Americans are living longer than ever before. On the Sunday story from Up First, we look at a

growing number of people using these extra years to find new meaning. You get at a point where

you start asking, what did you do in your life that was significant? A look at the transformative

power of human passion and finding your purpose in the third act of life. Listen now on the

Up First podcast from NPR. You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

Hey everybody, it's Mariel. Have you ever seen that meme of a shrimp in a desk chair? Normally I try not to explain

memes or jokes, but this one's pretty straightforward. You know how shrimpies get curled up into

sort of a hook shape? Imagine that, but sitting in a desk chair trying to fill out an Excel spreadsheet.

A lot of us sit like this or in equally tortured positions. And that's bad, right?

I always laugh as a physical therapist because people send it to me all the time.

But the reality is, it's not so much the posture in itself, but the time and the amount of movement that we actually get throughout the day to interrupt those stagnant positions.

That's Lita Malik. She's a physical therapist, an author of the book Science of Stretch.

And she says if you hold your body in a shrimp-like shape for a short amount of time, probably not a huge deal.

If you do it all day, every day, that's when you start hurting.

Katie Bowman is a biomechanist, which means she studies the effects that physical forces have on the body.

She says you may have felt this effect after a long time in transit when everything in your body feels stiff.

Usually on a plane or a car, you don't get to have any movement breaks whatsoever. You're

really, really stuck in a position. So what do you do in those moments? You shake out your muscles,

stretch, and move your body into other positions. Katie, who wrote a book called Rethink Your Position,

says doing that throughout your life is what leads to good posture. We've got so many parts and I don't think

we're really fluent in all the options that we have for positions, despite the number of joints

and hinges and levers that really allow us to assume many different shapes. We're kind of stuck in the

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