The Easy, Simple Fix for Exhaustion, Foggy Brain, and Back Pain | Manoush Zomorodi

26:25Coming up, Manoush Zomorodi talks about why working out does not cancel out the impact of sitting all day. Why standing desks, which I have, are not enough, sadly, to protect your health. And she gets very practical on a simple habit that really can boost your energy, your focus, and your productivity.

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29:37okay so now let's dive into what we can do we'll get to the eyes for people who are worried about that and feeling like i'm dropping the ball on that i'm not i'm going to come back to it that's what we in the business call a tease all right well let's get back to this five minutes of movement every 30 minutes because i have a bunch of questions i suspect there are many people listening who have the question I'm about to ask, which is a question I have personally, which is I'm already working out quite a bit. I also use a standing desk and, you know, I walk around when I'm on the phone calls or, you know, I try to convince my reluctant staffers to not do zooms, to just do audio, which for some reason they hate, but I sometimes win.

30:19And so I'm already doing a lot of this stuff, but I'm still fucking exhausted. So it apparently isn't enough. You're definitely ahead of the curve here. So, okay, let's start with what you said about working out. As Keith explained to me, when people work out, that actually makes up usually only about 4 % of their day, right? And it's great that you work out. It's good for your muscles, your cardiovascular system, all the things. However, study after study has shown that if you work out and then sit for the rest of the day, it doesn't make a damn difference. So sorry about that. Doesn't mean you should stop, but you need to know that your risk of all those chronic illnesses are just as high as someone who doesn't work out if you sit for the rest of the day.

31:06So there's that. Then we have the standing desk. Unfortunately, the data is in on that as well. If you stand for two hours a day, let's say, at your standing desk, that has not been shown to reduce potential cardiovascular issues, such as risk of stroke. In fact, it can make things worse. You can get varicose veins, things like that. If the standing desk prompts you to get up and then move, by all means, keep your standing desk. Or if you're, you know, marching in place when you're at your standing desk for five minutes, or if people have back pain, if it relieves their back pain, go for it. But don't think that a standing desk is going to mitigate the effects, once again, of sitting for 9, 10 hours a day.

31:48To your point, though, what you're prescribing to your team about turning off the camera on Zoom and moving during calls, hell yes. Yes, that is the best thing you can possibly do. That would count towards the five minutes per half hour, or, you know, if you're in good shape, do it once an hour, once every two hours. The point is that we have to break up these long sessions of sitting and looking at screens because our biological systems are not, can't just plug us in or upgrade the operating system. These are ancient systems that we're talking about. They are finely calibrated to keep us alive.

32:31And if you don't give them what they need, which is constant churning of oxygen and blood, they will let you down. Now, why are you so tired? Let's figure this one out. How long are you sitting for, would you say? I almost never sit, except for when I'm doing the podcast. One of the reasons why I'm thinking about doing less podcasting is I really hate sitting. My back is uncomfortable. Well, I'm a generally fidgety person. I don't like sitting and doing the podcast. Can we start a walking podcast, Dan? Well, slight digression, probably of local interest, only to podcasters. But there's a new podcast that I haven't watched or listened to the whole thing yet.

33:11I've just seen the clips on social media. Benny Blanco, the music producer, and his friend Dave. I forget Dave's last name, but he was in a TV show also called Dave. That was very funny. I'm fans of both of these guys. I think they're both very funny. They're young guys. and they have a new podcast with Dave's wife. So it's three of them, three hosts, and they shoot it in the house and they're all wearing wireless mics and they move around. So they're like cooking things, just moving from one place. I would love this podcast way more if that was the structure of it because I like to move. So I think another reason, and I don't want to go too deep into my stuff because it's not that interesting for the listener, I fear.

33:48But I think another reason why I hit a wall at three or four is I do a lot of writing and I find it just extraordinarily taxing, even when I have movement breaks. And so by mid-afternoon, I just can't function. And I don't think you should be berating yourself for that. The brain consumes a ton of glucose, 20 % of the power that needs to be produced. So there's a section in the book where we talk exactly about that. How as information workers, we are expected to, what do you do? You wake up, you read your email. Should you respond to that? No, you're going to file that one. I'll respond to this one.

34:26Actually, no, I'm going to sit on that because I have to call somebody else to figure out what I should respond, right? All these switches that we do throughout the day, that's one form of burning through glucose. And then there's the sustained concentration. You can only really do that for about half an hour. I can't tell you how hilarious and like I needed to be hit over the head. every expert I talked to from the eye experts to the hearing experts to the cognitive scientists, half an hour came up over and over and over again. That sort of around that time is how long you can sustain something.

