Fidgeting, Keep Doing It
You know you have those periods during work when you just stop, look around and decide not to do anything. Sitting still is not an option that will keep you “entertained” so you start fidgeting. In general, sitting down and not doing anything has been connected to a series of great disadvantages including obesity, a problematic heart and even dying at an earlier age.
Fidgeting, on the other hand, seems to be the solution to all these problems that doctors have been warning us for so long. A study that was published in the Journal of Preventive Medicine this week has highlighted these exact benefits and we are interested in presenting the hows and the whats to our beloved readers.
It all started with the University of Leeds and the University College London, which both studied data on approximately 13,000 women. The women were aged in between 37 and 38 years old and they participated in the University of Leeds’ now famous UK Women’s Cohort Study. It has been deemed one of the largest studies of its type that has been realized in the UK.
The participants were asked questions about their “sitting down habits” and were also asked about how much they were fidgeting every day. The measurement was registered on a scale from 1 to 10 where 1 meant that they were not fidgeting at any point during the day and 10 meant that the participants were fidgeting whenever they got the chance.
But this is not the entire amount of information that was collected. The participants were also kind enough to give insight as to how much they smoked, drank alcohol and how much daily exercise they performed. All this data had been originally filled in between the years of 1999 and 2000. All the researchers had to do was follow up 12 years later.
After all the information was put together, researchers came to the conclusion that around 30% of the women who sat down for 7 hours or more daily were likely to die compared to those who sat for around 5 hours or even less. The women who spent a lot of time sitting down seem to have considerably reduced chances of dying if they considered themselves medium or heavy fidgeters.
So next time you are in your office and you find out that you are fidgeting, keep doing it. Keep in mind that this is not an excuse for you to fidget all the time, however.
Photo Credits wikimedia.org
