A WalkingPad® Convert On Engaging the Body In Work
And a way to contribute to my next book chapter
The following is an excerpt from an article written for Common Good Magazine. Read the full piece here.
There are advantages to being a late adopter of new technology. One is that, by the time you’re ready to jump on a particular bandwagon, others might be just as ready to sell off their first-generation gizmos — hopefully, at cut-rate prices on Facebook Marketplace.
The early adopters who sold me a walking pad and standing desk this spring were among those who had been called back to in-person work at federal offices in the D.C. area. Did buying these benefits of working from home from them feel a little too opportunistic? Yes. Has the guilt kept me from delighting in my new toys? No. (Besides, the sellers were in their 20s; they probably still slay at pickleball.)
Like you, I’ve heard that long periods of sedentary work can be as bad for our health as picking up smoking. A Mayo Clinic analysis of 13 studies found sitting for more than eight hours a day with no physical activity significantly increased participants’ risk of dying from heart disease, cancer, and other causes.
Studies since then have found that five minutes of gentle walking every half hour can serve as a healthful antidote to all that sitting. But when 20,000 people were asked to do just that, more than half of them found it was too hard to get those steps in while also getting their work done (or while appearing to do so by being visibly at an office desk).
Enter the WalkingPad. While standing desks have been around for ages (Leonardo DaVinci and Thomas Jefferson famously preferred them), adding a small, sometimes foldable treadmill under the desk is a much newer trend. The idea for the WalkingPad, according to its maker’s website, comes from a group of postgrad and doctoral students who found their bodies buckling under the physical pressures of sedentary scientific research.
“My doctor told me to get more exercise,” the inventors’ story goes. “But I didn’t even have time to walk in the park.”
The entrepreneurs released their smaller, foldable version of a treadmill in 2018 as a way to get computer-based work done while still accommodating the body’s need for movement.
To be honest? I was a little torn when I first considered what this WalkingPad moment could represent for human history. Despite the narrative we’ve been living under since the Industrial Revolution, research has confirmed time and again that humans are not machines. We cannot sit at desks churning out “content” at all hours without serious consequences for our physical, mental, and spiritual health.
I’m also not surprised that a technological culture would cheer a technological solution to our latest perceived problem: Not enough time to work and workout? Enter the you-can-do-both machine.
Yet I have become equally weary of another narrative that had begun living, as the young people say, “rent-free” in my head: The assumption that the needs of my body are always in the way of the work of my hands . . .
Read the full article for Common Good Magazine here.
One Fun Thing 🎤
Thank you all for cheering the news in my last newsletter that I am working on a new book. I am so grateful for your support. And when I say I cannot do this on my own, I mean it.
To that end, I would love to hear from you! If you’re on Voxer (you can find me here), I would love to hear your (anonymous) response to one of the following questions. Feel free to record a note while you’re walking the dog or doing the dishes; I live in a world of background noise too.
This month, I’m working on a chapter about embodied beauty. What in the world are we to do with it and make of it?
What is the biggest “problem” you have or have had with the beauty of the body? (Yours or others’?)
Have you ever felt like the beauty of your body or others’ is a distraction, in the way of what you’re trying to do? How do you work through that?
In what ways are you (or the culture around you) tempted to make too much of the beauty of the body? In what ways are you (or the culture around you) prone to make too little?
You can respond to one (or all) of these questions by replying to this newsletter in an email or answering in the comments below. Or if you’re an out-loud processor like me, drop me a voice memo on Voxer right here.