35:06Look, everyone is different, right? There's some people who are listening and like, actually, no, I can do definitely an hour, maybe even two. Amazing. Knock yourself out. that's great. But not having a snack, literally putting glucose into your body, not giving yourself enough oxygen because you're bent over. We can talk about how breath affects that might be why you're so tired. You know, you need to go through the checklist of what your body needs. And when we say your body, we also mean your brain. This is all super interesting. I'm going to keep going with my questions. Okay. I suspect I am speaking for a non-trivial percentage of listeners when I say that Five minutes of movement every half hour actually sounds like a titanic pain in the ass.

35:53It sounds attractive, like I'm down with it. But one of the things I hear from my listeners a lot is, you know, in this era of constant comparison and optimization and hyper productivity and biohacking and all this stuff, like I don't give me more to do. It's too much. I have no question about the outcome of your work and Diaz's work. I do have some questions about how to sanely apply it to our lives. And just let me have one more thing while I'm being a dick. I think there are a lot of people listening who don't have enough control over their schedule and their workplace to be able to operationalize this advice.

36:31So first part, I also was kind of bratty when I first read the study about five minutes every half hour. I was like, that sounds stupid easy. But wait a minute, is this going to get annoying? And it was kind of annoying. I will admit when I was in the lab, I was like, this is stupid. I only answered one email and now I have to get back on the damn treadmill again. But here's what I saw on that one day. And then I want to extrapolate that out further. So on that one day, what I found was that the volume of work I got done was less, but the quality of the work was so much better. I did not have to go back and revise.

37:08I was very clear with what I wanted to get done. and when I checked it off my list, it was done. It wasn't like, ah, this is fine, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. However, my question was exactly the same as yours. Can people actually do this? Let's find out. So I said to Keith, I was like, I don't know if people can do this, dude. I was in your lab and it was great because somebody tapped me on the shoulder and led me over to the treadmill and put me on there at two miles per hour. And that was awesome. So we put out the call. We were like, people, do you feel like shit after sitting and looking at your screen all day?

37:40do you want to try this? We're going to open a global clinical trial. So this was a partnership between Columbia and NPR. And clearly, yes, people feel like shit because we had to shut down the signups at 23 ,000 people. We had every state represented, 74 countries around the world. People really wanted to see, like, could I feel better? And what we asked them to do was to choose a cohort. So they could choose to do five minutes of movement every half hour, every hour, or every two hours. They could do anything. They could march in place. They could shuffle side to side. They could walk around the house and pick up all the dirty glasses and put them in the dishwasher.

38:19They could do arm movement exercises if walking wasn't an option. We gave them lots of different possibilities. The point was, though, do this regularly. Do a self-survey. Track how your fatigue, your energy, and your ability to focus are affected. And what we found was that But 80 % of the people who stuck with it loved it. They were like, this changed my frickin' life. They saw levels from 21 to 28 % of less fatigue. The more they took the breaks, the higher levels of getting back more energy. It was sort of proportional to it. But we also found that people who took like four breaks a day, you know, not like stuck to it regimentedly, they also had huge breakthroughs and effects.

39:08At this point, we couldn't strap on blood pressure monitors or glucose monitors or all of that. But I did hear back from different people who had worked with their doctors who also saw a huge change. One of them, this woman, Dana, she works in HR remotely, and she had been having all kinds of health issues and also just felt exhausted, like we've been talking about. She decided she was going to be really on this, and she worked with her doctor. By the end of the study, her cholesterol issues had started to resolve, and she was able to start tapering down her insulin. We've actually stayed in touch.

39:46She's now completely off her insulin for type 2 diabetes. She's become a health coach at the company where she works. And for her, this little change, she said it was like just a little nudge, a little spark. She started to change everything. She started to sleep better. She started to eat better. She started to feel more joy in her life. And she'd been frustrated because her doctor had said to her, you know what, just take the dog for an hour-long walk every morning. That was what she had been doing. And her numbers weren't changing. She wasn't feeling great. And just by sprinkling this movement throughout her day, she just sort of kick-started her life.

