Sitting for hours on a regular basis can be harmful to your body and brain. A new study shows that keeping your brain active helps to reduce some of the negative effects of sedentary behavior.
Engagement means activities like knitting or solving puzzles, instead of scrolling or passively looking at a screen.
Scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm surveyed 20,811 Swedish adults, mostly women between the ages of 35 and 64, about their weekly physical activity and how much time they spent daily in “active mental” and “passive mental” sedentary behavior. They began questioning participants in 1997 and followed them 19 years later to assess risk and dementia status.
Sedentary behavior – long periods of sitting, lying down or reclining – is linked to “major risk factors for dementia,” such as high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes and obesity, said Mats Hallgren, a principal researcher at the Karolinska Institute and author of the study.
However, brain activity is an important element in protecting against that damage.
The brain “works like a muscle,” he said. Not actively using it for an extended period of time can ultimately negatively affect the part linked to memory and learning.
In the questionnaire, being mentally active while being sedentary includes office work, sitting in meetings, as well as knitting and sewing. Activities like using a computer to solve puzzles are considered intellectually stimulating.
Watching TV or listening to music while sedentary is counted as mentally passive.
In the study, which was published Thursday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, participants who were involved in sitting more mentally passive had “significantly higher risk of developing some types of dementia in the future,” said Hallgren.
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Using a statistical model, researchers then predicted how changes in mental activity will affect the risk of dementia.
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They calculated that adding one hour of mentally active behavior while sedentary decreased the risk of dementia by 4%; changing an hour from mentally passive behavior to mentally active behavior reduces the risk by 7%; and combining physical activity, such as walking, with active mental behavior reduces risk by 11%.
Learning has limitations. Since the initial questionnaire nearly three decades ago, smartphones, social media and endless scrolling have been absent. Previous reviews have suggested that older adults derive cognitive benefits from phone use, but less is known about children and young adults. And because it is based on self-reporting, the study cannot conclude whether mental passive activity increases the risk of dementia, or whether people at greater risk of dementia may engage in more passive activity.
Dr. Hussein Yassine, professor of neurology at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, speculates that the phone and the use of social media can lead to similar risks by affecting our ability to concentrate.
“It will affect your ability to process information and potentially build synapses in certain areas of the brain that help with concentration,” says Yassine. “So the next time you have a serious task or you need to concentrate, you are less able because your brain network is hijacked by this passive acceptance.”
Adam Brickman, a professor of neuropsychology at Columbia University, says that the rise of short content like TikTok has exponentially increased mental passive behavior.
“If you think about how kids, even adults, spend their time passively watching content that I don’t think anyone would classify as stimulation or active behavior, it’s definitely higher today than it was in 1997,” said Brickman, who was not associated with the new study.
Recent studies have raised concerns about cognitive decline, known as “brain rot,” including a shorter attention span that can accompany short video consumption.
“This kind of scrolling nonstop-without-thinking from one YouTube video to the next, they sort of behavior when you sit for a very long time, if they are repeated over time, possibly associated with depression and anxiety and stress-related conditions, compared to more active engagement and doing work-type scrolling,” he said.
Although technology has changed, “the pathways that affect dementia are basically the same in people today as they were 30 years ago,” Hallgren said.
His advice for lowering the risk of dementia is simple: “Sit less and move more, more often.”
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