Is Too Much Sitting & Sleeping Just as Bad as Smoking and Drinking?

A study of over 230,000 people says it is.

There has been a slew of recent research about how sitting too much could be bad for us, but a new study parallels the health risks of too much sitting and sleeping to those of smoking and drinking.

“Evidence has increased in recent years to show that too much sitting is bad for you and there is growing understanding about the impact of sleep on our health,” lead author Dr. Melody Ding, senior research fellow at the Sydney School of Public Health, said in a press release. “But this is the first study to look at how those things might act together.”

The Sax Institute’s study included over 230,000 Australians ages 45 and up — Australia’s largest study that looks at health as we age. The researchers determined how many unhealthy behaviors each participant engaged in, such as smoking, drinking, eating unhealthy, sleeping too much, exhibiting sedentary behaviors, and rarely exercising. While many people might argue that there’s no such thing as too much sleep, the researchers defined it as nine or more hours a night.

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About 30 percent of the participants engaged in two or three of the unhealthy behaviors, and over six years, nearly 16,000 study volunteers died.

Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that physical activity is one of the keys to a longer life. Those who weren’t physically active were 60 percent more likely to die than those who undertook more than 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity each week.

The researchers also found a particularly deadly trio: too much sleep, sitting, and lack of exercise. In fact, the study found that those who engaged in these three activities were at a four times higher risk of death than those who lead sedentary lives but got some exercise.

Smoking and drinking are often denounced as some of the unhealthiest choices we can make with our bodies, but the research showed that the combination of physical inactivity with either sedentary behavior or too much sleep was just as strongly linked to mortality as smoking and heavy drinking.

However, a limitation to the study is that the researchers didn’t incorporate other long-term lifestyle behaviors or conditions that could have played a role in increasing the risk of death.

But above all, the researchers warn that lack of physical activity poses the largest threat, and that it should be the one factor that’s addressed first and foremost. However, the combinations of unhealthy activities should also be addressed.

“The take-home message from this research — for doctors, health planners and researchers — is that if we want to design public health programs that will reduce the massive burden and cost of lifestyle-related disease we should focus on how these risk factors work together rather than in isolation,” study co-author Professor Adrian Bauman said in a press release.