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What sitting all day does to your brain and body | Keith Diaz | Your Body on Tech
00:46:15
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- [00:03]
Minouche Zamorodi
You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day.
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Keith Diaz
Hello.
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Minouche Zamorodi
No, I am not Elise Hu. I'm Minouche Zamorodi. I'm a journalist, an author, a two time TED speaker, and you might recognize my voice because I host the TED Radio Hour podcast over on npr. So why am I here? Well, this week I am taking over from Elise to bring you something a little special, a series of episodes all about how you can live a healthier life in our high tech era. Because in April, I had the honor of guest curating a session at the TED 2026 conference and I packed it full of speakers whose work I have been obsessed with and who I think will make you think differently about your body, how you use your technology and, and what is keeping us human in this digital age. So every day this week we are bringing you one of these talks from my session, followed by a conversation with these incredible speakers to go deeper. Really, truly, they are amazing. Let's begin with a feeling, okay, that end of the day, so drained, can barely think, exhausted feeling that comes after spending hours on our devices. Physiologist Keith Diaz knows that feeling.
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Keith Diaz
I was still tired, exhausted actually, but I hadn't used my body at all.
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Minouche Zamorodi
I Met Keith in 2023 when I came across research he'd done in his lab at Columbia University Medical Center. This is where he studies how lives spent mostly sitting and looking at screens affects our health.
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Keith Diaz
We are living in the most sedentary error in the, in modern history. And what scientists have found is that being highly sedentary increases your risk of diabetes, cancer, dementia, heart disease, and ultimately early death. This is true even if you exercise regularly.
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Minouche Zamorodi
Yeah, it's awful. But Keith has spent his career trying to figure out the minimum amount of movement that the human body needs every day so that you don't die an early death. Our teams at NPR and Columbia ended up partnering to see if we could get his research out into the world. We wanted to find out could people take movement breaks throughout their day and take back their health from their sedentary screen filled lives? And we ended up creating one of the largest citizen science studies ever. If you follow me on social media, you have probably seen me post about this study. We called it Body Electric. And very recently I put out a book by the same name which has these findings. At the heart of it, Keith explains the study and what you need to maintain your body on a daily basis. And then I join him to talk about what it takes to balance our biological needs with all the conveniences of modern life so that we're not living some drained, tired version of ourselves. All that right after a quick break.
- [03:21]
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- [04:12]
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Minouche Zamorodi
And now our TED Talk and conversation of the day.
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Keith Diaz
My favorite job ever was as a summer camp counselor, where I was basically paid to play games with kids all day. We played capture the flag, running bases, dodgeball, went swimming in the pool every day. And at the end of the day, I'd be tired, but in a good way. Not mentally drained, but physically tired. A satisfied kind of tired where I'd use my body to complete a hard day's work. Flash forward and my job today looks very different. Even though I'm an exercise scientist, I don't get to actually do any exercise at work. Instead, my days consist of staring at a computer screen and sitting in countless meetings. The transition for me to office work was jarring. I no longer had those same feelings of satisfaction. At the end of the day's work, I was still tired, exhausted, actually. But I hadn't used my body at all. And this shift that I experienced, I'm not alone in feeling. We are living in the most sedentary era in modern history. In a single year, the average adult now spend a full 187 days over half of the year sitting or physically idle. The bad news is that our bodies weren't designed for this. I know because I've spent my career as a scientist studying the harms of being highly sedentary. And what scientists have found is that being highly sedentary increases your risk of diabetes, cancer, dementia, heart disease, and ultimately early death. Worse, this is true even even if you exercise regularly. To put it simply, being highly sedentary, as many of us are, is toxic. Let's start with the healthiest people among us. To use as an example. In one study, when highly trained endurance athletes were forced to bed rest, their aerobic fitness levels dropped by about 20% in just three days. What took them months to build was erased in a matter of a long weekend with no movement. This isn't unique to highly trained endurance athletes. If you took a regular, typical healthy adult and forced them to 40 days of bed rest, their heart would show changes similar to 50 years of aging. Now, this isn't about missing a workout or two. Exercise only makes up a tiny fraction of your day. The toxicity comes from when movement begins to disappear from your life. And this begs the question, why isn't exercise alone enough? Part of the answer lies in our muscles. Our muscles are more than just the machinery that power movement. They're also really important for regulating things like our metabolism. Let's use blood sugar as an example. Our muscles are like sponges for blood Sugar. When we regularly use and contract our muscles, they're like a moist sponge soaking up the sugar from the bloodstream. But when we don't regularly use and contract our muscle, like a dry and shriveled up sponge, not really good at soaking up anything. Now here's the key. When we exercise, it rewets the sponge. But eventually that sponge dries out if you get little