Heroic Interview: Sitting Kills, Moving Heals with Joan Vernikos

Foreign. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Joan Vernikos, who probably has the coolest job ever. Had the coolest job ever. She was the director of Life sciences for NASA, where basically she was in, in charge of making sure that her astronauts were healthy before, during and after their trips into outer space. Which is, if it isn't the coolest job ever. That has to be certainly tied for first. And she's written a great book called Sitting Kills Moving He Moving Heels. And the subtitle is How Everyday Movement Will Prevent Pain, Illness and Early Death and Exercise Alone Won't. It's literally changed my life. And I'm really excited to chat with you about some of my favorite big ideas. Joan and I appreciate you taking the time.

That's wonderful. Let's go.

Well, let's go. Let's start with Gravity 101. So talk to us about gravity astronauts, the effects on our astronauts, and then we'll apply that to our day to day lives.

Well, other than in physics books and classes where we read a little bit perhaps sometimes about Isaac Newton and the mention of gravity passed across our path, or Star Trek, where we were introduced to the concept of humans floating around in space in weightlessness and how gravity could affect the human body, we knew very little or we knew very little. And when we started out, we knew nothing. It was except for plants. Now we knew about gravity and plants because lots of experiments we did in school, we're putting plants on their side and watching them grow up towards the light and down the roots towards gravity. And we learned a lot about plants and that gravity had something to do with a healthy plant. But other than that, talk to a doctor and they would say, well, you know, so what's the problem? Gravity is all around us, so why do we need to worry about it? Well, then we started thinking about sending humans into space and we started, okay, what's going to happen? Well, stress, okay, you put a man on top of a rocket, surely that has to be stressful. Well, that's the reason I was hired by NASA. I was hired by NASA for my stress research. How the brain regulates the response to stress. And I went fully expecting to see wondrous great big responses to getting shot off into space and landing. And much to my surprise and everyone else's, the first time we actually measured something in the urine of the astronauts on a daily basis was Gemini 7, which was in 1966. And they were up for 14 days. We think now, 14 days, shuttle, 14 days was a lot. But we did it back in 1966, lo and behold. What happened was that during the flight, while they were in space, stress hormones were very low, much lower than they are normally on the ground. Yes, they were high before they were shot up. You expect them to be anxious. They were high after they landed, but during flight they were low. And of course, we thought we'd done something wrong. That's natural, isn't it? Your natural tendency is to, oh, dear me, I failed. And it just didn't make sense. Nobody believed it. They said, you know, can't be true. Something was up. And that was very, very awkward and very difficult. And I thought, well, that's the end of a beautiful career. I better start looking for something else to do in this place. And so we turned my attention to gravity and to how gravity affects the human body and if it affects the human body at all. And we started measuring things in astronauts before and after flight. And yes, your heart rate went up and your blood pressure went up, but that wasn't very exciting. It was expected. So we started looking at simulation. And you can't simulate absence of gravity on the ground because it's here, it's all around us. But you can reduce its influence. And the way to reduce its influence is what every child knows is jump in the pool and sit in water. And in water, the influence of gravity is reduced. The buoyancy of the water reduces the influence, the pull of gravity towards the center of the Earth. So we used sitting in water for a while. Well, sure enough, it mimics the changes that you see in astronauts in flight. And then if you. One other way. But you can't keep people in water forever. We soon discovered that, and we would like to, but we couldn't. Another way the Russians had studied was putting people in bed. So when I'm standing up, gravity is pulling in the head to toe direction downward towards the center of the Earth. If I lie down, it pulls across my chest. So the influence on my body, the pull on my body is reduced because it's only across the chest. And that change in the direction of gravity produces very interesting changes that are very similar in those that astronauts experience in flight. And that's how we set out to really try and understand and map what happens to the human body when you reduce the influence of gravity. And we still use. We call it bed arrest.

That's amazing. Can you share some of the stats? I was just dumbfounded by some of the stats of an astronaut goes into space For X period of time, they come back and they've aged how much in their blood plasma?