40:23And we heard other stories from people who said, you know, this helped me lose the last few pounds. This helped me just focus. This helped me be a better parent. And, you know, it wasn't easy. It's not like you suddenly, like, can change to your second point, which was, well, what about people who aren't in charge of their own schedules? Yeah, that's hard. But I think the key number to me was also that people's productivity did actually not drop. If anything, it rose a little. People would say they'd come back from, like, their five minutes able to focus again. They could concentrate or they'd get a really good idea while they were out on their walk.

40:59That did not surprise me as someone who has researched boredom. Like, a boring five-minute walk can fix a lot of problems in our lives. It's really that simple. So this is such a dumb little hack. And yes, it's annoying, but the results are so outsized and it's free, by the way. Why not get your boss to give it a try? And we did hear people who said, you know, I told my boss. I was like, listen, I'm going to be doing this. It's an experiment. Is that okay? And one person in sales, their boss was like, actually, yeah, let me know how it goes, because maybe we should make a change around here. And so they did.

41:37And there were other people, to be fair, who said, actually, we've got this one dude who gets us up off our feet every couple of hours, like yelling, fit break, fit break, and running around the office. I was like, okay, that's weird, but great. Awesome. How important is it in these breaks to stop working? In other words, you applauded me. I don't know if it was you humoring me, but you said approving things about the fact that I will take walks while I'm on phone calls. But that isn't going to restore my interception per se, because I'm not really checking in with myself. I'm just moving. Yeah, I was definitely not humoring you.

42:17When we did this big clinical trial with these thousands of people, we did not specify. We were like, you figure it out, whether you want to get off your screen, stop working or not, you decide. and here's the bottom line the people who did get off their screens had more I would say mental results people who went outside that won't surprise you also felt better in terms of optimism focus mood etc but I think you know we're on this quest Dan to like just tell me what to do right like just tell me exactly what to do so I can freaking feel better and the problem is hate to tell you Every body is different.

43:01Every person is different. We're in different work situations. Some of us are retired. Other people are home with little kids. And as much as my phone can be personalized to trigger me in all kinds of ways, I need to take that personalization seriously for myself is what I think I've learned and what I hear from a lot of people. Yes, we all want the one thing that's going to fix it. But actually what we need to be doing is having a conversation with ourselves. What do I need right now? Does my body need a walk? Maybe I should take this call outside because I can't miss this call. That's great.

43:39You're doing something. Something is always better than nothing. And I think our devices prey on that, you know, it's just easier to lie down on the couch, to sit, to go from one screen to another. It's just easier. But what people said was, I wouldn't want to take my break, but the minute I would start to move my feet, I could feel myself starting to feel better. And it was the people who tuned in, did that somatic check, did that inner selfie. They trained themselves. They trained their bodies to crave it. brings us to the other thing that we heard was, you know, people started by setting timers.

44:20Okay, every hour I'm going to take this. And we now know, like there is research behind this, that you can train your body to start to tell you. Many people said, I didn't need to use the timers by the end of the two weeks. I could start to feel it. I'd be like, oh, yep, there goes my weird twingy back. Time to get up. Or, oh, okay, I am doing busy work. Time to get up. And seeing that You can sort of train your body to figure it out for you to the point where you don't have to convince yourself. Your body's like, yo, excuse me, we need to take a break. That to me is huge. I mean, Keith is on a big mission, too.

44:59He's like, this is ridiculous. We talk about health and the workplace, like, you know, OSHA is in charge of making sure we don't injure ourselves at work. We're not doing it for the majority of people who are at work working on digital devices. We are not taking this seriously. In various countries, you can imagine in Scandinavia, they do take breaks very seriously. In Germany, they think it should be a workplace hazard to work without breaks. He's like, this is just a slow moving total health disaster that we are walking into by not mandating that people should have the ability to move and get up if they want to.

45:42makes perfect sense to me. And just to get back to something you were saying halfway through your last diatribe, I would not have called it a diatribe. Oh, thanks. Yeah. I would have called it a lovely avalanche of helpful information. Okay. Thank you. Charming insights. Halfway through that, you were saying, you were talking about how people started to learn to pick up on their signals. Like, oh yeah, when my back starts feeling that twinge, okay, that's my signal. I I'm going to get up and move. And it reminded me, there's a body of research that I've become really fascinated in over the past couple of years.

46:18And it's based around a term called self-compassion. One of the little mantras that the pioneers in the research, whose names are Kristen Neff and Chris Germer, one of the little mantras they recommend to people is what do I need right now? If you can hold that question in your mind throughout the day, like, yeah, what do I need right now? We tell each other all the time when we're leaving, take care and take care of yourself. But we never actually take care of ourselves because of tech, because of some idea that taking care of yourself is self-indulgent, whatever the reason. We rarely ask ourselves, like, what do I need right now?