to no movement the rest of your day. So what do we do? Well, we need to keep the sponge moist. Now, I'm not going to tell you that we need to move all day. Instead, I'm going to suggest that we follow the lead of an unlikely place. The tobacco industry. In their early days, cigars were their primary product. But this was the industrial age. Millions were working in factories and those workers only got short breaks from their lines, certainly not long enough to smoke a cigar. Thus, the cigarette became the primary focus of the tobacco industry. So that these workers could get their fix in small, short doses, a few minutes at a time throughout the day. And if sitting truly is the new smoking, as the saying goes, then what better way to fight back than to use the approach of the tobacco industry? But instead of smoke breaks, movement breaks. Short bouts of movement a few minutes at a time, sprinkled in throughout the day. If our muscles need regular use to function optimally, then outside of any exercise time, we need to be contracting them frequently through movement. The question that we asked in my lab is what's the least amount of movement breaks that we need in order to offset the harms of being highly sedentary? And the answer we found was a five minute walk every half hour. This reduced the blood sugar spike after eating by about 60%. That's the size of a reduction you would expect to see if you put someone on medication to manage their blood sugar levels. The cool part is that our participants weren't sprinting or even walking fast. This was a stroll. They were walking at two miles an hour. Now, I want to be honest, what I'm proposing to you as the answer
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to our modern sedentary lives, our 5
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minute movement breaks every hour or every half hour, I should say. The truth is that when I found out that this was the answer, I was disappointed. My immediate reaction was, there's no way people are going to do this, largely because I couldn't realistically do it myself.
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And so part of me wondered whether
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this should be the end of the road for my research on movement breaks. But rather than argue with the data, I decided to press forward and put it to the test in the real world. With a little help from public radio, we had over 20,000 people try our experiment to take movement breaks throughout the
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day, anywhere from every half hour to every two hours for two weeks.
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And to my surprise, the vast majority of people liked taking movement breaks. Many wanted to keep going. We had tapped into something that people were craving, an antidote to our toxic modern lives. But what really surprised me is that when we asked people what they liked about moving brakes, very few touted the physical health benefits. Instead, what they liked was how the movement breaks made them feel. They loved that they felt energized, that they no longer felt like they were in this brain fog throughout the day, that they were able to actually better focus at work. And this really resonated with me and my experiences as an office worker and how the exhaustion impacted my life. I remember when my kids were younger, they'd come home from my office job, I'd open the door and they'd greet me with energy and enthusiasm and want me to immediately start playing with them. I just didn't have it in me. I was too drained from the day. And that's one of the most striking findings that we see in the lab. Over the course of sitting all day with no movement, people's mood plummets while their fatigue builds and builds. And that's because our muscles have a symbiotic relationship with our brains. They're in constant communication. Our biological need to contract muscle is more than just about physical health and metabolism. It's also foundational to mental and brain health. The promising news is that in our real world experiment, our participants only average four to five movement breaks a day, far below our lab tested prescription. And yet they still reduce their feelings of fatigue by about 25%. And we see this play out in the lab as well. Something as small as a one minute walk every hour can still largely offset the impact of sitting all day on your mood. So even small, short, infrequent movement breaks can counter some, not all, but some of the hidden costs of our sedentary lives. Now, one of the biggest concerns I often hear from employers in schools about movement breaks is that they worry that it's disruptive, that it'll hurt productivity and performance. But movement doesn't mean you have to stop working. You can have walking meetings, pace around while you're on a call, get walking pads, or simply just move around while thinking. But the bigger idea and concept with movement breaks is that when you compare brain activity after movement versus after sitting, the differences are so Striking the brain after movement looks like one certainly far
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more ready to learn and to work.
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And yet, somewhere along the way, we decided that sitting and staring in front of a computer screen for eight hours
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straight is the best way to work.
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And that's where the real challenge lies. Productivity, culture, convenience, culture and technology are re engineering our lives and steadily removing the need for movement. We can have groceries delivered and robots vacuum our floors without ever getting off the couch. And the consequences of this re engineering is that we now often see movement as an inconvenience. We see it as an interruption. We see it as something to avoid. I saw this play out with my daughter recently when I had to drive
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her to our local library. But when we got there, the parking lot was full, so I had to
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park a little further away on the street. And she immediately started complaining that I
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had parked so far away.