Well, now they're talking. Now that we've been up there consistently for six months, we've only got one guy who's been there longer, one US guy, but we have several that have been there for six months. And what we have seen is that what we thought, the changes we thought, yes, sure, they happened, but surely they would adapt, they would stabilize. I mean, they don't just keep going downward, right? Not so. They keep going and going, and I think, where are we going? This is very serious. The bone loss, the muscle loss, the changes in blood pressure regulation, the fluid volume is reduced, and when they come back, the balance and coordination is affected. You have a tendency to pass out, to faint. Now, all kinds of changes, vision and other things have been observed. So it appears, if you think that you lose, you and I lose about 1% of bone density a year. Okay. In space, you lose about 1% a week to a month. And there has been one guy who's been up there six months and came back and had lost 30% of his bone. Wow, 30% is, is sizable. And there was no indication over the six months that anything was stabilizing, anything was plateauing off. So when is it going to stop and where is it going to stop? We still don't know.

That's amazing. And then, of course, the book is about. Look, these same negative effects of leaving gravity as an astronaut affect us when we're constantly sedentary. Can you talk to us about that connection?

Yes. I call it the gravity deprivation syndrome. Because if you look at it from. A baby born from the relative weightlessness of the womb experiences gravity for the first time. First time. So it can't pick its head up. We know that right away. It can't push itself up. It can't stand and walk. So it has to learn. It has to strengthen the muscles in the back of the neck and strengthen its arms and figure out how it can work against gravity until it can stand, bring its feet together from wide apart to bring them together. If you see a returning astronaut at the bottom of the shuttle steps, they're always standing with their feet wide apart. And that is as a safeguard for their balance. If you ask them to walk, they'll walk forward with their feet wide apart. And if you ask them to turn the corner, they might run into the wall. And if you do rats, if you fly rats, it's okay to talk about rats on your program. If you fly rats and they Come back, they do something very interesting. They actually drag their foot, the top of their foot and then place it down. So they drag it and place it down. And that's with just a few days, seven days, you send a rad up and you see it right away. So astronauts also, when they return, have to relearn how to place their foot down one at a time and eventually bring their feet back together until they can step forward and put one foot in front of the other. So it's a relearning process when they come back. So you literally forget in space. Let me tell you a story. Rick Seyerfotz was a commander, eventually a commander of a shuttle on Neurolab. He was a pilot. When he came back, we put him on the little platform that swayed to measure his balance. Any changes in his balance. And I'm standing there, profile, watching him. And they're doing. The scientists are chit chatting and doing this thing they shouldn't do. And they say, eyes open, eyes shut. And then I see Rick gradually leaning forward and forward and forward and forward. And I think, oh my God, this great strapping guy is going to fall over. And. And my instinct was to try and catch him, which of course was dumb because I couldn't have. But fortunately other people came also and grabbed him and he shook his head and said, what happened? And they said, well, you were about to smash your face on the floor. He said, I never had any sensation of falling. Never any sensation to put my hands out to protect myself. Now, this was nine days. Nine days. The maps we develop in our brain that tell us where things are relative to our, in our environment. The things that help you touch your nose when you shut your eyes. Can you touch your nose when you shut your eyes? Pretty good. You'd be amazed how many young people can't, my doctor said one day, touch your nose and shut their eyes and touch your nose. And I said, what's all this about? He said, oh, it's an early test of Alzheimer's. I said, thank you very much. But any obstacle to the brain would prevent you from accessing this map that you develop, you and I develop about our environment, where things are without our looking at them. I mean, we know where things are, right? And blind people have to learn also differently. Now what happened to the rexier force is he lost. Those maps were erased in nine days. And it took him about 15 days to restore these maps. Now, obviously with six months, they get an awful lot of erasure happening. What we learned though, which is very exciting Is because we used to think once erased, they're gone. But what we learned is that you can restore these maps. And what that tells us is that we constantly need to work to keep those maps working. So when we sit all the time, when we don't move, when we don't pay attention to our environment, when we don't challenge ourselves by moving our arms and our legs in our environment, then we are in fact erasing these maps. We're letting these maps disappear, but we can restore them. And that's the beauty of what we learned for the first time. It just reversed that whole idea.

That's fascinating. Way before we were really getting into the neuroplasticity, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Well, that is truly fascinating. Let's bring that to us at our desks. And a lot of the practical tools you walk through in the book are obviously to move from the sitting that kills to the moving that heals. Can you talk to us about neat non exercise activity thermogenesis, if I remember correctly?

