actually if the quality is better than you’re not spinning your wheels.
Brett McKay:
So how did people integrate this in their lives? What were some strategies and tactics that they used?
Manoush Zomorodi:
Super interesting. So what I ended up doing was going through and creating sort of three buckets. One was younger people, students and educators, and we could not let people under 18 into the study, but there were a bunch of teachers who tried to do it with their classrooms. Then I had the middle group, which was information workers, knowledge workers, people who generally make a living off of sitting and looking at a screen. And then the third group, which was older adults who maybe were retired and thinking more about the longevity and health effects for students. Some of it was, I can put it to you two ways. One was there were teachers who really felt very frustrated because there is no mandate for recess in schools. And so it is really left up to teachers to figure out how to get movement integrated into their classrooms.
And it’s not a nice to have Brett. There is a ton of research that shows that movement helps students learn better. There is a direct correlation between those things. And the teachers see it too. It’s not just the kids are wiggly, their bodies are growing and need the circulation and they need the oxygenation. So some teachers, they turned it into a science project in their class. They were like, look at this weird NPR project. This was a high school teacher. And she said, we’re going to do this to understand data collection. We’re going to do this to experience it ourselves and track ourselves, and then we’re going to talk about the placebo effect and see if that has anything. So they turned it into a science project, which I thought was such a creative way of doing it, but I also heard a lot from professors who maybe would’ve powered through a three hour workshop who then integrated breaks into their workshop and found they had a better time teaching their students were more attentive and on the whole people actually retained the information better.
So there’s a lot more into that. And my whole thing is that I think we need to teach interoception at a much younger age, teach really little ones to start to listen to what their bodies are telling them because they are surrounded by screens all the time. So that’s part of that chapter Information workers. I really went deep in trying to understand scheduling, right? Because that’s the thing. And what you saw of course, was that the people who are in power, those are team leaders or executives, they set the tone. They can say, instead of half hour meetings, we’re going to schedule 25 minute meetings. So you get that five minute break or 55 minute meetings instead of an hour. They can say, it’s okay to not have your zoom camera on and move. If you need to move during a meeting, go for it.
Some people who maybe were not in charge could just say like, oh, I need to turn off my screen. I have terrible wifi. And then they would do their movement break, which really cracked me up. And then they would start to create rules like another boss said, when we’re having an internal meeting, anyone is welcome to move during a meeting as they need to, but if we’re with clients, let’s make sure we don’t do that. It’s not socially acceptable. I think once a team decides that it’s okay for heads to be bopping up and down on a zoom, then it’s not a big deal, but it really needs that cultural sort of shift that we are able to do better work and we have higher job satisfaction and also potentially less sick days. So the winds are big. And then older adults had a completely different issue because what I heard from a lot of retired people was actually they were more active during the day.
They were volunteering or helping out with grandchildren or whatever. But come say four or five o’clock, there was sitting for the next 6, 7, 8 hours watching tv, Netflix, scrolling on their phones, and those were the hours that they needed to insert interruptions into, and they made a big difference. I mean, one of Keith’s other studies I should add for people who replaced half an hour of sitting with movement decreased their risk of an early death by 18%. So we’re not talking about huge changes here. We’re talking about just getting more movements into your life. And if you need to start by looking at your phone while you’re doing that, whatever, who cares? Baby steps. We just want you to live longer and healthier
Brett McKay:
After I read the book. So I am pretty active. I take a morning walk every morning mile, and then I take another walk. But after I read your book, I was like, I need to start taking these five minute breaks. So I just set a timer. Every 25 minutes I get up. It doesn’t matter if I’m in the middle of something, I’ll go take a walk for five minutes. Or if I can’t take a walk, I have a problem going outside and taking a walk when it’s really cold outside, I’m kind of a wuss. So I’ll just do jumping jacks. I’ll just kind of look like a weirdo moving my arms up and down, doing 1980s aerobics.
