This is What Would Happen If, a close examination of mundane hypothetical situations. Each week, we look at something that you could do but probably never would, and take it to its logical endpoint. This week: What would happen if you never got up from your seat?
We’ve all been there. Your bones ache. Your skin yearns for rest. You sit down, and exhale a groan of relief. A thought, suggestion, creeps into your head: What if you just never got up? What if you just remained sitting. Forever.
It’s an attractive prospect, unless you're on an airplane. But what would actually happen to your body if you took relaxing to the logical endpoint? To answer this, we consulted ergonomics expert Alan Hedge, a professor at Cornell’s Department of Design and Environmental Analysis.
As it turns out, it’s possible to have too much chill. You will die if you never get up from your seat.
Within a matter of hours, the reduced physical activity coupled with gravity will force the blood to pool in your legs, explains Hedge. The reduced circulation will put you at risk for developing deep vein thrombosis (DVT), a blood clot in one or both of you legs. You might experience some swelling or pain, or you might not. But you won’t die from DVT, at least not directly. No, where you really run into trouble, Hedge stresses, is if part of that clot breaks off and enters your lungs. That might cause a pulmonary embolism, a blockage of the very important pulmonary artery, which can definitely kill you.
“A few years back, people in the media called this ‘Coach Class Syndrome’,” says Hedge. “You know you're sitting on an airplane and you don't really have the ability to get up and move around very easily, so that puts you at risk.”
But let’s assume you don’t develop DVT. Let’s assume you manage to stay clot free and continue to stay chilling. Are you in the clear? No, of course not. In the next few days you’ll start to get weaker, and your muscles will start to atrophy. “if you're not challenging your body with gravity then you begin to lose muscle mass,” says Hedge.
Becoming less swole certainly won’t kill you. And yet as the days turn to weeks, and you continue to be unmoved you’ll start to mess with your spinal cord. “Depending on how you're sitting, you'll probably get some sort of spinal compression,” says Hedge. “So you may increase the risk of developing a herniated lumbar disk by oversitting.” Ask anyone who’s gone through a herniated disk. It won’t kill you, but you’ll feel like you want to die.
So your muscles are getting smaller, your spine is getting smushed together, your very own blood threatens to kill you. Couldn’t get any worse, right? Wrong. Again, you’re no longer fighting the forces of gravity, which will continue to mess your body up. After about a month of staying put your bones will start to give up. Normally, your bones are in a constant state of remodeling. Cells break down old bones to release minerals into your body, known as resorption, while others lay down new bone in its stead, known as ossification. They key catalyst to ossification is stress. And in the absence of stress, the resorption begins to outpace the ossification. “Bone density requires you to get gravity challenging your body,” says Hedge. “In the absence of that you start to excrete from your bones, so your bones become more fragile.”
Right, so, your blood hates you, your muscles are dying, your bones are slowly turning brittle, your spine is not right. This must be the end.
No, of course it isn’t. As your body slowly wastes away, your sitting posture also restricts the airflow to your lungs, which limits the amount of oxygen to your brain. Over time, this will being to degrade your mental alertness. “In the absence of moving around the oxygen levels are going to decrease and you'll just become duller,” says Hedge. “You'll gradually just waste away and become a blob.”
The good news is if you’re even moderately healthy, it’s almost impossible to sit still for days at a time, let alone hours. “We call it fidgeting,” says Hedge. “And once you start doing that, making those postural changes, that's your body telling you that ‘Hey you've been sitting for too long in one position.’”
That said, while bone loss and muscle atrophy are far-off possibilities, the threat of deep vein thrombosis is very real. If you find yourself sitting for extended periods of time, Hedge suggests getting up and moving every thirty minutes or so, just to keep the circulation going and the oxygen flowing.