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Now, mind you, the place I had parked may have added an additional 20 seconds of walking to her life. Not a mile, 20 seconds. But that moment hit me. Movement had become an inconvenience for my daughter, too. So I gave her a classic dad lecture. And this was met with a preteen eye roll. But a few days later, we were leaving a stadium and I was taking the escalator down. As I'm going down, I see something pass by and I look and it's my daughter taking the regular set of stairs, happily taking the regular set of stairs, smiling at me as she goes by. It was a small victory. And if my eye rolling preteen can make this shift on occasion, then I have hope for the rest of us. Because movement breaks are ultimately about something bigger. They're about seeing those small moments in your day when you have the opportunity to move, to see them not as inconveniences, but as a way to reconnect our bodies and our brains so we're not living some tired, drained version of ourselves. Thank you.
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Minouche Zamorodi
That was Columbia University Medical center physiologist Keith Diaz. In a minute. My conversation with Keith about the scientific findings that are about to be published. I am super excited about that and what it takes to actually change the systems that keep us so sedentary in our lives. I am always learning from Keith. You will, too. Don't go away.
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Keith Diaz
Picture this. A curve in the road, a change in plans. Well, what do you say with the allnew Audi Q3?
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The answer is always yes. Yes to adventure, yes to escape, yes to performance, yes to comfort, yes to right now. Because saying yes without hesitation, that's real luxury.
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Minouche Zamorodi
The all new Audi Q3 made for the yes life. Okay, so you just gave your TED Talk about this project. I was the NPR person. We partnered with you and your team over at Columbia to do this study and. But I, you know, as I've sort of been talking to people about the work that we've done and the book that's come out about the project, the thing that really catches people, Keith, and really makes them mad and sad is this idea that doing a morning workout or taking an evening jog won't undo a day of sitting and looking at a screen. Can we just unpack like your own? Coming to grips with that information? Cause there is a backstory here.
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Keith Diaz
Yeah, let's normalize that reaction first. That's totally appropriate. I had the same initial reaction. It's why I started the research that I'm doing. When I was a doctoral student, I came across some news headline. It was like in Runner's World magazine and there was a headline that said something like, sitting is the new smoking, even if you're a runner. And I was like, you know, as a runner, as an exercise physiologist in training, I tend to see exercise as the cure all, prevent all, for everything. And so for this article to put it out there that like, you know, what you do, exercise wise, you're running, that's not enough. I didn't believe it. And so I set off in my career to debunk that and show that, you know, that's not true. Exercise can overcome that. Sitting isn't the kryptonite to exercise. And here we are almost 15 years later. And, man, I've come to see it in a very different light. And the way that I think about it now is a picture like the iceberg, that exercise is just the tip of the iceberg that we focus on, that's on the surface that we see and that there's so much underneath. When it comes to what does a healthy movement profile look like and why I say it's the tip of the iceberg, because if you do the Math, you exercise 30 minutes a day, that's only 2% of your day. Is 2% of your day really gonna offset the other 98% of the day that you're not moving?
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Minouche Zamorodi
Can you just explain? Like, people wanna know. They're like, how long is sitting for too long gonna cause all these problems? What exactly is the mechanism? Let's talk about the sponge that you brought up in your talk.
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Keith Diaz
Yeah.
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So first I wanna start with, by saying that if you are an exerciser, that's great, keep doing it. You are far better off and healthier as an exerciser who sits all day than as a non exerciser who sits all day. So I think that's the first and most important part, that your exercise that you're doing still matters. But what we're learning is that our body was designed in a way that it needs regular muscle contraction to function optimally. And our muscles are really important for regulating things like our metabolism. And so the example that we use in the talk is about blood sugar. And so that's the key here, is that, yes, when you exercise, that wets the sponge, undoubtedly, and helps soak up some of that sugar. But then when you sit for eight hours, by the end of that day you have a dry, shriveled up sponge again. Right. And so the key here is more kind of like a faucet dripping over your muscles, right? Like, you don't need to pour water all over it.
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You just need some drips to just
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keep it going, keep it moisture and not dry out. It's not that we need to soak it every hour. We're talking little movements throughout the day just to keep it moist enough. That's what we're looking to do.
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Minouche Zamorodi
So the gold standard that you found was this. Five minutes of movement for every half hour. And people are like, what? I can't do? Like, that's gonna be like 16 breaks that you're talking about. What is a better way to think about it based on all the data that you've collected from thousands of people? And of course, just talking to people about what is in real life?
