Labor Day 2022 means a return to work from home and the office. That can be unhealthy.
Happy Labor Day weekend! Then work from home and the return to office takes over, and worsens America's sitting epidemic.
Bad news for you beach lovers: Pumpkin spice latte season has begun, a jarring reminder that summer is winding down. The arrival of Labor Day doesn’t just imperil your tan, however — it can also jeopardize your long-term health.
The changing season brings a work period without another major holiday break until Thanksgiving. This means millions of office workers spend more time at their desks, exacerbating an epidemic of stillness that is slowly killing us.
In case you’re thinking you can offset your daylong sitting by going to the gym, it’s not so simple.
People who work at a desk spend, on average, 77% of their workday sitting, with work breaks taken primarily for bathroom runs and meals. Like the frog in the pot of ever-warmer water, the danger from stillness may not be obvious until it's too late, but it can become life-threatening.
Before the widespread shift to remote work for office jobs, a major study in 2012 attributed nearly one in 10 premature deaths to physical inactivity. Excessive sitting increases the risk of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer, according to the Mayo Clinic. In a meta-analysis of studies involving more than 1 million people, those who sat more than eight hours a day with no physical activity at all had an elevated risk of dying on par with smoking. The government of Australia went so far as to declare “sitting is the new smoking.”
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