It's much more stimulating than just passive consumption. If I don't do this I feel like brain turns to mush after a few hours of TV.
Or just otherwise forcing yourself to be accountable for your predictions is a great way to moderate your ego.
While I still spend a lot of my working life staring at a screen, taking acting and filmmaking as a hobby has enabled me to enjoy many other aspects. Even if the plot/character is lousy (e.g. "Heated rivalry") I enjoy looking at the director's choices and analyzing them. My wife jumped ship and every time we watch something we have a discussion about it, which is something I had never done with books.
It truly is the level of engagement, not the medium.
Of note, they have a "Setting the record straight" addendum[1] that includes a couple important quotes:
"Misconception #1: Office workers should now be confused about whether they should sit or stand, and about whether sit/stand stations are a good idea. They shouldn’t be, says Smith. The study’s main finding was about workers who are required to stand for long periods (i.e. five hours or more) throughout their work shift, without opportunities to sit. Extending this to any worker who stands (e.g. an office worker using a sit-stand desk) is not correct. This is because office workers who stand at these types of workstations likely have the option to sit down when they get tired or when they feel pain in their legs and back."
and
"Misconception #2: We no longer have to worry about the negative health effects of prolonged sitting, thanks to this study. Not so fast, says Smith. There was nothing in this study to refute the research on the health consequences of a sedentary lifestyle. Much of that research is about sitting too much throughout the day—at work, while commuting and at home. This study only focused on prolonged sitting and prolonged standing at work.
"And even within the study, another finding about prolonged sitting at work got lost in the coverage. Yes, prolonged standing occupations were linked with twice the risk of heart disease as prolonged sitting jobs. However, prolonged sitting jobs were still linked, among men, with a 40 per cent higher risk of heart disease compared to jobs that involve a mix of standing, sitting and walking."
[0]: https://www.iwh.on.ca/newsletters/at-work/90/standing-too-lo...
[1]: https://www.iwh.on.ca/news/study-on-prolonged-standing-and-h...
I put a zafu (kapok filled, and not too full so its soft/adjustable) on the stool, and adjust the desk height so I don't have to reach up at all to touch the keyboard.
I also do a lot of zazen on a zafu (with legs crossed) so keeping my torso upright is pretty ingrained into my body.
This is just anecdata, but my dad suffered with back pain his entire life (included multiple herniated spinal disks), knock wood, I haven't. If I skip the check on the keyboard height and find I am reaching up for a while, I will get shoulder soreness, but so far early enough to function as a warning to lower it.
Sitting upright as tho you are a world honored one does I think affect the entire mind/body system in a healthy way :)
False dichotomy. Choose moderation if and when you can, like most things in life.
Sitting and watching tv you can literally be completely still for long periods of time.
Anyways, I think you are missing the point that this thread is about active sitting. I imagine there isn't much difference to the meaning behind movement: movement is movement, meaningful or not.
I wonder if there could be an application that would encourage active sitting
Next: Playing chess on one leg is better for brain health than sitting.
I feel like I've seen enough of these "X is good/bad for Y" articles on these popsci explainer sites surrounded by the same ads for an entire lifetime. Not that I don't think this is actual research, it's just the canonical link we end up with here on HN is probably... not the ideal one.
I wanted to grab the journal link, but going back to the article now, I'm trapped in a "keep reading" loop that blocks the article, so I can be told "Mouse Study Suggests Nose-Picking Has a Surprising Link With Alzheimer's". If I could use an adblocker on the work PC I would.
Playing chess in one leg is a curious thing to me, I think it would initially affect the player's performance but that's just a guess.
https://news.uq.edu.au/2026-01-not-all-sitting-same-when-it-...
> "...Passive activities such as watching television have been linked to worse memory and cognitive skills, while ‘active sitting’ like playing cards or reading correlate with better brain health, researchers have found."
...Do these researchers even read this to themselves aloud before hitting publish? It's confounding that they would find "sitting" to be the active ingredient pushing the outcome differential. Obviously, if you remove the bodily posture from the action that the user is engaging in, you would observe the same outcome the researchers did—meaning sitting was not operative here (..duh).
Breaking news at 11: the brain works best when it’s actually used.
His only tv was phonics and numbers, which helped significantly because when he started playing minecraft on creative, he had to sound out the items he wanted to search for.
I didn't have any science, it was intuition.
I suppose next step is to figure out which video games are best. We basically don't let them play Idle games, but I'm starting to think platformers might need to be banned too.
Based on this report.
Sadly, other science publications seem to be following a not dissimilar trend.