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Keith Diaz
Yeah. So, you know, if you were to pick a dose that you were really worried about, managing your blood sugar levels, managing your blood pressure levels, that's the dose that the science at least looks like we should recommend. But what we found in the real world is that people really had a hard time sticking to that regimented clock. But there were other doses of movement that we tested that were still beneficial. Maybe you didn't get all the benefits. So, for example, moving every hour for five minutes still reduced blood pressure by almost five points and still improved a person's mood, reduced their feelings of fatigue, help them feel more energized. Right. And so instead of 16 movement breaks, we're talking about eight movement breaks a day. But I'll give folks even more encouraging news. I've been crunching our body electric data more to see what's really the least amount out in the real world that people really need to do to strive for. And what we're finding is that once people take about five movement breaks a day, you start to see diminishing returns in terms of their improvements in fatigue. Right. Like after about five to six breaks a day, you don't get that much extra benefit from doing seven, eight or nine. That's somewhere about five is where you maximize your benefits for reducing your feelings of fatigue. But you know, I think part of the bigger message here that I think people should take home is that this is really about that our bodies just need regular movement throughout the day. Like that's the take home more than anything, that you just can't sit for hours at a time. And that's what our world is designed. And we can get into that.
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But.
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Right. Like recognizing that if you're worried about your health, then you do need to find ways to integrate movement and sprinkle it in throughout your day.
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Minouche Zamorodi
I think the other thing that people have been really connecting with is that tired, can't focus, feeling like everyone feels like they have adhd. And I feel like we have talked so much in our culture about how too much time online and social media is the reason why we're having all these mental health problems. But actually maybe some of that is biological. It's because we haven't paid enough attention to our physical needs as well. And not just like athletics or going to the gym, but like this, tending to our anatomy.
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Keith Diaz
Yeah, absolutely. You know, when we kept analyzing the data time and time again, we kept seeing this effect on how people felt their mood and their fatigue and their energy levels. That's what Kept kind of resonating and standing out consistently. No matter how we approach the studies physiologically, it makes so much sense to me now, and I think we're learning so much more about this. You know, there was a study that found in flies who have a much less complex and much smaller brain than ours, they found 51 proteins in a fly's brain that come from muscle. And so I can only imagine how many proteins are coming from muscle in a human's brain. And so we're learning that there's these chemical messengers called myokines that are muscles when they contract, release into circulation, and then they travel and communicate to other organs. So we're learning through a lot of these basic science studies that there's something to this kind of muscle brain crosstalk and relationship that probably could explain some of what you're describing. Minouche of like, people not realizing that like actually our brains and our muscles have this symbiotic relationship and they're constant communication.
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Minouche Zamorodi
How much does oxygen also play a role in this? In that like muscles being stimulated pushes oxygen literally up our bodies to our brain. And of course we need oxygen if we're switching tasks constantly opening another window, answering another email, we burn through oxygen really fast when we're so busy on our screenshots.
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Keith Diaz
Yeah. Another thing about our brain is that even like a slight change in your oxygen levels and your cerebral blood flow, you can feel that. And that comes across as feelings of fatigue. Right. And so when we're sitting all day, it's not causing drastic reductions in your cerebral blood flow, but there's still reductions enough that your brain feels that and likely interprets that as feeling exhausted and feeling fatigued. And so that's why like the muscle contraction and getting up and movement helps kind of restore that cerebral blood flow, that oxygen rich blood that your brain really needs to function optimally. I think that's one of the key pieces of why people are feeling so fatigued at the end of the day is that the brain sense that just slight turning down of the dial because their muscles weren't active for so long.
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Minouche Zamorodi
Maybe people know some of this, you know, ambiently know it, but actually hearing it, like out loud and specifically, and then reminding yourself of it when you're sitting at your screen and you're getting kind of sleepy, that like, guess what, maybe coffee's not the answer. Maybe just moving your body and pumping some oxygen up to your brain is the thing you need. I guess I'm curious then, where does the research go from here?
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Keith Diaz
I mean, we just crowdsourced from 20,000 people, like what works and what doesn't in terms of how to take movement breaks in the real world. And so for us from here, it's how do we build interventions, how do we build programs that we can roll out in workplaces that help people do this? Right. The number one reason people didn't take movement breaks is they forgot. I think that's the one thing that really stood out to me was that sitting is so ingrained in our lives that we don't even notice it. We don't even notice that we've sat for four hours straight. Like we've, we've tuned out to that. Our body's probably telling us that, like, I don't feel so good right now. I'm feeling really stiff, I'm feeling lethargic. I don't have great focus right now. And what do we do? We just press forward, we keep going. And that was the number two barrier that were challenged that people reported. I was too busy, I was too focused on what I was doing and I didn't want to break away. And so that combination of not being as mindful as we need to be about our sitting habits and then just this notion or idea that I gotta push through and keep doing my work, those two are really the biggest barriers that people have to taking movement breaks. And I totally get it and understand it. It's wrestling with how do we change our cultures, our social norms to address those behaviors. Cause those are deep rooted issues that we have to tackle.
