Office workers spend too long sitting at their desks

In a typical working week, people spend on average 5 hours and 41 minutes per day sitting at their desk and 7 hours sleeping at night. Prolonged sitting at your desk is not only bad for your physical health, but potentially your mental well-being.

Nearly 70% of employees surveyed did not meet recommended guidelines for physical activity; interestingly 50% of people surveyed aged 50 years and under failed to meet these guidelines.

The findings also showed:

• Those who sit for longer at work are more likely to sit outside of work.
• A correlation between BMI scores and sitting time at work, as one would expect.
• More time spent sitting at work was associated with a decrease in mental well-being.

The findings by Dr Myanna Duncan, Mr. Aadil Kazi and Professor Cheryl Haslam from the Work & Health Research Centre, Loughborough University, to delegates at the British Psychological Society’s Annual Occupational Conference, were a subset of a larger study looking at employees’ experiences of occupational health provision, over an 18-month period during 2009-2011.

The psychologists conducted an online and paper-based survey with over 1,000 employees, measuring employee’s use and experiences of occupational health services and their physical activity levels.

In the UK, as elsewhere in Europe, there are now twice as many workers aged 50 and over as there are aged 25 or younger. Health, work and well-being have been identified by Dame Carol Black as a key government priority in order to maintain the health of all workers across their lifespan so they are able to continue working healthily and productively into their 70s.

Dr Duncan says “People don’t need a psychologist to tell them to get up and walk around. But if it helps, I’d tell them to put a post-it note on their computer to remind them. Anyway, go and talk to your colleagues face to face, it’s a lot more sociable and better for you than emailing them.”