Splice Now

In another sobering reminder that long work days influence your health, a paper published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine reports that people who worked 11 or more hours a day were 66% more likely to have a heart attack or die of one than those who worked 8 hours. Or course, the paper only demonstrates an association — they’d have to do a different kind of study to prove causality. But 66% is a pretty unsettling number.

NY Times Article / Abstract of Original Article

Now that y’all are back from stuffing yourselves with stuffing, here’s a weird news item: researchers have been experimenting with having sedentary workers take two 10-minute exercise breaks every day. It turns out that in carefully controlled experiments, the energy and focus you gain from a couple of short breaks more than outweighs the time you lose taking the break. People come back refreshed, are able to focus better and are measurably more productive. Work-related injuries, including repetitive stress problems, go down, too. What makes the whole thing strange is that people take the break together: a work group will all stop at the same time and do something similar to yoga or stretching. Several companies have adopted the technique, and trials are going on at 70 places in LA.

As we in post production spend more and more time staring at screens, physical problems only increase. I can’t really see us ever doing such a thing, but maybe for that very reason I get a kick out of imagining everybody in an editing building stopping twice a day to work out.

Details are in this NY Times article, which is derived from a book describing the idea — “Instant Recess.”