Manoush Zomorodi

The point is to feel good in your body, Aisha, to reconnect your body to your brain, to feel like a human who is in the world, not just like a brain popped on top of a bag of flesh.

We all feel awful at the end of a long day sitting attached to our devices.

But why?

What exactly is happening to us physically when we use our technology?

And what can we do about it?

We're talking about like some pretty fun, positive ways of just having more joy and energy in your life.

We'll be right back.

Yeah, so when we first spoke, I described feeling like crap, like you described in your introduction.

At the end of the day, feeling totally exhausted from spending so much time looking at a screen and wanting to understand why I felt so tired.

And in the last few years, not only have we done this big study, but I've come to understand that as much as we have talked about the mental health effects of too much time online or social media, I think we are missing the biological, the body part of this conversation.

OK, so we're going to go sort of twofold.

First of all, there's the fact that when you are on a screen, you are mostly sitting.

And that has the effect of sort of kinking your body in two places like a garden hose.

At your torso and your knees, you're kinked.

Pressure backs up.

Your blood flow sort of gets limited.

And also your leg muscles are not stimulated.

You need your leg muscles to be stimulated in order to suck oxygen.

the glucose and the lipids out of your bloodstream and to process them and to push oxygen up to your brain.

If you don't do those things over weeks, months, years, chronic conditions like diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular issues can start to creep in.