Conscious Choice: Change Your Chair, Change Your Life

December 2004 | Whole Health

Change Your Chair, Change Your Life

Depression, lethargy and — brace yourself — cellulite and varicose veins may all be by-products of one of the worst inventions of humanity...the chair.

by Dave Brian Butvill

Let’s first get something straight. There is no perfect posture. There are sitting and standing positions that are better than others. Yet, one of the worst possible postures is the right-angle seated chair position that serves to contort, distend and wreak havoc on our bodies.

When architecture professor Galen Cranz lectures to her University of California-Berkeley students, she encourages them to stretch out on the floor, or stand, or squat, “to do anything but sit rigid and still in those crammed auditorium chairs.” On a good day, she says, about a third of her audience accepts the offer, the rest presumably are too frozen in convention.

To Cranz, a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique — a system of posture and movement that works to improve ease and freedom of movement and motion in our everyday activities — the chair is the foe of comfort and stability. In fact, she argues most chairs are a “royal” pain in the butt. “Chairs were invented as a way to distinguish royalty from ordinary people,” Cranz says. “Kings and pharaohs used them and then the rest of us glommed on to them. Because our revered leaders sat in this right-angle posture, we ordinary people wanted to sit that way.”

So the chair design — as unhealthy as it is — has persisted, making it one of the most influential structures in industrialized culture. The average person in the West plunks down daily in some two dozen ill-designed seats.

But there is hope.

Pull Up a Chair ... or Not

I recently paid a visit to Cranz’s cozy home in Oakland, Calif., for an interview regarding her criticism of chair design and her recommended alternatives to it, which she addresses in her most recent book, The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design. In the center of her living room sat two chairs: a cushy, inviting La-Z-Boy recliner and a sterile black lounger—an armless contraption with a rigid pad, adjustable at the knees and waist. She gestured me to the lounger. Sure, I thought, take the good one for yourself.

What’s the problem with chairs?

Chairs aren’t practical; they’re hard on us physiologically. It’s better to squat, sit on a stool for a few minutes; be off; be walking. The chair was invented only for prestige purposes. Granted, it’s tiring to stand all the time and it’s nice to sit down. But there are a lot of different ways we can chose to sit.

Perhaps our biggest problem today with chairs is that seat height has been standardized at 18 inches off the ground, which is supposedly the length of the shin. That puts a terrible stress on the lower back for most people. Having a standard is ridiculous because shin length varies. At 18 inches, most chairs are geared toward taller-than-average people. They should be more like 14 to 16 inches high for a big percentage of the population.

So if we are going to have this right-angle seated posture, which I have doubts about in the first place, we should at least have multiple-sized chairs in public settings. There should be size a, b, c and d. You should walk into a space, see your size, pull it up and sit next to somebody who is the same size as you, or bigger, or smaller and they would be in their own chair.

Other than the burden of chairs that don’t “fit,” how is sitting hard on us?

Think about how you feel after performing any type of exercise — refreshed and energized, more optimistic, more hopeful. When you sit forever in a chair it’s just the reverse of exercise. You’re pooling all your fluids and reducing circulation, and this can make you feel depressed and lethargic. You are also stressing your structure and your internal organs.

See, the chair I’m on right now [the La-Z-Boy] is a little too soft. I’ve dropped into this chair, and the material wraps around and compresses my body. In contrast, the one you are on is more of a plane, so your ribcage can open out against it. That makes more internal room for your lungs and your heart and your guts and all your other organs. Your chair is better because it creates more internal movement. And because it’s more planar and less squishy, you can make gross motor movements more readily. There’s a link between “moving your body around” and what’s going on with your organs.

So all chairs are evil?

Of course not. But, posturally speaking, we need environments that support change and movement. A good chair allows you to sit in the perch position, which is a stance halfway between sitting and standing — a “sit-stand” where the pelvis rolls forward, the lumbar curve is preserved and the legs are in an oblique angle in relation to the spine. This position promotes circulation. There are several ways to do it [see illustrations]. People can use their kitchen counter or island so they can be in the sit-stand position to eat, do bills or work. For something inexpensive, you can buy a plain wooden stool that puts you in the perch position. One chair called the “Capisco” has a saddle seat with a space cut out for the thighs so that they can drop away. Rockers and lounge chairs, like the one you’re on, are also good. When you sit in a regular chair, you round your back into this big, C-shaped hump. Lose your lumbar curve [the arch between the tailbone and middle-back] and you get slipped disks.

You want very little padding, as padding is often too deep — you sink into it and it presses up around the “sit bone” into the flesh. You never want flesh to carry the load, bones should. Deep padding doesn’t allow your fluids to enter and exit your cells properly and you have a build-up of waste material, which is fatiguing. Moreover, I believe one of the reasons we have so much cellulite in this country is because our flesh takes on this load-bearing function that it’s not designed for.

Varicose veins is a problem in chair-sitting cultures as the posture forces a static right angle between the foot and the leg. That angle opens the leg’s saphenous veins to their maximum, subjecting their walls to constant pressure and ruining their elasticity. After years of sitting in school like this, the veins are permanently dilated. Later, an adult who works for hours on his or her feet or experiences pregnancy may need the elasticity. When it’s not there, the walls of the veins rupture.

We need to use the floor much more deliberately, especially for infants during the first year of life. Kids need hard surfaces to react against for their developmental patterns. If you want to relate to kids, you should go to their level, not try to get them up to yours. You don’t want to put kids in little chairs. We need to reclaim the floor.

Ultimately, I am saying we shouldn’t sit in any one position very long — that means moving, which radically challenges how we generally show respect for one another — by sitting still and paying attention. I’m not just asking to change this one little object but rather a whole cultural set of rules for how we relate to each other when we are working, recreating, resting and learning.

Science writer Dave Brian Butvill lives in Costa Rica, where human needs and the natural world often find a sustainable balance.

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