Yes, yes, I can talk to you all day about that. It's the little movements we make all day that we don't pay attention to. And that which our parents and grandparents used to do in the course of living. I mean, they had to do them to live. They had to go to the well and get some water. They had to squat and cook. They had to bend over a whole bunch of times and pick up things from the trees and do all these. All these things some machine does for us now. Okay, I call my dishwasher Maria. It's, you know, I love it, it's great. But I don't have to do what it does for me. I don't have to go to the river to wash my clothes, etc, etc. That doesn't mean we don't clean our house and so on, but nothing compared to what our parents and grandparents used to do. Now these are the little movements that we little and bigger that we did, we made, they made all day long in the course of a day. Now, my latest theory, and I'll jam it in here, is that really. It came down to the fact I've had time to think after I retired. It's wonderful. You're lucky because you think all the time, right? And you read and you listen to people and you think. I came to the realization that what I tell people is that as the world goes around and around, around itself, around the sun, we have day and we have night. And during the night we lie down in bed and we sleep. And when we lie down and sleep. It's a bit like our bed rest subjects, lying in bed, where we mimic the reduction of the influence of gravity. Of course they don't sleep in bed, but that doesn't matter. They are lying down and then you know what happens? The sun rises. Great. So what do you do?

I ask you, what do I do personally?

Yes.

Get up out of bed, brush my teeth, meditate. And then I think we're getting to the punchline, I sit down some more, I read and work. And now with your wisdom moving a heck of a lot more. But tell us.

Well, what you do is you wake up first of all, you open your eyes, little activity and then you sure enough stand up, you get out of the bed and you stand and then you move and you go and brush your teeth and do whatever and the rest of it. What we forget, what we normally are supposed to do, is move all day, every day, including weekends. So we don't necessarily have to go to the gym to do this activity. It is part of our day. As long as we are awake, folks, let's move. We're not meant to sit when we wake up, we're meant to move. And then at night we go to bed and we sleep. And that's the natural sequence of events. So these movements are these non exercise activities a way to draw the line? It's a question of intensity. It can be. Walking is a function, is a movement. But if you overdo, it's an exercise, it's an exertion. I see this non exercise activity as the foundation. This all day intermittent on off stimulus. It's an intermittent all off stimulus that keeps your body tuned. There's no reason you should just tune your piano or your guitar. Tune the body. And this on off the standing up and sitting down, standing up and sitting down. And it's not just the legs or just the arms. And this is the difference from structured exercise because it's more comprehensive. I mean you can do small activities with your hands. You might be knitting, you might be cooking, stirring a pot of Sophia Lorenz's favorite pasta sauce recipe, whatever, mopping the floors, gardening, shoveling snow, raking leaves, you know, all the little functions we do, big and small to various degrees that help us move, that we have to move, to do, to accomplish. And that's the non exercise activity. What is interesting is that if you exercise vigorously once a day, if you go to the gym and do your, you know, I ask people in my talks, do you exercise? Oh yes, I get lots of hands. Good Great. How often, how long? Okay, about an hour, three to five days a week. Okay. And what you do the other 24 hours, huh? Silence makes you think just because you exercised. And we've grown accustomed to the concept of exercise as you've done it. Tick it off. And you know we've done it. Not. So if you sit the rest of the day, you do not prevent the changes that are associated with a prolonged sitting. So exercise alone won't do it. You've got to have this on off tuning thing, which is a different kind of function. It is both circulation and postural, ideally, which is the inner ear that controls your balance and stimulates a whole bunch of things. Muscle, bone, now the regulation of blood pressure and of course, coordination and cognition and lots of other things.

Yeah, this was the idea that really transformed my sense of perspective. Just the idea that you can be an ardent exerciser and be sedentary. And that idea of, yeah, as you said, we can go hit the gym even for an hour a day. But you drove to the gym sitting down, then you came back to the office, sat down basically all day. And that's going to lead to the negative results no matter whether we're working out or not.

They are two different things. It's a difference between being healthy and being fit.

Ideally, we're both right.

We want both. Yeah, we need both. But first you've got to be healthy, I think. And it doesn't help you just to be fit and not be healthy. And there are people who are very fit and are not healthy.