Manoush Zomorodi:
Totally. And I think what you’re doing is exactly right. Is it time to move? Yes. But if you are like I’m in the middle of something and I am in flow, well then, okay, fine. Don’t take a movement break. It’s no big deal. What I sort of am sick of a little bit is this idea that we are so all or nothing, we’re either on the traveling soccer team for our kids or they don’t play soccer at all. Well, what about just going out in the backyard and kicking the ball around more often? We don’t need to be training for a marathon or just sitting on our butts. It’s like, what if we just got up and I like to do this works for me. I get up and I just walk around. There’s a big conference table, and I walk around that for a couple minutes and then I get a glass of water and I go back to my desk and it helps a lot.
Brett McKay:
You’re kind of like a prisoner that gets your yard time walk around the yard.
Manoush Zomorodi:
I try not to think of myself as a prisoner, but yeah.
Brett McKay:
That’s what I was thinking the other day when I was taking a walk just around in my driveway because I needed to. Why not? It worked.
Manoush Zomorodi:
Yeah.
Brett McKay:
But what’s interesting too, you highlight a lot of people may be listening to this, okay, yeah, you can get these health benefits by taking these five minute breaks. But it’s like, well, I exercise every day. I had this hard workout for an hour. I do CrossFit. I do a run. But you highlight research that that’s probably not enough if you’re sitting down the rest of the day.
Manoush Zomorodi:
No, in fact, it’s definitely not enough. And it’s so unfair. It sounds so unfair. So Keith told me about his own journey when there started to be research into this idea that even if you do a morning workout or you go for an evening run, if the majority of your day is then spent sitting and looking at a screen, it doesn’t matter, don’t give up your workout. Obviously you’re building muscle, cardiovascular strength, all the rest of it, but it is not enough to offset the harms of sitting for long stretches for the rest of your day or evening. And he just said to me, he’s like, this was shocking to him. He’s like, we had been taught when we were getting our PhDs that exercise is the ultimate medicine, that it is the cure for everything. So to then read that, you could check it off your list first thing, but it doesn’t make a difference the rest of the day. That just sort of shocked him. I mean, I guess the good news is if you haven’t been moving at all, you are going to see benefits just by starting to take five minute walks or as you have said, if you can’t walk, there’s options with your arms. The point is to get the blood flowing and raise your heart rate just a little bit, but you don’t have to go crazy.
Brett McKay:
And then the other thing too, you highlight that this is interesting. A few years ago, standing desk became all the rage people heard sitting as the new smoking. Okay, well I got to stand up while I’m working, standing all day at work. Can that offset the downsides of being sedentary?
Manoush Zomorodi:
No. And this was such a drag too. I had people say that to me. They’re like, oh, I’m so glad I have a standing desk. And I was like, oh, I’m so sorry to tell you this. There have been massive studies looking at all the different clinical trials about standing desks, and unfortunately the consensus is that standing at the very best doesn’t really cause much harm. It gets you up, maybe it relieves some back pain, but at the very worst can actually cause circulation problems or increase your risk for stroke and varicose veins and things like that. It’s the movement that stimulates the muscles. And when the muscles are stimulated, they suck in the glucose, they push the oxygen up. Just standing unfortunately is not the answer. It’s so sad again. Yeah, but
Brett McKay:
The answer, it’s easy. It’s just five minutes of gentle movement every 25 minutes. If you can’t do that at least an hour. Just move more. Just move.
Manoush Zomorodi:
More. Yeah, exactly. What we ended up finding was that most people, if you hate the timers, there’s another thing. Some people would just set a goal, I’m going to take four or five minute breaks today, and then just when it pops up and it feels doable, you know what I mean? And I think what I also found so interesting, and there’s starting to be more research into this, this is not in the book because the research is very preliminary, but this idea that the number one thing people did was set timers in order to get themselves moving. And that makes sense. You can’t remember to get up. You’re in the middle of something. But what ended up happening, and I’ve seen this in myself and it sounds like you probably do too, is that your body begins to send you pings and messages that even if you don’t set the timer, it’ll start to say like, yo, I’m feeling a little rough around here.
Can we please get up? Can we please get up? And many people told me that by the end of the two week study, they didn’t need to use their timers anymore. And I was just talking to some researchers at the NIH who are looking into this idea of introception and motivation and how the body begins. They think it has something to do with sort of circadian rhythms, but not what has to do with night or morning or anything like that, but that the body gets itself on a sort of rhythm and it begins to anticipate and alert the brain that it wants something or needs something, which I think is really interesting.