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Minouche Zamorodi
Here's the thing I've been thinking about too, which is, you know, there is so much distrust right now amongst the American public into medical science and, and how, you know, obviously this was a self directed clinical trial and that's never gonna replace like a double blind drug studies. But I think what our paper documents is that maybe we should be taking people in more to do the science and maybe they'll trust the results more because they were part of finding it.
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Keith Diaz
Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, having done this and had this experience, I'm like, how do we just keep doing it this way? Like this was such a way to tap into citizen science. And you know, I also thought it was such a powerful way of, like we harnessed kind of this collective spirit of kind of we're all doing this together. Like there was this energy around the project where everybody just felt invested in this and think about like, how do you harness that collectivism to help think, fuel behavior change and to change how we operate as a society. In terms of managing our health. We had this issue where our server crashed the first day, right? And people got mad because our server crashed and we couldn't start. But rather than, like, some people were upset, but, like, how many people reached out to us, were like, we want
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to help you fix it.
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Like, no, we're all in this together trying to figure out an answer to a question. And we all have equal stake in it. And that's what I really loved. And I think it's a really different way to do science. And I think if we do more of that, we can develop tools, interventions, healthcare that actually works for people. And that's what I really liked about the project.
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Minouche Zamorodi
It makes me think that there must be so many other clinical trials that are locked up in labs that need to be set free into the real world to be given a tryout, see if we can do this. Things that maybe scientists are like, well, forget it, this is impossible, but maybe we could try.
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Keith Diaz
Yeah, we kind of learned, like, it's possible, but we're gonna have to pivot a little bit. And so doing this really early on and getting that feedback from people in the real world, I think can really help scientists figure out, like, how to then move forward in the best way possible. Right. And so I think that was a key piece of our study, is that we didn't, like, spend 10 years developing this to then try it out in the real world. We tried it one time in the lab, and then right away to the real world. Tell us what you think. And so I think it was really important for us to do it that way rather than spend decades working on this to find out it actually is not going to work in the real world.
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Minouche Zamorodi
We're going to take a quick break, Feel free to move, and then we'll be right back.
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Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
This episode is brought to you by NPR's Planet Money. You know, one thing I love about TED talks is how they take something huge, a scientific breakthrough, a global system, and make it feel deeply, personally relevant. NPR's Planet Money does that same thing, but for the economy. Every episode starts with a why are Pokemon cards outpacing your retirement account? How has Russia's economy held on through four years of war and sanctions? What does a 750 pound walk robot mean for the future of restaurants? These aren't abstract economics lectures. They're human stories. Funny, surprising, and genuinely illuminating. The Planet Money team has published a book tracing the global supply chain, launched a satellite to explore the private space industry, and walked inside a live book auction, all in the name of helping you understand how money shapes the world. It's Econ down to Earth. Follow NPR's Planet Money podcast and understand how money shapes the world. This episode is brought to you by Walmart Business. The best leaders might tell you the work that moves an organization forward doesn't happen in spreadsheets or supply chain email. It happens when you have the space to think big. That's the idea behind Walmart Business. It's built to take the friction out of running an organization so your team isn't losing hours to procurement logistics when they could just be focused on the problems that actually matter. With an ever expanding business assortment everyday low prices and fast, reliable shipping, Walmart Business keeps your operations running smoothly. Shop online, in store or through the Walmart Business app, however, works best for you. Simpler operations, smarter spending. It's Walmart built for your business. Sign up for a free Walmart business account@business.walmart.com this message is brought to you by Apple Card Apple Card members can earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases wherever they shop. This means you could be earning daily cash on just about anything, like a slice of pizza from your local pizza place or a latte from the corner coffee shop. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app to see your credit limit offer in minutes. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch terms and more@applecard.com.
- [34:48]
Minouche Zamorodi
One of the questions that I've been working to figure out too, is this relationship to technology. Where does that fit into this? Like, did we have this sedentary problem in 1986 before everyone had smartphones? Or is this a very particular 2026 issue?
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Keith Diaz
It's both. So if you kind of map out the trajectories of our sedentary time and, you know, how much time we spend watching tv, how much time we spend sitting in a car, how much time we spend sitting at work? It's kind of been like steadily increasing across decades, but it has really ramped up when the smartphone error came about, right? So in the 2014, 2015, 2016, there were dramatic increases in people's overall tech usage. In that time. We're talking like 40% increases in people's tech usage over that period of time. I think the pandemic probably accelerated that even more. So we've been creeping up steadily as technology has advanced and developed, and then I think it just really kicked up even more in the last 10 to 15 years.
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Minouche Zamorodi
Some researchers are looking into whether technology interferes with something called interoception this idea that the body sort of sends messages like, I need a break, I need to get a snack, I need to go to the bathroom. And that we're so captivated by what is on our devices that we ignore those signals that the body is sending us.