46:57That's a very interesting North Star as you move through the day. So I say that just to see how it lands with you. It lands hugely with me, but because I come to it from a different angle. I'm the type of person who's like, show me the science. What's the data behind that? Why do we know that? I think I inherently in my heart know that that's what I should be doing. But when study after study after study, and now including my own study, shows it, there's no excuses. Like, I am so good at justifying, Dan. I'll be like, you know what? I'm just going to do another hour because I really think I can get this done by 3 o 'clock.

47:33And if I get up done by 3 o 'clock, then I won't have to go and do the other thing. So if I take a break now, that's actually going to be a problem. It's wrong. I am wrong. I am on this battle every single day to power and push through. It is, as a type A person who loves to get shit done, this is incredibly hard for me. And yet the proof is shown to me hour after hour after hour. I don't know how many times I can prove it to myself that this shit works. and yet here I am continuing to do it. But this idea of what do I need right now? Sometimes I don't believe what I need right now. I try to trick myself out of it.

48:13I'm like, you don't, you're fine. You're good. Just keep going. Maybe you're a little special even that you don't need to do this. You ever told yourself that one? So not special, Dan. So not special. So just like every other human. and my system has not evolved in some way that it doesn't require enough oxygenation or that I can power through email. You know, we think there are people who are special. I'm not one of them. So yes, the battle is daily. I think I'm winning. Didn't think I could say that. I actually think I am winning because there's a gift at the end of every five-minute break. Oh, yeah.

48:54I feel better. I'm not as depressed. I'm not quite as anxious. I think I can actually get through the next hour without berating myself, without feeling like I am maxing and pushing myself to the absolute limit. That's for me. But I heard it from a lot of other people, too. I relate to everything you said there. And I fall into that trap all the time of pushing, pushing, pushing, even though I know it's stupid. And if I did the counterintuitive thing of just stepping away, it would improve the quality of my work and probably help me get more done. And yet. Because I'm scared, right? Yes, it's scary.

49:33That's it. Yeah. There you go. Yeah, I run on fear and it's taken a lot of work and being in my 50s to trust the process, trust the knowledge that I have, trust that this has worked in the past and it will work again. I think especially as I get older, that I can't cut corners like I used to when I was younger. You know, you write the book that you need, right, Dan? I do want, as promised, to get to the eyes and ears and all that other stuff. But let me ask one last question on this five minutes per 30 minutes protocol. For people listening and still feeling a lot of resistance for whatever reason, I don't want to do it.

50:17I really can't do it, et cetera, et cetera. I believe you said in there that we can start small. So if you were to do it every half hour in an eight hour a day, it's 16 breaks. But you said some people were just doing four. And even that can make a difference. Even one minute saw an effect in some of Keith's studies. The key metric to remember is that it's breaking up these long periods of sitting and staring at a screen, just sitting as well. So let's say you're sitting for eight hours straight. If you're breaking it into two, four-hour sections, that's great. If you're breaking it into four, two hours, do the math, right?

51:01However you can break it up, that's great. It's always better than none. The key is just that one long sitting stretch. It compounds in terms of mood and physical health. Thank you. Okay. Eyes and ears. Let's do it.

51:22Coming up, Manoush talks about how your screens are reshaping your eyesight and what to do about it. Same for your ability to hear and some simple fixes for posture, breathing and better sleep.

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52:53This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. What are our devices doing to us? You've said a little bit about it, but if there's anything more to say, please tell us and then let's get to what we can do about it. Yeah. So one in three kids these days is nearsighted.

53:31That is triple the rate that there was in 1990. So nearsighted myopia, just for the lucky people out there who don't have to wear glasses, this is when you can see what is close right in front of your face. But if you look into the distance, it starts to get a little blurry. And the thing is that by the time someone notices this, usually the damage is done, Right. For me, you know, it was in my late 30s. I was like, huh, there are two moons in the sky. What's up with that? I needed glasses to drive to go to the movies. Right. Just stuff like that. And then as we get older, inevitably, it does happen that you need reading glasses.