Brett McKay:
And as you increase your movement, you increase your interoception. So you were able to notice those urges to move more.
Manoush Zomorodi:
Totally. And like Keith said to me, he’s like, I feel like we don’t want people walking around in circles like robots. That’s not the goal. But I think for younger people, if you tell them, this will help with your anxiety, your ability to focus, we hear a lot about people having more depressive symptoms. This will help you feel more positive. And then for people of a certain age, I’ll include myself. I’ve started thinking about chronic illness. I don’t want a chronic illness, and if this is something I can do that makes me feel better and protects my health for longer so I can live not just longer, but live well, then why the hell not?
Brett McKay:
Yeah. One bit of advice I’d give to people who want to start this, and you talk about this in the book, is don’t use your smartphone or smartwatches nudges that they have. I think that the Apple watch has this where if you haven’t been moving for a while, it’s like get up and move. Actually, I talked to someone, it was a psychologist who brought up research that those nudges, those automatic nudges, they actually backfire because you start to resent them. It’s like, I don’t want to do that. And I noticed that with the apple. I set that up in the apple, apple watch when I first got, I was like, oh, I can have it remind me to move when I haven’t been moving. And I would just be like, dismiss, dismiss, dismiss. Shut up for the rest of the day. So if you want to set up a nudge, you have to make it yourself. Set up a timer. So don’t rely on the AI to tell you to move.
Manoush Zomorodi:
And the way I like to think of it is that setting it with intention is you’re making a contract with yourself, right? You’re saying, in one hour I will take a five minute walk, and instead of being stupid machine, you’re like, oh yeah, okay, I made a plan. I better get up and go. That’s not to say it’ll be easy. There are some days where I’m like, I don’t want to. I’m comfortable in my chair, but I feel better. Every single time.
Brett McKay:
So something else you do besides exploring these overall systemic health benefits of moving gently several times throughout the day. You also talk about what staring at our screens all day is doing to our eyes and to our ears. So how are screens messing up our vision?
Manoush Zomorodi:
Well, I did not know that they are changing the shape of our eyeballs. So our eyes are extremely malleable and cooperative. If you tell them that you want to look at something that is close to you a lot, they will conform, they will change shape and become sort of egg like shapes and you will go nearsighted. And what they’ve seen is that in the past few decades, this is happening to younger and younger kids and more and more kids. I think there’s some statistic that it’s like one out of three kids is now nearsighted. And I spoke to Maria Liu at Berkeley who has been studying exactly, because for the longest time people thought, oh, if you’re nearsighted, it’s genetics like tough luck. And she was convinced that it was actually lifestyle and behavior that were these soaring rates that she saw in her native China that were starting to come to the US. This was 20 years ago.
And so she went into the lab and she actually fitted chicks with contact lenses that made them nearsighted and then tracked how their eyeballs changed shape. And we see the same things in humans that the more you stare at a screen, the better your eyes will get at doing that. It’s basically saying to your eyes, I don’t need you to look into the distance. And so they lose the ability to do so. The good news is that as long as your eyes are still growing, and this is actually into your thirties, there are treatments now that will reverse the effects. You can literally turn back the clock and you need to combine that with things like going outside. I was looking out the window. She was like, no, you have to go outside your brain when you’re inside knows that there are walls and that it won’t be able to get the full horizon effect that your eyes need. She also said, you need to go outside. They’re not entirely sure why vitamin D and sunlight are so powerful for healthy eyes. But that combination of being outside, looking into the horizon, scanning the horizon and doing it regularly tells your eyes that they need to be good at looking close and far.
