Walk down any school hallway and you’ll see the same routine playing out: teachers (oh-so-kindly) telling students to stash their phones in backpacks, pouches, or lockers. While locking away devices can reduce classroom distractions, Manoush Zomorodi argues it’s only a Band-Aid. Instead of focusing on subtracting technology, a near-impossible feat, she says the secret to reclaiming student attention is adding something to the school day: movement.
Zomorodi is the host of NPR’s TED Radio Hour and author of the new book Body Electric: The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age. To test her theories, she teamed up with Columbia University Medical Center to see if people could successfully integrate movement breaks into their sedentary, screen-heavy days. The findings were striking: Short bursts of movement radically dropped participants’ fatigue, stabilized their mood, and elevated their productivity.
In this interview with EL, Zomorodi digs into its learning impact. She discusses how continuous sitting alters student biology, why a physically depleted brain can’t critically compete with AI, and how schools can transform students from passive screen-scrollers into high-performing “information athletes.”
We’ve spent years talking about how technology affects mental health and reshapes developing brains—but we rarely talk about its impact on students’ physical bodies. What led you to believe that “digital wellness” is actually a biological issue?
So for me, it started during the pandemic when I was working from home. My life had moved entirely to screens. I was socializing on screens, working on screens, relaxing on screens. I just felt like crap. The day would end and I would have nothing left in me. All I could do was crawl over to the couch and scroll on my phone.
But then, as things went back to normal, I continued to live on screens—and that feeling didn’t go away. I felt physically drained.
It made me wonder, What is happening in my body when I’m sitting and looking at screens all day? I ended up hearing a story on public radio about research done by Keith Diaz, a physiologist at Columbia University Medical Center. Keith’s mission in life has been to understand the minimum amount of movement that the human body needs to avoid ending up in an early grave.
The statistics are insane: The average American adult spends 12 hours a day interacting with media—sometimes double-screening, triple-screening. And three out of four American adults have a chronic illness, like diabetes or hypertension, many of which are preventable.
Keith found in his lab that moving for five minutes every half hour during these long periods of extended screen time made the difference. It radically slashed participants’ glucose levels and blood pressure. It brought back their ability to focus and stabilized their mood.
What exactly is happening to our bodies when we’re sitting and staring at a device?
Keith explained a couple of things. One is that our leg muscles need to be stimulated in order to pull the glucose and fats out of our bloodstream. Even if we’re at a standing desk, that’s not stimulating the muscles.
The other thing he said is that when we’re sitting, it’s like our body is a garden hose that’s kinked at our torso and legs. If a garden hose is kinked, pressure builds up. The exact same thing is happening with our blood flow.
When we sit, we’re often hunched over, and that constricts our diaphragm. We take short, shallow breaths, which means less oxygenation. When we have less oxygenation in the brain, carbon dioxide builds up. That’s when we get that foggy, tired, can’t-concentrate feeling. We essentially lose our ability to pay attention.
You suggest that subtracting screens isn’t the answer, but rather “adding back” what technology has crowded out. What does that look like in practice?
Keith and I ended up partnering together on a clinical trial to see if people could actually integrate these movement breaks into their lives. We asked 23,000 participants to take movement breaks for 5 minutes every 30 minutes. What we ended up finding at the end of a two-week period was that not only did participants enjoy taking the breaks—80 percent were able to stick with it all the way through—but their average fatigue level dropped 25 percent and their productivity rose.
Some creative educators are already using these findings to shift classroom culture. Take high school teacher JaYoung Kim, who turned the Columbia study into an interdisciplinary lesson plan. Because legal restrictions barred students under 18 from enrolling in the medical trial, JaYoung made it her students’ job to keep her on task with her five-minute breaks.
Along the way, the class used the experiment to study data analysis, self-surveys, the placebo effect, and the biology of movement. To model the habit, JaYoung would stand in her doorway between periods shuffling side to side, prompting some students to ditch their phones and take laps around the building before the next bell.
This is a mindset shift we have to make. As teachers have shared with me, across the board, we tell kids that sitting, looking ahead, or looking down is what being good is, it’s what being diligent is. We need to start talking instead about how fueling our bodies with movement fuels our brains, too.
There seems to be this acceptance that little kids need to move, but then once they get to middle school, high school, and college, it’s over for them.
You mentioned in your book the concept of “interoception.” How do screens interfere with this, and how can we teach students to recognize when their device use crosses from productive to draining?
Interoception is the body telling the brain you need something—a snack, a bathroom break, a quick stretch. New research leads us to believe that being on screens all the time disrupts these signals. I know for me, I can be so captivated and sucked in by what I’m working on that I’ll suddenly realize I haven’t gone to the bathroom in three hours or that my left foot is asleep. That connection to our bodies and what we need biologically gets lost.