54:16I have these things where I can read and I can see in the distance. But it always used to be like when we were growing up, there was, you know, maybe a couple kids who wore glasses to see the blackboard. Now they're seeing lots of kids are having issues seeing the blackboard. The theory is that, well, it's a couple of things. It's compounded. One is that there's more close up work. You are looking at phones. You are looking at screens. My kids, like they have a laptop in school. Then they come home and they work on their laptops for their homework. and then they look at YouTube on their phones, maybe to relax a little bit.

54:53It's just constant near work that's going on. And what has been shown is that literally the eyeball changes shape. It morphs so it can do the job better of seeing close up. It's like, you want me to look at a screen? Great. I will get really good at looking a screen. You don't need me to look into the distance, right? Fine. I won't. And the earlier that happens, you know, it gets worse and worse and worse. Later in life, it raises your risk of having glaucoma, even blindness. It also means that you just don't experience the world, right? There's a lot you're missing if you can't see. The good news is, as long as your eyes are still growing, you can turn back the clock on that.

55:35You and I are screwed, Dan. But younger kids and actually young adults in their 20s, even into their 30s, their eyes are actually still growing and you can start to take breaks. Unfortunately, the 20-20-20, have you ever heard that one? 20-20-20 is like the old standard, which is every 20 minutes, look up for 20 seconds at something 20 feet in front of you. That's actually not the best thing to do. So Dr. Maria Liu, who I talked to, who specializes in this, actually says one of the key things that we all need to be doing is getting outside more for multiple reasons. One is sunlight increases serotonin production.

56:16Another is that your eye needs to see a horizon. It needs to see the entire distance. I was like, oh, can I just look out the window? She's like, no, your peripheral vision will start to cut out the sides. It needs to actually experience a horizon. So ideally, she wants us to go out every half hour for five minutes. I was like, what? Again? Half hour for five minutes? Everybody keeps telling me this. She's like, yeah, sorry. You know, I can't do that. My eyes are already screwed. But it just goes to show kids need to get outside. They need to be out in the sunlight looking into the horizon. You know, I take my little niece and nephew and we go look for birds.

56:54That's like the best thing you could possibly do with little kids. Like go outside and look for birds because they're looking into the distance. They're getting the sunlight using their peripheral vision. There are treatments now where you can reshape the eyeball. They're actually contact lenses that kids and young adults can wear at night. They're called Ortho-K. There's also different kinds of drops that you can wear that sort of turn back the clock and combine that with better lifestyle habits, and you can delay the myopia from sending in. For those of us who are screwed, my number one hack is buy yourself computer glasses.

57:30So I measured the distance between my eyes and my laptop and got a pair of glasses just made for that. And it made a huge difference for me in terms of headaches and dry eye and fatigue. Again, always take a break. What about working on paper? Not great because it's not awesome for the trees, but I try to print things out when I'm writing and really work on paper instead of a screen. Yeah, I mean, I think the reason that can make a difference, you're still doing the close-up work, right? But it has been shown that people blink less when they're looking at a screen, and therefore you're not moisturizing your eye.

58:09And that can lead to dry eye, which then feel irritated, and then you get tired and all of those things. But I think the key, again, is what works for you and mixing it up, essentially. I also like to print out articles once in a while and I'll go sit by the window and get some light and read there as opposed to being in my cave with my laptop. All right, let's talk about the ears. I was bummed to read this. One of my favorite things in the world is for an hour a day to blast punk rock in my ears and work out. How loud are we talking here, Dan? Well, since I started preparing for this episode, I've been not going as loud as I usually go, but pretty fucking loud.

58:54Oh, dear. Okay. All right. Do you not listen to anything after that? No, I don't listen to anything after that. Okay, that's great. That's really great. So there's an amazing studying happening right now. Your listeners can even sign up to join it. It's Apple combined with these researchers at the University of Michigan. They are doing the largest ever study of how long people are listening on their phones, what volumes they're listening. They are even sending hearing tests to people's phones that you can join and take. Yes, I saw that recently. They sent it to me. So cool. Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that cool?

59:30I love that. And so like they can, you know, do you have tinnitus, which is a ringing in your ears? Can you hear this tone? Do you hear that tone? So there's data coming out of this study all the time. And you won't be surprised to learn that we are listening not only louder, but longer. I walk around my neighborhood and walk my dog and everybody has their AirPods in. We're all listening to the podcasts and news and call my mom and like, oh, some music is nice. Nobody wants to be alone with their thoughts. So we're all just stick those bad boys in our ears and listen, which is fine. except a couple things.