Yeah.

Like nerf runners.

Yeah. Who again, are active and sedentary. Can you talk to us? You call them G habits, these non exercise movements that have all the positive benefits. Can you give us some examples of the G habits? Some of your favorites maybe?

Oh, I think a trampoline. Jumping on a trampoline is a great G Source. It's about 4G, four times you're standing position. One of the best activities, non exercise activities you can do. Play, any kind of play, any kind of play. Swing on a swing, skip rope, hang upside down. Anything that relates your center of gravity to gravity, whether it's upright or downward, it doesn't matter. Just enjoy it. And intermittent, repetitive, all day, every day. You're awake, the system says you're awake. You move. It doesn't say, oh, it's Sunday, you know, it doesn't compute that way.

To your point either. The shutdown occurs so quickly. Right. And you aggregate enough of that. Oh yeah, you've got me. We have a Little kind of a rebounder. A mini trampoline downstairs we've had for years that my wife has been a huge fan of, and I've. She uses all the time.

I'm.

I am now encouraged even more to use it more often.

There you go. Excellent. Anything you see, it's in the vertical, and it is intermittent, and it is, you know, okay. Some of these vibration vibrator machines are coming in, but this is the elaborate way of doing it. A little trampoline is easier. I mean, lots of things are much easier. Just jumping, I mean, or standing up from your chair. There is a test that this professor of aging at Fullerton, California. Fullerton does. Deborah Rose with all her new candidates, and she has them sit on a chair with their arms on their shoulders, their hands on their shoulders, and sees how many times you can stand upright and sit down in 30 seconds without leaning on anything. Ideally straight up. Not this way. And if you are less than nine in 30 seconds, you need help. If you're more than 14, you're okay. And nine to 14 is about average. But hey, you need to go to the toilet. It's a basic function that your body needs to do. So this motion, you need to have to be independent. All these little activities we need to survive. So they're survival modes.

Yep. You made the really strong point for the older population of just. That's it. That's the core. Independence is the ability to get up and get down with strength. You know, when I was going through the book and I was reviewing it for my notes in preparation for the video, I couldn't find the thing. Did you say that, like, jumping up and kind of doing like a. Like a jumping jack was like the ultimate kind of motion? Did you mention that or did I make. Did I just misremember that you probably.

I may or may have not. I mean, what I mentioned is stand up and wave your arms about, and.

That being just a super simple.

Yeah, but you have to have the alternative. You have to have the change. You have to sit down. This is where, you know you have to sit down to stand up. I mean, I know it's silly. It sounds silly, but you won't have the standing up unless you sit down. So it's. You need both. And when you sit down, if you don't plop and you go down as slowly as possible, then you make it a more constructive activity.

Well, this is the whole point of your. One of the main points of your book is you can construct all these little movements throughout your day. And in aggregate, compounded over time, they have a huge impact. So even just getting up without support. Right. Putting our hands on our shoulders and just using that as just a mini opportunity to move. So good for every aspect of it.

Fabulous. You can do it at various times during the day whenever you kind of get the urge. I mean you can squat too. If you can't squat, you can sit down and stand from a chair or go to your toilet and practice. People may not associate that function, but it's. But standing up many times, ideally, you know, at least every 20 to 30 minutes.

Yeah. I said after reading the book, I set a timer, just a simple little time max, you know, 20 minute countdown where I'm obviously reading and writing a lot. I'm standing right now and it's know I do chats like this, it's easy to stand, but I just don't write as well when I'm, when I'm standing yet. But anyway, I set this, this timer realizing I'm active and sedentary and wanted to change that. And it's amazing to me how fast 20 minutes goes.

Oh yeah.

Just now it's the discipline of get up and then do a little bit of movement, even just for a minute.

And it's a habit. It's a habit because what I do, if I'm getting grossed and you know, sit down, I'm riding, I say, oh well, another five minutes, you know, and I really need to get this thought down another five minutes. And I find that some. It's half an hour is gone and it's easy.

Yeah, that's exactly. I've disciplined myself now where it's, there's no negotiation. The sound goes off, I get up and you know, the train of thought would be there and you know, and the reality is I actually not only get the long term benefits, but you get revitalized. I mean there's a level of energy that comes just from a simple set of movement that then obviously freshens us.