- [36:16]
Keith Diaz
Yeah. I mean, we haven't measured it so much in our lab studies, but I think it's something that has long resonated with me. And this idea or notion that this process of not having that interoception and not being mindful of our bodily cues is something that starts when we're in kindergarten and we go into schools and teachers tell us to sit in our chairs for seven, eight hours a day and that you shouldn't get up and move. And so you have your teachers harping on that. You sit at your desk all day and then you get that message. Your entire school career, and then you transition, you know, to go to college, it's much of the same. And you go into a workplace and it's much the same. Right. So we're kind of just training ourselves to ignore those sensations. So that's part of this going back to the social norms piece of this, is that we have this expectation that we must ignore those cues.
- [37:07]
Minouche Zamorodi
So your body's cues. A lot of people rely these days on their device, a smartphone, to ping them. You know, it's time to get up. Or they're sort of outsourcing it because, you know, technology is amazing and they can count their steps and their blood, heart rate and all those things. You're actually not a fam, if I understand correctly, of fitness trackers. You've told me. We did see that people who adhered to the protocol ended up needing their timers less. They did sort of get back into the rhythm of what their body needed. So, like, what? How do you approach this?
- [37:45]
Keith Diaz
I think we learned from the body electricity that people need reminders to start. Right. Because you first have to kind of check back in and realize, like, how much actually am I sitting and how much often do I need to get up and move around? But you know why I'm not as much of a fan of it is that you're relying on kind of external cues still. You're not relying on your interoception. You're not checking back in on your body. You're just relying on a device to tell you to do this. And where I'd love to see this and what the science kind of tells us on human behavior change is that for us to build a habit, it has to be more so something internal. And so when we kind of learn how to check back in with our bodies, we don't have to rely on external cues to do that. That behavior is much more likely to stick. The example I always use is brushing teeth is like, the ultimate health behavior that we all aspire to. Get people to eat as good as they are at brushing their teeth, or exercise or move as much as they are good at brushing their teeth. And that's because brushing teeth is something that we have, since we were kids, were taught and trained to do, but we also have tied it to cues in our day. We automatically are cued by our environment that, like, oh, yeah, I put my pajamas on, I go brush my teeth. Like, that's just the natural part of it. And so getting to that place in our everyday lives for movement breaks, or just movement in general of like, okay, I just. I've just finished a work task. I'm gonna go take a movement break before I go on to the next one. I just finished a meeting. Before I go to the next one, I'm going to move right? And tying it to cues in our day, rather than relying on some kind of device to remind us, you know, like, I remember I was in a store one day, and two workers were sitting, and I heard one of them say, oh, my watch just went off to tell me to stand up. And then she looked at it and she's like, nah. And they just kept working. And, like, they just kind of like both looked at each other like, yeah, no, we're just going to ignore that and keep going. Like, I just feel like that's where it ends up with these external reminders. Right? It works for some people, but it doesn't work for everybody.
- [39:43]
Minouche Zamorodi
I'm old enough to remember that people wouldn't forget to go out for a cigarette. So let's talk about this analogy of smoke breaks. Cigarette breaks, short breaks. What do you do when you sit outside and smoke a cigarette? You're taking deep breaths. Okay. You're filling yourself with smoke. But maybe people were just looking for a get away from everybody, a get away from the grind, take some deep breaths. And that used to be fine. How do we begin to normalize something without people thinking that, like, oh, they're slacking.
- [40:13]
Keith Diaz
Yeah, I wish I had, like, the answer to change that. We looked at it in the body electric study. This notion idea that if you're away from your desk, that you're not productive. Right. That's going to hurt your work performance. And what we found in the study was that that's actually not the case, that people's work performance and how engaged they felt actually got better and improved. And there's lots of science on this outside of just movement breaks. But just breaks in general from work actually are really beneficial for helping you concentrate better, to have better executive function, better memory. And movement in particular really helps with a lot of those pieces too. Right. And so it's getting employers to kind of see this perspective of actually sitting for eight hours straight is not the best way to work. And in fact, a healthy and more productive workforce is one that is actually taking movement breaks. One of the things that we see with movement breaks is that those improvements in mood that people experience is instantaneous. It's not like you see it at the end of the day. You feel better right there in that moment. And so harnessing that and creating a positive feedback loop where, like, I took a break. Oh, I actually felt better, or getting us to focus on. I like how I perform better at work when I take these movement breaks. This is gonna make me feel better and actually make me a better worker. I think, as a way to help start to address some of this.
