Sitting all day is killing you — here's what to do about it | Manoush Zomorodi
TED Talks Daily
TED
4.1 • 11.9K Ratings
🗓️ 5 January 2026
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
You've heard that too much time online is bad for your mental health, but what is it doing to your body? In this energizing talk, journalist and author Manoush Zomorodi explains how tech habits (including sitting all day) affect your physical health, from making you feel exhausted to raising rates of chronic illness. With early results from a 20,000-person experiment, she shares a practical solution to go from "wired and tired" to feeling healthier and more productive.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity |
| 0:11.2 | every day. I'm your host, I'll ease hue. We have let our screens quietly train our days into |
| 0:17.0 | locked down stillness, says Minouche Someroti, the host of NPR's TED Radio Hour podcast. |
| 0:23.1 | In her talk, she explains how our sedentary lifestyles have led to many of us feeling exhausted most of the time |
| 0:29.5 | and makes the case that tiny regular bursts of activity baked into our days, known as movement breaks, |
| 0:36.1 | can be the key to combating the rising negative health |
| 0:39.0 | effects of sitting too much. This talk just might change how you go about your daily life. |
| 1:00.4 | Do you ever close your laptop at the end of a long day and feel like you have just enough energy to crawl over to the couch, to scroll on your phone, or watch a show, or maybe both at |
| 1:09.8 | the same time? Yeah. During the pandemic, that maybe both at the same time. |
| 1:11.9 | Yeah. During the pandemic, that was all I wanted to do. |
| 1:14.9 | And I couldn't understand why. I was safe. I was healthy. |
| 1:18.3 | Why didn't I want to close my laptop and go dance around the living room? |
| 1:22.6 | Where did all my energy go? |
| 1:25.7 | I'm a journalist. |
| 1:27.2 | My specialty for the last 10 years has been trying to understand |
| 1:30.6 | how our tech habits change us as people. |
| 1:33.8 | And so I decided I was going to find out |
| 1:35.9 | why sitting in front of a screen makes us feel so exhausted. |
| 1:41.5 | Because we have all heard about the mental effects, right? But what about our physical health? |
| 1:48.6 | Well, as I quickly learned, looking at screens is not only reshaped our days, it is reshaping our bodies. |
| 1:56.6 | According to researchers at Johns Hopkins, every day the average 19-year-old moves about as much |
| 2:01.8 | as the average 60-year-old. |
... |
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