Why the chair wins

If your tally has come out at eleven, twelve or thirteen hours, you may be feeling that you've been lazy. I don't think that's the right word, and I don't think it's a useful one.

Look at how the hours got there. You didn't sit in the car because you like sitting. You sat because that's how you get to work. You sat at the desk because that's where the screen is, and the screen is where the work is. You ate at the desk because there was a lot on. The meeting was held around a table because meetings are. None of these was a decision about sitting. They were decisions about travel, work and food, and sitting came with each of them.

You're also typical. The NHS says that many adults in the UK spend more than seven hours a day sitting, and that people over sixty-five spend ten hours or more sitting or lying down, which makes them the most sedentary age group. Researchers who fit office workers with motion sensors report that they typically sit for between 70 and 85 per cent of their working hours. If your tally is high, you're living the way most people with a desk job live.

The world was rearranged to produce this, mostly within living memory, and mostly for good reasons. The NHS puts it plainly. We drive or take public transport, machines wash our clothes, fewer people do manual work, and shopping, housework and other necessary jobs take far less effort than they did for earlier generations. Nobody wants the mangle back. But each of those improvements removed some movement that people used to get without thinking about it, and nothing replaced it.

Then there are the reasons the chair is attractive in itself, and they're real.

Sitting is comfortable. After a day of work, your body asks for the sofa, and the first minute on it is one of the day's small pleasures.

Sitting looks like working. At a desk, the person who's seated and staring at the screen appears busy, and the person who's wandering about appears not to be. Many people feel watched when they stand up.

Sitting is the polite default. You sit in waiting rooms, in other people's houses, on trains and in meetings, because standing when others are seated feels odd.

Sitting feels like the sensible response to being tired and stiff. If your body aches when you move, moving less seems like looking after it.

And the alternative seems to be exercise, which you may not like, may not have time for, or may feel you've failed at before. If the only choice on offer is between the sofa and the gym, the sofa is going to win most evenings.

Underneath these are needs nobody should be ashamed of. You want to rest when you've worked, you want to get your job done without drawing attention, and you want to look after a body that's complaining. The next several chapters ask whether long sitting serves those needs. I'll argue that it serves the first for about twenty minutes and then works against all three.