1:00:09Your ears actually need breaks as well. Honestly, Dan, like I don't know how many times I could hear this. Your body needs breaks. So the ears, their cilia are these tiny little hairs inside your ears and they get tired, right? So let's say you go to a punk rock concert and you come out and you can't hear for like a couple days. You really need to be gentle and let them recover. If they die, these little cilia, they do not grow back. Like, that's it. You get a finite amount. So honestly, what they told me, well, first of all, one in three people now is listening at what the WHO says are harmful noise levels across the world.

1:00:54But also, what do we do? We walk by a busy construction site, we crank up the volume, or we go to the gym and obliterate any thoughts that we're having by blasting the punk rock and getting on the Stairmaster. I don't know what you do there. You got to take the breaks. You got to have the quiet, the silence. What I find most interesting is like, I know some people who just listen to music all day long with their AirPods in all day and they need to give themselves some silence. They need to take a little chill out time just as much as the rest of your body does. So, yeah, that's the gist of it there.

1:01:30Okay, so I can listen to loud music for an hour, maybe not as loud as I have historically done it. I mean, yeah, maybe not that loud. What they told me was, look at the settings in your phone. If you can, limit it to 70 decibels automatically so that your phone won't play it any louder than that. And let's say you are like, but it's really loud in the gym. I can't hear my music. Okay, then put noise canceling. You have that on your phone. You have that ability to put noise canceling. Okay. And then just stick with that. If you can, look, there are treats we want to give ourselves. If you want to give yourself a delicious hour of like, I don't know what your favorite punk rock band is, a delicious hour of Nine Inch Nails, then knock yourself out.

1:02:17If that's your jam, do it. Also, like, maybe not. Just to say that's industrial, Manoush. Oh, sorry. Oh, right. No, that is true. What is your favorite punk rock band? Well, I don't know if I have a favorite. So this is my producer is probably going to cut this, but I got interested in indie rock, alternative rock, punk rock, whatever, when I was 15. I remember the moment when Tim Smith, the goth kid in my sophomore year homeroom turned around and gave me a tape with the Minutemen on one side and Sonic Youth on the other. and so that started a 40-year obsession now i listen to like new bands that are coming out all the time a buddy of mine is a front man of a group called culture abuse i really like them another band with a very dumb name that i don't understand military gun and they don't even spell military the right way but that's a great band so stuff like that um the tons of female fronted bands out of australia now oh interesting i love them i'm not even gonna tell you what music i like which is where are you is it and yeah oh god no in the 90s man like Britpop just like I Oasis no not Oasis I'm more like Blur and whatever Damon Auburn does and that sort of direction more sort of like anyway we digress I don't find that embarrassing at all and I think that music is having a comeback amongst the youngsters it's aged well I love that stuff in real time It has aged well.

1:03:47Yeah. I went to see Jarvis Cocker from Pulp recently, and that was just a delight. I was like, man, this guy knows how to age. He looks amazing. Still got it. Damon Albarn's doing well, too. The gorillas are still putting out. Totally. They're amazing. Okay, back to our regularly scheduled, less pathetically aged conversation. And sorry to the boomers who are listening and saying you guys are kids and calling yourself old, so nothing but love to you. posture and breath. What do we need to know about that? Okay. So, I mean, breath is something you talk about regularly here on the show. You will not be surprised to know that that sort of cashew shape that we often put ourselves in when we're on something restricts our diaphragms.

1:04:30Diaphragm is right under our lungs. If you constrict that, you're not able to take full breaths. Lack of full breath can lead to many things, including anxiety, health problems, bad breath, lack of oxygenation, loss of focus, all those fun things. And this part like knocked my socks off when it comes to posture. There is new research that shows that there is a conversation happening between our abdominal muscles, our brain, and our adrenal glands, the ones that pump out cortisol and stress and make us feel, you know, anxious all the time. That, they think, is the reason why yoga, Pilates make us feel good.

1:05:15The muscles start to send a message to the brain to not take in as much cortisol. So there's all these systems that we don't even think of as working. You know, thousands of years people have been doing yoga. Now we're starting to show the biology that there is behind it. So I'm sure you know this one, the physiological sigh, that one. Yeah, I know what it is, but can you explain for listeners? So I didn't know about this. It's something super easy that just hyper oxygenates you very quickly. And the idea is you take one big breath in, then you top it up with a little more breath and then let it all out.