- [41:40]
Minouche Zamorodi
Can we talk about younger generations of people and how we start to make this part of their lives? Because recess is not a law in the majority of US States, and movement breaks, you know, some teachers do them, some don't. I'm thinking, you know, you have a teenage daughter who you tell a story about life being inconvenient if you have to move to execute. What's it like to be a parent of a teenager in this time when this is what the norm is? Sedentary with a screen. The world, as you say, is being built around those two things.
- [42:14]
Keith Diaz
Yeah. I still think we're struggling with both of my kids, of how to fit more movement into their days. And part of it is it's so structural. Changing the classroom environment would be 1. Helpful. Two, allowing kids to stand up and go take movement breaks is really hard to do. And how schools can easily allow that to happen in a safe way, too, I think is logistically challenging. I think what we've strived to do is kind of try to change our daughter's viewer relationship with movement. And kind of fostering that mentality of like this can help with your mental health. And this is a way for you to reset and also to change your perspective to see where there are opportunities for movement. And so one of the things that we always do is she loves going to the library and getting books and our library is about two miles from our house. And we'll sit there and be like, do we need to drive our car?
- [43:12]
Minouche Zamorodi
Ah, I love it.
- [43:14]
Keith Diaz
Can we go ride our bikes? Right? Yeah, I guess it's kind of rethinking, like, where can we actually fit movement in?
- [43:21]
Minouche Zamorodi
I'm laughing because in my family it's like a joke that we always end up walking by the side of some highway when we go on vacation. Cause my husband and I are like, I think we could walk. Like, we'll look at the map and be like, it's not that far. I think you could walk. And then so many American cities are not set up for you to walk a mile from one place to another. So, like, it is, you know, if there are no sidewalks, if there's no safe way to get somewhere, if you live in a neighborhood where there's pollution or you don't feel safe, like, it's. It's so frustrating when people want to do these things and yet there's nowhere to go because they work in an office park and because everyone drives to and from everything.
- [44:02]
Keith Diaz
Yeah, I feel the same way. And that's what's like, so discouraging, I think, is that, like, school environments, our neighborhood environments, our world wasn't designed for this. And so it's like, how do we redesign it? And those are big questions. And it's going to take a lot of work to think about how we redesign these things. And so I think part of our hope with the work that we do and the project that we did, was to find small, simple ways to do this that you could easily fit into your day. And the bioelectric product, the study that we do in the lab, it's all walking based, but you don't have to walk, right? Like, this is about muscle contraction. And there are studies that show, like, if you did squats and high knees and calf raises, you could still see a lot of the same effects that we saw with walking. Right. So it's just about getting movement. And it doesn't have to be you leaving your house to do that.
- [44:50]
Minouche Zamorodi
You know, I don't think I've ever asked you this. Was there a moment back in the day when you were trying to research why working out once a day wasn't the antidote for sitting all day? Was there like a moment, the aha moment when you were like, ah, it needs to be interstitial? What led you to that conclusion?
- [45:09]
Keith Diaz
What really pushed me to go further down this road was in 2018, the U.S. physical Activity Guidelines came out. It was the second time they'd ever released guidelines. And for the first time, they actually said, in addition to exercise, people need to sit less, move more. Right. So they're acknowledging for the first time ever that it's not just about exercise, that your sitting also matters. But those guidelines were sit less, move more. And I remember thinking, like, those are terrible guidelines, and that's not to bash the people who made those guidelines. That's all the evidence we had at that time. Right. But, like, if we're gonna get people to do something about this, we need more than sit less, move more. That's what I liked about the movement bricks concept. It was a way to give someone an actionable plan to do something about it than just, oh, you should sit less and move more.
- [45:57]
Minouche Zamorodi
Mm. I mean, it's interesting. Here we are, you said that was the 2000 and tens. And, like, AI is becoming a thing. And, you know, there's this fantasy that AI will all set us free and we'll have time to frolic in fields five times a day. But that is not what people are seeing. If anything, AI is causing more compression of work, making people sit for longer periods of time because they're also overseeing the work of eight AI agents or whatever. So I guess my question is, what happens next? Our relationship with technology is getting even more entangled. So are we at this point where we have to be more specific, Put language around or doses, as you say, around things that, like, you know, probably when I was a kid, if someone was like, did you get enough movement today? That would be kind of like, maybe not in school, but, like, generally, we were always moving. This is not getting better.
- [46:53]
Keith Diaz
Yeah, I wish I had a great answer to that. I'm equally as concerned. And this doesn't change unless policies are developed around the workplace and around technology. Because I don't know how much the tech companies care about people's bodies and their health. Some do, don't get me wrong.
- [47:16]
Minouche Zamorodi
But they care about their efficiency, right?
- [47:18]
Keith Diaz
Yeah. And.
- [47:20]
Minouche Zamorodi
And their productivity.