Brett McKay:
Alright, so mean is especially if you’re a parent of young kids, make sure they’re not just looking at screens. Make sure they get outside and looking at the horizon. If you’re over 30 and you’re already nearsighted, it seems like the clock has already ran out on you,
Manoush Zomorodi:
Kind of. Yeah. But it does matter if you’re in your twenties, you got to be on top of it. If you work inside or you work in a lab or whatever, you will go nearsighted faster. So to me, I was like, wow, I could have done something. I could have staved it off. But you’re right, once your eyes stopped growing, you’re sort of cooked,
Brett McKay:
But it’s still good for you to get outside when you’re on that walk. Don’t look at your screen, look at the horizon. You might not be able to change the shape of your eyeball if you’re 45, but I think it’s still good for you. I mean, I got football shaped eyeballs. I’m in astigmatism, but I still like to get out there and scope out the horizon. It does feel nice on the eyeball,
Manoush Zomorodi:
And there’s a good reason why it feels nice. There’s actually been research into animal eyes. Certain mammals, they have seen that sunlight that hits the back of their retina releases serotonin. They have not been able to show this in humans because it’s hard to prove. But like you say, I don’t know about you, but when I get some sunlight, it just feels good.
Brett McKay:
What about your ear health? Because what a lot of people use their digital devices for is to listen to stuff. They’re always walking around with AirPods in their ears.
Manoush Zomorodi:
Yes. So there has been a really fascinating study going on between Apple and a Michigan researcher named Rick Knight. This is the Apple hearing study where they have tens of thousands of people enrolled through the iPhone. So they’ve been able to track noise exposure, how long they’re listening to something, the volume, also the external noise. So do people put on noise canceling? Do they raise the volume in order to counteract? They’re walking by a construction site or something like that. And Rick told me, because I was like, well, you just need to turn down the volume. He was like, yeah. Not only that though, it’s the duration of listening your ears. It turns out also need breaks. So you know that feeling when I don’t know about you, guns N Roses man would come out and you couldn’t hear for a couple days.
Those are the clia, the little tiny hairs in your ear that have been damaged. And if you give them a break and you let them relax, they will eventually recover. They can recover. But if you do that often enough or you wear down your CLIA and you never give them a break, once they die, they do not grow back. So they are seeing and expect to see more levels of people losing their hearing at much earlier ages. And for a while people were like, well, why didn’t we see that? When we first started, when had consumer devices like the Sony Walkman, and they think that the reason why that didn’t really have that much of an effect or damage people’s hearing was because the battery life was so crappy. And now of course we charge our phones and we listen nonstop. So again, take breaks exposure. Something is being used in your body when you are exposing yourself to exterior sound information vision, and your body just needs to regroup
Brett McKay:
And hearing loss. I think they’re starting to see more hearing loss in younger and younger people. They’re always got their AirPods in really loud, but hearing loss can eventually contribute to dementia down the road.
Manoush Zomorodi:
Right? And also it’s related to people losing their balance and falling the vestibular sort of feeling of being able to hold yourself without falling over. So yeah, there’s very good reasons to protect your ear health. And there’s actually, this has not been shown yet, but there’s suspicions that having noise canceling on all the time might disrupt some sort of connection between your ears and parts of the brain. They’re not entirely sure. That’s very preliminary.
Brett McKay:
You also talk about how our digital lives are impacting our sleep. So how are screens messing up our sleep?
Manoush Zomorodi:
Well, I mean I thought I was like, it’s going to be blue light, right? Blue light is the devil. And actually they don’t think that blue light is the problem. It’s so minimal what blue light does in terms of, look, there are some people who would say, no, I’m very sensitive to it. Absolutely. And children absolutely are sensitive to blue light. But on the new thinking is that rather than the devices themselves messing with our sleep, it’s the fact that we are displacing our sleep with time on screens. So somebody can’t sleep, what do they do? They look at a screen. It’s not necessarily the screen that’s making them unable to sleep. It’s because they turn to the screen or we have the phone on next to us and it’s not looking at the phone right before we go to bed necessarily. That’s making it impossible for us to sleep. It’s constantly being interrupted. I have my phone on next to my bed nervous wreck. I have elderly parents and I have teenagers, but I did learn to set it up. So they are the only people who can call me in the middle of the night. So it’s this idea that just one more show, just like let’s keep playing game. And you lose track of what time it is. It is displacing the amount of sleep that you got and it’s not necessarily the screens itself doing it.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, we had a chrono biologist on the podcast a while back ago. He mentioned that it’s not, the light from a screen is not enough to disrupt your circadian rhythm, so you don’t have to wear those goofy Elton John blue blocker glasses.
