Did you know that your office furniture could be making you ill? In fact, your work in general could be making you ill. Seriously.
If you sit down for too long you are at an increased risk of developing heart disease, and heart disease can lead to heart attacks. It’s that simple.
Sedentary lifestyles are not healthy, but the bottom line is that if you work within an office, and sit on office chairs all day long, you’re hugely contributing towards your overall risk factors for serious conditions. A recent study by the Warwick Medical School showed that office jobs, or any type of sedentary type of job hugely impacts on cardiovascular health risks. The same study also showed that the risk of developing serious heart disease increases for every hour you spend every day sitting, over five hours. When you consider that most working days are seven hours, that’s a big risk to invite into your life.
Here at Calibre Office Furniture we’re all about health and wellness for our employees, and that means encouraging something called active seating. Yes, you can be active whilst you’re sat at your bespoke office desks!
There are many ways to incorporate active seating into your office space, and that can be anything from seats which rock and move, ensuring that you move your body on a regular basis, therefore burning calories, to doing yoga exercises at your desk too! The basic rule is that you move your body, and that helps to reduce your risk factors for serious cardiovascular issues.
Of course, heart disease is a large umbrella term, and encompasses a lot of different conditions. A few of these include coronary artery disease, changes to your regular heart rhythm, heart defects that might have been present since birth, and blood vessel problems. These are all conditions which have the potential to worsen over time, when correct lifestyle choices aren’t made. We haven’t even listed all of the possible conditions to think about there!
Another potential consideration is treadmill desks. Whilst these might cause an issue with office space planning, due to the fact that they take up so much room, they will certainly do a lot for helping you to move around during the day. If you’re not so keen on walking whilst trying to work, how about static standing desks or electric height adjustable desks instead? As you can see, moving around during your working day isn’t as hard as you might think!
Remember to head outside for some exercise during your lunch break, take the stairs instead of the lift, and perhaps walk to work a few times a week if you can. These are ways to incorporate more movement into your working week, and therefore adds up to a cumulative effect on lowering your chances of developing serious heart-related problems in the future.
The less physical nature of an office job means that you are certainly falling into the sedentary lifestyle bracket, even though you are putting a lot of strain on your mind. Office work is more mental than physical, but you can add in a few physical elements to protect your overall health and also to give your brain a boost of focus and concentration too. These don’t have to be huge changes, as the small changes often add up to a huge snowball effect; the important thing is that you focus on movement more than you would do otherwise, looking at changes you can make, to lower your risk of developing heart disease in the future.
Of course, when you’re young you don’t think about heart problems, but protecting your heart now, for the future, is one of the best insurance policies you can take out – don't forget: prevention is better than cure.