Fidgeting is usually considered as a sign of boredom or lack of attention which can be distracting to others. Parents and teachers often demand that their children and pupils stop doing it. But fidgeting could actually be good for their health. Research suggests it might help protect against obesity, improve cardiovascular health, and even save lives.
The children all followed the same procedure in the calorimeter: 30 minutes watching TV, ten minutes drawing or coloring, and 20 minutes playing with toys on the floor. We counted the number of times children changed posture and took that as our measure of fidgeting.
The fidgeting we witnessed—with colleagues from the Australian universities of Wollongong and Deakin—varied enormously, despite all of the children following the standard set of activities. There were 53 posture changes per hour in the most fidgety third of the sample and only 11 per hour in the least fidgety third. These differences directly affected the number of calories burned.
The difference between the most and the least fidgety groups was only around six calories per hour. But when extrapolated over months and years, this could lead to large differences in energy use.
Fidgeting as Health Strategy?
It is now well established that prolonged periods of sitting are harmful to health, and it is possible that fidgeting might reduce the harms of sitting. A study of more than 12,000 adult women in the United Kingdom found, as expected, that the amount of time spent sitting per day predicted the risk of premature death over the subsequent 12 years.At the start of the study, the women had been asked to self-rate their tendency to fidget on a scale of 1 (no fidgeting) to 10 (constant fidgeting). In the most fidgety third, the risks of premature death from sitting were substantially reduced compared to the least fidgety third.
Fidgeting is not considered as being important to health at the moment, but the growing body of research suggests that it should be. The evidence might even lead to new (and much needed) approaches to preventing obesity and promoting cardiovascular health.
Such approaches might be particularly practical as they involve fairly small changes in how we live. Fidgeting or standing breaks during long periods of sitting in the classroom, or at home, far from being an annoying habit, could be precisely what we need.