The move out of the trees and into the shopping malls has not been good for us apes physically or mentally. Although the structure of our skeleton hasn’t changed over thousands of years since we were hunter-gathers on the African plains, the increase in the size of our brains has allowed us to create huge changes in our physical and mental environment.
If human evolution was put into the space of a week, in the last few seconds before midnight on Sunday night, we have suddenly shot indoors and stopped moving about.
As a result, the way we live has changed dramatically. We live ‘in our heads’ more than ever before and we are less active than we have ever been. We are no longer active hunter-gatherers. We no longer roam. And with that we’ve lost something vitally important; we’ve lost our predisposition to move.
We are no longer moving around for our survival. We no longer physically labour 3-6 hours each day to obtain our food. We’ve become distanced from nature, and with our increasing technology and our big brains, we overthink things and have become anxious and stressed. Our fear, courage and aggression no longer come from moving about in the wilderness but rather from looking at blinking computer screens under florescent lights. Some of us can be spending up to 93 percent of our day sitting in an office or an enclosed vehicle.
With the industrial revolution and the shift to division of labour, we have divided our society into jobs with highly specialised but very narrow skillsets. Today we do highly repetitive tasks instead of the wide variety of activities we used to do when we were hunter-gatherers. Many of us who work in offices are suffering from disorders created by a highly sedentary lifestyle.
In this industrialised age, we have created our own perfect storm. We have caged ourselves in. Physical exercise is decreasing, and obesity is increasing at an alarming rate, and we have forgotten something vital. We have forgotten that we are an animal.
Consider this: If you saw an animal sitting in a cage looking stressed or depressed, staring into space, not moving for large parts of the day, you would think that animal was sick. Yet that is what a lot of us do.
The good news is there is a simple, 60 second solution to this sedentary lifestyle health risk:
AnimalTaiso.