Are you feeling groggy after the holidays? Dreading your New Year’s resolution to exercise every day? It’s great if you’re a person who loves to jog, run marathons, or run on the treadmill. But what if you’re not? What if you just can’t motivate yourself to break a sweat—or if your joints and muscles don’t allow you to do it? There are many ways to move and get the benefits of exercise without even trying and have fun doing it.

Moving is important for many aspects of health, beyond boosting your flagging energy. The expression “Sitting is the new smoking” is very true. Prolonged periods of sitting are associated with greater risks for heart disease, diabetes, depression, anxiety, even cancer and cognitive risks: the brain's memory centers are shrunk in people who chronically sit for prolonged periods.

So, anything you can do to reduce the length of time you sit—like interspersing periods of movement with shorter periods of sitting—and any way you move more, whether walking from the parking lot to the grocery store, moving about your workplace, or taking a walk in the neighborhood, will be beneficial. Movement can give you a boost of energy when you’re fatigued, help you relax when you are anxious or stressed, and even prime you for creativity.

In our studies in which we fitted government office workers with wearable health tracking devices and measured their movement and stress responses during two and a half days, we found that people in open office settings were 32 percent more active than those in private offices and 20 percent more active than those in cubicles. That’s 1,000 steps more per day—your office could be your new gym! And those who were more active during the day were less stressed at night, slept better and were in a better mood the next day.

The spaces we studied were purposefully designed to provide many options for employees: bench seating where workers had their workstations, small private phone rooms, medium- and large-size conference rooms, a roof deck with café tables, and so on. Intentionally designing attractive spaces optimized for specific purposes will entice people to work in them and in turn to move their bodies to get to them.

Uninviting spaces, on the other hand, will keep people glued to their chairs. One worker described how the dark, dingy, windowless lunchroom at one of her previous workplaces remained........

© Psychology Today