Harvard Researcher: ‘Sitting Is the New Smoking’ Is a Harmful Myth
Harvard Researcher: ‘Sitting Is the New Smoking’ Is a Harmful Myth
EXPERT OPINION BY JESSICA STILLMAN, CONTRIBUTOR, INC.COM @ENTRYLEVELREBEL
Oct 14, 2025
An accomplished scientist says worrying about how much you’re sitting at work is a waste of time. Make these small tweaks to your lifestyle instead.
More than 10 years ago Dr. James Levine of the Mayo Clinic coined the phrase, “Sitting is the new smoking.” Ever since, entrepreneurs and other largely desk-bound workers have eyed their chairs with guilt and suspicion.
If you work in front of a screen all day, it’s pretty hard to avoid sitting for hours at a stretch. Yet the media is full of articles insisting that spending all day on your butt causes metabolic changes that lead to an increased risk of a range of terrifying outcomes like heart disease, cancer, and early death.
The result is a lot of angst for office workers. But what if all that stress about sitting was actually worse than the sitting itself? That’s what one Harvard researcher contends. Instead of worrying about spending all day at your desk, he suggests making small tweaks to your lifestyle instead.
How much did our ancestors sit?
Harvard researcher and author Daniel Lieberman studies how the human body evolved the way it did. For this research he spends a lot of time in rural African villages studying the habits and physiology of people who live a basic, subsistence lifestyle similar to our pre-modern ancestors.
These villagers don’t have laptops or even electric lights so you’d expect to find them sitting a lot less than your average office worker. But that’s not what scientists have observed.
“If you go to study hunter gatherers… guess what they’re doing? They’re sitting,” Lieberman reports in a recent, in-depth interview for Big Think.
“Now, they may not be sitting in chairs ’cause they may not necessarily have chairs. They’ll be sitting on the ground, or they might have benches or stools. But it turns out that when you measure amounts of sitting in non-Western, non high-income populations, they sit pretty much as much as we do, about 10 hours a day,” he continues.
Sitting, it turns out, isn’t a modern scourge. It’s just what people do when they’re not engaged in some particular physical activity. And throughout human history, people have only been active for a small percentage of our days. (This seems true even further back in our evolutionary history — chimps are lazy too).
Sitting at work matters less than you think
Does that mean that being entirely slothful and never getting any exercise is fine for your health? Of course not. But Lieberman takes issue with the “sitting is the new smoking” rhetoric that causes people to feel angst-ridden about a totally normal aspect of human behavior for a couple of reasons.
First, it makes people stressed about something they largely can’t control and which doesn’t matter that much anyway. “When you look at the data on sitting, turns out that how much you sit at work isn’t really that much associated with health outcomes. It’s how much people sit in leisure time that’s associated with negative health outcomes,” Lieberman says.
Research has found, for example, that cramming all your activity into the weekend doesn’t seem to have negative health effects. Multiple other studies show that entirely doable amounts of leisure hours activity counteract the effects of a sedentary job.
There are better and worse ways to sit
Second, “Sitting is the new smoking” obscures the fact that not all sitting is created equal. “There are better and worse ways to sit,” Lieberman insists.
If you get up periodically to walk the dog or make yourself a cup of tea, sitting is far less harmful, research shows. It also helps to shift some of your sitting time, if possible, away from modern ergonomic desk chairs and to less comfortable set-ups that demand you support your own posture more.
“If I was sitting on a stool or I’m squatting on the ground, I would have to spend some muscles to keep my body going. That turns on the cellular engine of our body. It’s like turning on the car engine. It causes you to use up some of the sugar in your blood. It uses up some of the fats in your blood,” Lieberman explains.
You probably won’t be doing much squatting at the office anytime soon. Standing desks barely get used, studies show. But it is entirely possible to keep an exercise ball in the office to sit on now and again. And it’s even easier to set a literal or mental timer to tell you to get up and stretch every hour or so.
Less angst, more everyday movement
“Smoking is the new sitting” is a memorable catchphrase. The problem is it’s better marketing than science. Yes, literally never getting up from a chair is terrible for your health. You knew that already. But there’s no reason to worry that your office job is as bad for your health as a pack-a-day habit.
It’s entirely possible to sit all day for work all day and not ruin your health. As Lieberman puts it, “if you have a normal desk job, but you also walk around and get some exercise and do various stuff, you’re fine. There’s no evidence that there’s any problem with that. It’s a completely normal thing to do.”