1:05:54And James Nestor, the author of Breath, actually taught me that one, but I heard it again and again from people. So, and you literally feel better. And that's even just 10 seconds. The other thing that someone convinced me to have by my desk is a kazoo, Dan. So, yeah, walking around. There's no way you cannot breathe properly when you're playing on a kazoo. Also, you just feel like an asshole and start laughing at yourself. And that is another way to reset your day. James Nestor was on this show once and I'll drop a link to that episode. And I believe it was James who taught me box breathing, which I constantly, when I'm guiding meditation, I often have people do three deep, deep, deep inhales through the nose and then exhale through the mouth with lips pursed as if you were blowing through a straw and you want the exhale to be three, four or five times longer than the inhale.

1:06:56And I often joke that it's like, you remember those Colt 45 ads from when we were kids, the malt liquor and the Billy Dee Williams would come on and say the slogan, which was works every time. And I find that with box breathing, it really does it. You just feel your nervous system resetting. Totally. Oh, I love that. That also relates to the vagus nerve. I sort of system that's connecting our brain all the way down into the rest of our body and it's rest and relaxation sort of triggering that ability and it's so it's once you know that it works too you're like i have a little bit of magic in my pocket and i can pull it out anytime and so now you know waiting for the elevator my little reset physiological sigh ready to go Okay, well, you brought me exactly where I wanted to go, which is sleep and rest and resetting.

1:07:56You have a whole section in the book about that. Can you tell us? Yeah, and I think that this is, we've blamed technology for things. And yes, technology is part of the problem, but it's actually more that it exacerbates our human tendencies. So for example, with sleep, there's this one study with a bunch of undergrads, and they didn't sleep as well after they looked at an iPad for four hours at the brightest setting. So what do we do? We say, oh, blue light. This is a disaster. Don't look at blue light. It ruins your sleep. Actually, study after study since then has shown it might mess with your sleep, but maybe like by three minutes, 10 minutes, maybe 20 minutes max.

1:08:39Really what it is, is it's that what do we do instead of sleeping? We watch one more show. We play one more game. We're just going to check the headlines one more time. Oh, you meant to respond to that guy. Let's just do it. You won't be able to sleep if you can't do that, right? So it's not really necessarily the light that is making us not sleep. It's the habits that are spurred on by this. That is not to say there are some people who are very sensitive to light. Children, absolutely. Those young eyeballs, as we've discussed, they are sensitive to light. Keep them off the screens before bedtime.

1:09:15time. But don't blame the screen for your bad night's sleep. So they call this more the displacement theory, this idea that what has displaced our sleep, it's screens that has displaced them. And then there's also the interruptions because I don't know about you, but I keep my phone right next to my bed just in case of emergency, right? I've got teenagers and I've got older parents. The problem is, what do those interruptions do? It's really hard to get back to sleep. It's not just because you looked at your screen in the light. Sure, that's not great, But really, it's you got your brain going and then you can't get back to sleep and you're worried.

1:09:50Interestingly, though, there is very little research into the best way for adults to use their devices as it relates to sleep because researchers are obsessed with young people and teens. and what we do know is teens also look at their phones a lot and get interrupted but they're doing it more for social reasons right so it's not because there's an emergency so like yes they should have the phone out of the bedroom you and i though you know there are settings you can make it so only certain people's calls come through my mom's not going to call me at two in the morning to just chat right so if her call comes through great it can be there and i'll get it but i can to look as much at our behaviors around these devices and not necessarily think like, oh, blanket, turn it off, throw it away, get off your phone.

1:10:42Sorry, that's not going to work for a lot of people, people who have to work late or maybe you leave work so you can get home at four so you can pick up your kids and make them dinner and all those things. And you do need to get back on your laptop at night. Don't think that the blue light is necessarily going to destroy your sleep, but set yourself a time when you're done and let yourself wind down and relax. Dimming lights is a good thing still to do as well, but we can't just blame the blue light. It's more complicated than that. That's really interesting. You talked about kids and I'm saving this to the end of the conversation because I'm always sensitive to the fact that there are people who don't have kids and I don't want to do episodes that don't speak to them, but a lot of us do have children in our lives, either our children or nieces and nephews or grandchildren or just mentees or whatever.

1:11:34How do we set some limits, set some boundaries, talk to them without being screamingly annoying? What's your advice? I struggle with this. A lot of the air right now has been taken up by this idea that there should be bans, right? Take away their phones before 13 and kids shouldn't be on social media before 16. And as much as I agree with all of these rules that people like Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist, has put out there, I absolutely agree with them. I think it leaves a few things wanting. One is that many of us have a different relationship with younger people than we did a generation ago.