Yeah, but look at the child. Nobody teaches it how to use gravity. If you want to know what to do, just look at the child or be a child again. Tumble and hopscotch and you know, stand on one leg, hang upside down, whatever.

Constantly moving to your constantly moving. And that it wasn't something you have energy.

You wonder why kids have so much energy, but because they move. Yeah, I mean it's chicken, egg.

And I think your point, that's a really important one to go back and highlight for a moment, you know, 100, 150 years ago, even certainly thousands and tens of thousands of years ago. We didn't outgrow that phase. That was just who we were and what we did all day, every day, every moment of every day.

Right, right, exactly. And now we have our kids with their heads. What I am terrified about is the angle of the head, which is heavy, pulled down over one of these texting, whatever, machines. And all day, doesn't matter where you are.

You wrote a great testimonial for Eric Goodman in his book True Form. Just that idea of. And you talk about it. Standing tall.

Right.

And just how important it is to actually extend and to decompress is the word that he used.

Push your head up.

Yeah. So standing tall. Walking tall. Sitting tall.

Sitting tall. Sitting tall. Pushing your elbows back on your chair. When you're sitting, just push your elbows back. Not your shoulders, your elbows. Straight back. That's it. Straight back. It feels great, doesn't it?

Yeah, it's. It's the exact opposite of the rolled over. Hunching.

Right, right. Natural thing is to do this. But this is much better. Feels better.

Yeah. In his line of. Sternum up.

Oh, yes.

That was so helpful for my sternum. Yeah. Chin slightly down. Can you talk to us about the mental side? You talked about some of Ellen Langer's research. Can you talk to us about that?

Well, I think the mental side is fascinating. And more and more stuff that is credible is coming out. The cognitive. The effect on cognitive function, especially in kids, is really serious. Kids, I think upright desks are the best thing for kids. You say, well, you know, they don't. I said, look, the kids I see are sort of slumped over some desk. It's not standing up. And it's the change and the energy, and it increases. It stimulates cognition. Plain and simple. You know why? Because when you stand, when you sit, blood. Blood rushes to your feet. Okay. Where it's got nowhere else to go. There's no reason for it to go anywhere. So when you stand up, suddenly blood is still at your feet and you need to pump it up to your head. Otherwise you'll pass out. Plain simple. Now, if every time you stand up, and in fact, as your blood is pumped up to the head, you have increased blood flow in your brain. Not in your head, but in your brain. And people think that if they hang their head down, that will send blood to their brain. Not necessarily it will send it to the head, but not to their brain. So every time you stand up and you change position, you stand up from your chair, you do your 20 minute bit. You move up that stuff Eric Pepper does with his students in San Francisco State, every 30 minutes he gets them up and they wave and they down. And you don't have to stand for a while. So it's not calories to stand up. You burn 12 calories. Okay, start counting. You know how many times you need to do that to start making it sense? Out of calories. I'm not saying the calories you burn are bad, but not enough in the grand scheme of things. So it is the blood that's going to your brain, taking oxygen, taking glucose to your brain, that suddenly says, who? Okay, energy. And so your improved cognition. Now, if you slump, if you slouch, and if you sit in a nice comfy chair to watch whatever goofy program is on television, what happens? The blood goes to your feet and stays there. It stays there and stays there. And what happens to this poor little brain up in there? It doesn't see any oxygen, it doesn't see any sugar, it doesn't see anything. And you go dumber and dimmer as you sit. So kids need to be moving at school all the time. So you can have these high tables, like that Dickensian desk, you know, that were high. And ideally with a rod across that they can put a foot to rest and change position. They're much more alert. And I think cognition is going to be one of the most important things that's powerful.

And I'm standing on a cushion. It's like one of those like mats, but it's like rather thick, so it actually acts as a. You can almost.

I have one.

Yeah. Is it Kaibun or. Kaibun.

Yeah, yeah, that's great.

Yeah. I mean, it's literally, as you were saying that I realized I just got it recently. I didn't realize it was quite as springy as it is.

Yeah.

