Time For Writers To Take A Stand

Posted on | August 31, 2010 | 3 Comments

stand at work writer Vancouver copywriter I’ve decided to take a stand and change the world, one chair-bound writer at a time.

Writers are usually pretty easy to pick out in a crowd. In the younger, hard-scrabble days of winning our first scribbling gigs more out of bloody-minded pluck than actual talent, writers tend to be a bit skinny. As the years and the writing credits pile on, our bellies start sticking out even as our legs petrify into bony sticks.

Our jobs consist of too much sitting at the desk, tapping away on our keyboards as our veins atrophy and our arteries clog.

I was perhaps worse off than my contemporary wordsmiths. My professional sitting-down career combined with a general lack of exercise in my leisure hours. Too much television and video games. Not enough exercise.

By my early thirties, I had a bad case of what Seinfeld called the Jimmy Legs (AKA Restless Leg Syndrome). Not just at night, either — it got so bad this year, I couldn’t sit down at my desk for more than 15 minutes without needing to get up to walk around, stretch, jump, do whatever I could to get the blood flowing and the muscles moving.

So I started working out again. I bought a bike for jaunts down to the seawall. I joined a gym. I gave myself extra time to go places by walking instead of going by car or transit.

My Jimmy Legs got better. In the last couple of months, I was able to sit down for about half an hour before feeling the need to move, which seems to be a lot closer to the normal range of human toleration for stillness. But the feeling wasn’t quite gone. Not completely. It still bothered me.

I had an epiphany. Why was I exercising my ass off just so I could sit down? Would it be so awful for me to stand up? It’s only been normal for people to sit down at work for less than one per cent of human history. Maybe we’re just not built for this.

Maybe the discomfort we feel when we’re sitting down at our desks isn’t just an abnormal physiological twitch; maybe that’s just our bodies telling us, “Hey, dumb-dumb! Just because you’re not hunting big animals on the Savannah doesn’t mean you can treat me this way. You want to live to see 100? Get off your ass!”

So I took a stand.

On a typical weekday morning in my Vancouver condo, I got up and made a bowl of cereal and I ate it standing up. I drank my first cup of coffee of the day standing up. As my wife left for her day job, I prepared to face my workday — something I normally did with my Macbook from the dining table in my living room, or from the table on my balcony if the weather was nice. But I grabbed my computer, set it on top of a bookshelf in the bedroom and propped it up a bit higher with a thick encyclopedia just enough to comfortable typing height. And I set to work, standing up.

I stood and worked for eight hours. Well, not a full eight hours. I took a break for lunch and wandered into the other room to catch a few minutes of the BBC and Star Trek before getting back to my copywriting projects.

Surprisingly, my knees, feet and back held up just fine. In fact, by the time my wife got home from work, I felt great. My Jimmy Legs were now, well, Jonathon Legs. I was back to my old self.

Between standing most of every workday and keeping up my exercise routine, I feel healthier than I’ve been in a long time. I’m also more focused at work. No more twitching, fidgeting, stretching in my chair as I pound out my web copy and sales letters for clients. I’m all business, all the time. Productivity’s shot up.

My Jimmy Legs aren’t completely gone. I still feel the urge to take a quick walk around the corner if I’m sitting down too long with friends at a restaurant or watching a movie with family on the couch. It’s going to take more than a few months of concerted effort to undo more than a decade and a half of damage caused by inactivity. But if my discomfort was a 9 out of 10 before I made these changes in my lifestyle, it’s now at a 2 out of 10.

I get the feeling there are a lot of other writers out there who are in the same situation right now that I was in. Probably, a lot more people who aren’t writers are in the same boat. Your feet are like numb blocks of ice. You have trouble concentrating at work and can’t sleep at night unless you pace the living room first. And you’re sick of it.

Well, people, isn’t it time for you to make a change? Will you take a stand?

Comments

3 Responses to “Time For Writers To Take A Stand”

Al
September 1st, 2010 @ 11:02 am

Hi,

Looks like you are on the right track. A note showed up in the Globe and Mail’s Social Studies section about this yesterday:

http://women.webmd.com/news/20100722/sit-more-die-sooner

Highlights:

After adjusting for smoking, height/weight, and other factors, Patel’s team found that compared to sitting less than three hours a day, sitting six or more hours a day:

* Increased the death rate by about 40% in women

* Increased the death rate by about 20% in men

* Increased the death rate by 94% in the least active women

* Increased the death rate by 48% in the least active men

It wasn’t just that they weren’t getting exercise. Patel and colleagues found that sitting itself was detrimental to health.

Sitting increased risk of cancer death, but the main death risk linked to sitting was heart disease.
-30-
Jonathon Narvey
September 1st, 2010 @ 11:26 am

Very interesting stats. And perhaps a bit of coincidence, as well. I was just thinking about whether or not to submit this to the Globe and Mail’s Facts and Arguments section. So I just sent off the piece.

Perhaps this is where a movement to change the world begins.
Writers. Stand Up For Yourself! | writeimage
September 13th, 2011 @ 11:43 pm

[...] readers of this web copywriting tips blog may recall a quirky post last year called “Time for Writers to Take a Stand“. At the time, I lauded the benefits of standing with my laptop propped up on my bookshelf [...]