an addictologist offers solutions to fight against “chair disease”

“Stand, crouch, or sit on the floor, but please leave your comfortable seats.”, this is the appeal launched during the week of October 16 to 22 by Robert Van de Graaf, a world specialist in addictology in a Dutch daily. Spending your life sitting is bad for your health, we know, but this addictologist goes further. In a scientific journal he talks about “chair use disorder”. What he is saying is that human beings have become addicted to the chair as they might be to alcohol or tobacco. A generalized disease: “chair disease”. This concept can also be extended to armchairs and sofas!

Human beings are not made to sit still

According to Robert Van de Graaf, you only need to see the behavior of children who spend the first six years of their life in constant movement to know that it is not normal to spend hours comfortably seated. A sedentary lifestyle is not innate. Human beings are not made to sit in the same position all day. And the addictologist invites us to think again about the way families lived only two or three generations ago. The vast majority of people worked on their feet and walked all day. And for their health they had to sit down from time to time. Today it’s the opposite. All day long, human beings “consume” chairs and more chairs.

>> REPORT. “I train six times a week”: encouraged by social networks, more and more 15-24 year olds are in fitness centers

To get rid of this addiction, you must first realize that your behavior is bad for your health. Then want to stop. By noting how your days go, counting the number of hours spent sitting and then setting small goals. Working standing up, on a ball, squatting on the ground or sitting on your heels, these alternatives exist and should not be too comfortable either. It is necessary to rediscover a taste for discomfort, and with it effort… In short, by getting up and standing up. It may be possible to transform this chair illness into a movement pandemic.