I want to share a quote that you shared. You said, which is related to what you just said. You said nothing speeds up brain atrophy like immobilization. And here we are, an entire population voluntarily immobilizing itself with its sedentary, comfort oriented lifestyle. Gravity can't help us when we're sitting. So powerful, you know, I want to hear your thoughts, if you could, on telomeres. You talk about it.

Yes.

Can you share?

I think it's very interesting, extremely interesting. Because at last there is a direct measure of something that you can associate with your mitochondria and their activity. And they seem to gradually disappear with sedentary behavior, with lack of exercise, with aging. In space. And I don't know, there must be something else as well, which we haven't found found yet. I mean, we never have found everything, have we? There's always something else. And I find that exciting to think. You can't say, well, you know, your telomeres are gone, ciao. No, come on. There are other things happening as well that we never discovered. And, and you can, I think it's a wonderful thing because we now believe that we can actually stimulate the enzyme that makes these telomeres telomerase. And that's what, of course, pharmaceutical companies are trying to focus on. But all you have to do is move.

There's the magic pill.

It's a hell of a lot. It's cheaper. Why would you want to go and buy something to help your telomeres grow when you can do it just by standing up and moving?

That's so good.

It just blows my mind. What I worry about is that this changing these habits, this lifestyle. We're not going to stop technology, period. And we shouldn't. But we have to work with the technology companies to say, okay, how can we rearrange? How can you rearrange what you construct so that it incorporates movement, especially among the kids, or it incorporates posture instead of being like that with your head down so that we can work together to resolve. It's not. You are at fault. Technology is bad. We've got to eradicate it. We never will. It's idiotic. And we're not going to find pills that are going to correct all our ills. They haven't so far. So why should it work now? I mean, there are always things that help. If we can't bother to eat properly and sleep properly, that's my other side. But we have to really have a movement that approaches a discussion. And I don't know what the answer is. I mean, but they're the bright people. They design something before they let it out. They need to look at it in terms of the impact on health as a novel, as another way, because they look at it in terms of how much you use it and all those other things that they assess their technology. But we really need to develop a way to persuade them to incorporate into their technology development a health friendly factor. Don't you think?

I do. And then, you know, take responsibility with this is what it is. And then how do we interface with that?

That's right.

In as optimal way as we can. Via a lot of things we talked about. I mean, even I, I, you know, I'll pull a Book out and while I'm reading, have a book on my head to remind myself of, okay, there's one way to do it, or I can do my normal hunched over posture. And I think it's, it's finding those little G habits to the micro movements. The opportunities throughout our days to optimize just a little bit more, bring a little more mindfulness to it as we continue to evolve and hopefully get more products to support that optimal approach as well. Well, is there anything that we didn't touch on? Obviously we simultaneously covered a lot and just scratched the surface of what we could talk about for hours and weeks. But is there anything in particular that you think would be. Be important to highlight?

I think it's very important to alert people that change from, from age 20 on, we go downhill, so we're told, and we go downhill to a great extent because we don't send any blood up to our brains. Whether you go to college and sit in a bean bag with our feet up or whatever we do, even if we exercise, we just progressively are sitting from age 20 on. Now, a lot of the changes we see in astronauts are what we consider aging. Same features and they happen faster in space, which is wonderful as a test system, not wonderful for the astronauts, but I think we have to step back and say, look, you're not old at 60 or 80, you're old at 20. The minute you stop jumping around and hopscotching and being a child and you get serious, which is not healthy for anybody, you need to continue to be aware. And when you're aware, which I guess is mindfulness by another word, when you're aware of your body and what you're doing to it, then I think you can actually prevent completely and delay what we call aging. So, hey, telomeres at work.

Yeah. Through simple movements throughout our days.

Simple movements. It's very simple. You see, that's a trouble. It's not expensive and it's up to you.

The mundane, simple habits consistently engaged in or where it's at. I love it. Joan, thank you so much. I appreciate you and your wisdom. And again, I'm just so happy to be connected. And Joan's book sitting kills moving heels. And then Joan Vernacos, is that the best place for people to connect with you?

Yes.

So Joan Vernikos. Vernikos is spelled V E R N I K o S. Joan vernikos.com Connect and learn more about Joan and her work. And yeah. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Isn't it a bit odd we went from math to science to history, but somehow missed the class on how to live. For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule.

Of course, it's too late to go.

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