1:12:16This finger wagging and we know what's good for you, I just don't think it flies anymore. There's a conversation that needs to be had. Because frankly, it's not like you turn 16 and suddenly, magically, you can handle social media. There needs to be a constant conversation. And not every kid will get that at home, but hopefully more and more in schools, just talking about what does it look like when you are getting something good out of your technology? What does it look like when you are not? And also more importantly, what I would like to add to the conversation, what does that feel like in your body?

1:12:52I think we are very quick to slap a label on I have an anxiety disorder, and many people do. I don't want to minimize that in any way. But I think the things that are happening to us because of our technology are not just mental health. They're very much related to our physical health as well. My kids, when they were younger, and if you took the iPad away, they would be total jerks afterwards. Like it was very clear there was like cause and response. And so what I just want to do is like have experiments if you can in your family. How do you feel right now before you go on your screen? Pretty good?

1:13:34Okay, great. Let's remember that. An hour later, you're getting off your screen. How do you feel now? Oh, you're grouchy. Okay, So maybe next time we'll try half an hour. See what that looks like. You still feel OK? Great. Let's put it away. Oh, did you see that I got a new jump rope? Let's try that. You know what I mean? Like instead of being like, you're on your phone too much. You're scrolling all the time. Maybe we say something more positive. Like, did you take a walk? Did you get your stroll time in? How do we start to sort of make it less like guilting and shaming and more like, let's go be in the world.

1:14:07Let's move our bodies. not because we want to kill it at sports or because we want to look good in a bathing suit, but because we just want to feel like that we are flesh and blood and it's amazing to be alive. All this stuff we're talking about, the wonderful but often deleterious impacts of technology, how does this evolve, do you think, as we get deeper into AI and robotics and maybe neural implants and wearable tech and technology is not going away at all. It's just getting more and more sophisticated and potentially insidious, but also potentially wonderful. So I don't know, when you project forward, what does it look like?

1:14:56I am an optimist by nature. So part of me wants to really think, oh, won't this be amazing when AI takes over some of our work? We'll be able to have more time to frolic in the sunlight. That would be so cool. Unfortunately, as the first chapter in the book lays out, every point when innovation has been added that adds convenience to humans' lives, it's resulted in them moving less every time. I would also say we've gone through this with social media as well. And I think the battle over that was lost. And then we are now have to look forward to what happens with AI. The good part about AI when it comes to our health is I talked to a lot of medical researchers and the advances there are quite extraordinary.

1:15:46I do believe there's going to be amazing breakthroughs because of a lot of that. A lot of the data that we're collecting about how the body works is going to result in a lot of personalized health care. They now know there's not just two types of diabetes. There are tens, maybe hundreds of different types of diabetes. We just didn't have the data to know that. We are all different. Every body is different. However, I want more movement and more in-person interaction. And I think we see this. People want to be with other people. They want to be in spaces with other people. They want to have a face-to-face conversation.

1:16:29They want to read people's body language. I hope that there's a sense that we are more than just like bags of flesh, meat sacks, right? We are extraordinary human beings who need to be out in the air, in the sunlight, experiencing the world and moving our bodies. And if we can give ourselves more opportunities to do that, whether it's in the workplace, whether it's making sure that we have parks that are available for people, that we can set up workplaces where it's not frowned upon. If you even just get up and like shuffle side to side during a Zoom meeting, we have to change the cultural norms around movement and using our bodies.

1:17:09We just have to because literally our lives depend on it. Well said. Laudable rallying cry, really. Before I let you go, Manoush, can you just remind everybody of the name of your new book, maybe also the name of the previous one and your podcast. Plug, in other words. Oh, thanks. So the old book was called Bored and Brilliant. The new one is called Body Electric, The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Wellbeing. And you can find me. I host NPR's TED Radio Hour. Please join me in a movement to bring back movement into our lives. Consider me joined. Manoush, awesome to talk to you as always.

1:17:52Thank you. Great to be here, Dan. Thank you so much for having me.

1:18:00Thanks again to Manoush Zomorodi. Always love talking to her. Don't forget, if you're interested in boosting your sleep quotient, we're adding a bunch of new sleep meditations to my app, 10 % with Dan Harris. We also got a live video session coming up next week with Carl Lai, where we're going to talk about how meditation can help you sleep. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. Finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.

1:18:35Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our team.

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