- [47:22]
Keith Diaz
And maybe. Maybe it's going back to that point of, like, harnessing, like, this idea notion that, like, a body that moves is a more efficient and productive body as well. Maybe it's tapping into that and, like, what moves the needle for employers. Right. To allow this to happen. That's kind of where my mind goes. I was talking with a journalist recently, was doing another piece on sitting, and she's like, I feel like I've been writing the same piece for 10 years. Do you feel the same I'm like, yes. I feel like I keep saying the same story again and again and again, and people want to keep talking about it, but nothing is changing. And that's where I just feel like I feel stuck, because I'm like, how much do I have to keep talking about it? How much more science needs to come out before somebody starts doing something about it? And that's what really concerns me.
- [48:18]
Minouche Zamorodi
I'm gonna offer a little bit more positive anecdote. One itch is we can change our habits really fricking fast. Look at us getting on Zoom for everything during the pandemic, I'm starting to hear from people. Everybody's reading the book and the work that Keith is doing, and we did it today. So, like, at first, they'll be like, oh, my God, we are out of our seats. We're not working. Oh, actually, we felt better, and we got to the end of the day without feeling exhausted.
- [48:44]
Keith Diaz
Yeah. What you're getting at is it's a grassroots movement. Right? Like, the top ain't changing things. So we're gonna have to start from a different perspective and a different approach, and it's this trickle effect, and normalizing the behavior has to start with somebody being willing to do it and step out of that comfort zone. Like, I'm always that guy in a Zoom call who, like, is walking on a treadmill while they're. Everybody else is sitting.
- [49:08]
Minouche Zamorodi
I know it's weird to see you sitting right now, actually.
- [49:10]
Keith Diaz
Yeah.
- [49:11]
When you make it part of, like, oh, that's totally a normal thing to do, and I wouldn't even think twice about it. We have to start changing that perception and that culture, and it may have to start with just people doing it and making it normal.
- [49:22]
Minouche Zamorodi
I think we need a meme like, touch grass worked really well. Maybe we need, like, dance on grass or something like that. We're going to figure it out, Keith. We're on the journey.
- [49:31]
Keith Diaz
Totally.
- [49:32]
Minouche Zamorodi
All right, time for a movement break. Keith, great to see you. Thank you, as always.
- [49:36]
Keith Diaz
Keep it going.
- [49:37]
Minouche Zamorodi
Keep it going. Exactly.
- [49:44]
Keith Diaz
Oh.
- [49:45]
Minouche Zamorodi
What I love about Keith is his openness to experimentation and his patience in taking deep science and turning it into language that we can all use in our daily lives. We don't have to be researchers. Like, right now, actually, I am going to wrap up this episode by standing up in my studio and taking one of my many daily movement breaks. Please feel free to join me by walking or pumping your arms in place or marching side to side. That's what I'm doing. Feels good to move it's true. And I think that is the most delightful thing that I found working with Keith and the thousands of listeners who were willing to share their time and data with us for for the original project and my book Body Electric that just came out. People are interested in science and, you know, living with technology is one big experiment. And so they are ready and willing to be part of figuring out how to live with their devices the way that they want to, not just how the tech companies want them to. I think this is part of how we restore people's trust in the medical community, that we bring them into the process. We work together to find answers. Meanwhile, I love Keith's positive message. Let's enjoy being in our bodies and being alive. Keep walking, keep moving. That was Keith Diaz at TED 2026 in conversation with me, Minouche Zamorodi. You can also watch Keith's full talk at TED on tomorrow's episode, all the things you know or think you know about kids and social media. Child psychologist Candace Odgers says not so fast. Tomorrow, her talk, our conversation and why she wants you to reconsider how you think about teens and screens and adults and screens for that matter. That's it for today. If you're curious about Ted's curation, visit ted ted.comCuration Guidelines Ted Talks Daily is a podcast from Ted. This episode was produced by Lucy Little and Katie Monteleone. It was edited by Alejandra Salazar with editing support from Maggie Bishop, Banban Chang, Sanaz Meshkinpour and me. Keith's talk and conversation was fact checked by the TED research team and this episode was mixed by Matthew Polis. The TED Talks Daily team includes Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Tobner, and Tansika Sangmarni Vong with support from Daniela Balarezzo, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang and Lainey Lott. Special thanks to Sanaz Mesh Kinpour and my team at NPR's TED Radio Hour for all their help on this special takeover. And to my co curator at TED 2026, a very special thank you to David Biello. You can hear more from these speakers on the TED Radio Hour with episodes coming out throughout the summer. I'm Anoush Zamorodi. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea and conversation for your feed. Thank you so much for listening. I'm gonna sit down now.
- [52:59]
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Keith Diaz
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