Manoush Zomorodi:
You need to know yourself. If you were a person who loses track of time or you can’t help but be like, oh my God, I wonder what happens in the next episode. You need to know that, okay, this is a problem for you. Turn it off. Don’t blame the screens though for you’re not sleeping well, blame yourself essentially.
Brett McKay:
And then the other way that screens can mess up our sleep or just being on screens all day is we’re not moving. And being sedentary can also mess up your sleep. You’re not building up sleep pressure. Your body needs movement to feel like you’re tired at the end of the day. And if you’re just sitting around all day, your body’s like, well, I’m not tired. We don’t even go to sleep.
Manoush Zomorodi:
I think to me, that was the best explanation for the feeling of being wired and tired. This idea that you are exhausted and yet an alert, I guess is the way to think of it. And I hate that feeling so much. And what I have noticed, I do track my steps and what I have noticed is I need to hit, if I hit 12,000 steps every day, that’s when I can sleep properly. It makes a huge difference for me. It’s so obvious. If I only get 8,000, I do not sleep as well. I need the full sort of mental and physical fatigue to be able to rest, to really enjoy and sort of let go.
Brett McKay:
Speaking of step count, did Keith Diaz, did his research find that you had to hit a certain amount of steps a day to get these benefits? Or it didn’t matter as long as you moved five minutes? No.
Manoush Zomorodi:
Okay. Keith hates step trackers, which it really cracks me up. He said that when he started wearing one, it made him weird. He would be doing laps around his living room to try to get a step count up. He’s like, it does not work for me. It becomes my master. I don’t care. He’s like, what you need to do is put in the time. You don’t need to go crazy. No sprinting needed. If you want to do jumping jacks, go for it. But you really don’t have to. It’s just putting in the time, putting one foot in front of the other.
Brett McKay:
Last question. So you’re a parent. I’m a parent too. Our kids, they’ve lived in a world where they don’t know a world without screens. They’ve probably seen one since they were one years old. What can we do to help our kids integrate screens in their lives in a healthier way?
Manoush Zomorodi:
Yeah, I mean, I think that we’ve become so negative about screens to the point where it might be backfiring. I just think shaming kids for time that they spend on their phones, when really, a lot of the time it’s how they connect with the world and with their friends. I just want us to think about what we’re missing when we are on screens. And that is movement and getting outside. So instead of like, oh my God, get off your phone. Just be like, Hey, did you get some stroll time in today? Did you go for a walk? I think if they’re younger, taking a lap around the block after dinner, a dog is actually a great way to get them moving. Having conversations about if you’re going to have iPad time again for the little ones, how do you feel before you’re starting on your iPad?
You feel good? Okay. And then afterwards, how do you feel? And if they’re grouchy, be like, okay, so now we know that maybe you spent too long on your iPad. Maybe let’s do it a little less next time so that you don’t feel grouchy. I think for teenagers, it’s hard, right? Boy is it hard. But I have seen that my kids walk themselves essentially. They make sure that they get out and air themselves multiple times a day and they don’t feel right. If they don’t, they’re like, oh, I need a walk. And that is just music to my ears.
Brett McKay:
So just have those conversations. Encourage them to develop their sense of interoception and maybe offer some gentle nudging.
Manoush Zomorodi:
And I think it’s more saying what you can do and should do as opposed to what you can’t and shouldn’t frame it as positive. Let’s frame it as enjoying the world. Let’s frame it as touch grass.
Brett McKay:
Touch grass. Well, Manoush, this has been a fantastic conversation. I think hope everyone goes out and starts taking their five minute walks, but where can people go to learn more about the book in your work?
Manoush Zomorodi:
Oh yeah. Well, I’m the host of NPR’s Ted Radio Hour, and you can find out more about the book at my website manoushz.com. And that’s me on Instagram as well. And Brett, my God, congratulations. I hope I’m on again in another nine years.
Brett McKay:
Let’s make it happen.
Manoush Zomorodi:
Let’s do it. Alright.
Brett McKay:
Well Manoush, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Manoush Zomorodi:
Mine too.
Brett McKay:
My guest today was Manoush Zomorodi. She’s the author of the book Body Electric. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.