I think it’s really hard to quantify when you hit that “too much on a screen” feeling. What if we worked with kids to find their sweet spot instead of just saying, “No more screen time because look what it does to you”? What if we had them identify how they feel before they start using a device and then check back in afterward? If they feel OK at 40 minutes, then maybe 40 minutes is their sweet spot where it’s relaxing and they’re getting something out of it.
We need to help them parse their interoception. Am I feeling anxious? Am I wired and tired? Do I just need to do some jumping jacks? Having those conversations with students and giving them the ability to understand their relationship with their devices is a gift.
How can teachers get tech-dependent teens to actually care about their physical state? How do we frame this so they don’t just roll their eyes and go right back to scrolling?
If you are an athlete, a musician, a dancer, or an airline pilot, you are probably very conscientious of your physical health because your work depends on how your body functions. But most knowledge workers, like me, spend our days looking at screens. To fuel cognitive work, we need to treat ourselves like “information athletes,” taking regular movement breaks throughout the day.
Cognitive switching can be especially draining. If you want to process all this information, then you need to recognize that every time you switch from one screen to another, read a notification or “heart” a post, your neurons are firing faster and faster. Your brain is burning through oxygen and glucose. If you don’t replenish it, that’s when the carbon dioxide begins to build up and you get that foggy, cranky, “inability-to-concentrate” feeling.
To fuel cognitive work, we need to treat ourselves like “information athletes,” taking regular movement breaks throughout the day.
The more we help teens understand that there’s a biological reason why they feel this way, the more it will make sense to them. When it happens, encourage them to literally stand up and go for a walk or take some deep breaths, and they’ll feel better. I think it’s just that simple.
How does keeping our brains and bodies physically replenished protect our capacity for critical thinking?
To test this out, I asked a researcher to put me in an fMRI machine. In the morning, I went into the machine and played this game that measured my ability to make good decisions and judgments, having taken in zero digital information beforehand. Then I spent the rest of the day looking at my phone—I went crazy doing email, social media, all the things. Afterward, she put me back in the fMRI machine to see how I played the game. Surprise, surprise: The good decision-making area of my brain got tired.
But interestingly, my brain actually did better on a subconscious color-coding test embedded in the game because the striatum—the habitual part of the brain—had picked up on it. The researcher explained that the feeling of wanting to play a stupid, mindless game at the end of the day makes total sense because we want to do something that’s habitual, where we don’t have to make good judgment calls.
With AI, more and more information is coming at us. Researchers use the phrase “AI brain fry” to describe this exact same feeling of fogginess and the inability to make good decisions when overseeing digital agents. What do we have to teach ourselves and our kids? The ability to parse what is good information versus bad, and what is useful to us versus a load of crap that’s been spewed out by an AI agent. Being able to replenish our bodies and our brains to be able to do the critical thinking that only humans can do is going to be even more important in the future.
What is your elevator pitch to educators who worry that adding movement breaks will inevitably cut into valuable learning time?
We need to stop prioritizing the quantity of learning over the depth of learning. In our study, participants rated the excellence of their work and productivity higher despite taking regular movement breaks. We have been told that getting into flow and uninterrupted work is the goal. But actually, there is beauty in interruptions; they can provide us with the fuel to re-engage and go again.
Research shows you really can’t concentrate on anything much longer than half an hour. That’s pretty much the max. To say that more continuous time sitting and working will help kids do better on tests is actually detrimental. Providing breaks gives kids time to digest, process, and think about the things that they’ve learned so they can come back with new ideas.
The internet tells us all to “touch grass” when we’ve been glued to our screens too long. For you personally—as someone who spends her life researching this—what is your favorite, low-tech way to get out of your head and back into your body?
The interoception researcher told me this one: Give yourself a sensory reset. Go into your bedroom, close the curtains, lower the lights, get rid of the dog, and lie down. Don’t listen to music, don’t think, just feel yourself in your body.
We all need resets these days because we are taking in so much that we’re starting to confuse things—I’ve had times where I’m like, is that my phone ringing or my stomach growling? I’m not even sure. This idea of a sensory reset, just shutting it all down, rebooting yourself—that’s my favorite.
When educators look at the overall landscape of digital wellness, what is the most critical piece of data they should keep in mind?
The number one thing that predicts the well-being of a kid is not their screen time; it’s their parents’ well-being. If you look at suicide rates over the last 20 years, they’ve skyrocketed, not just in kids, but in adults. We have to look at what is going on in kids’ lives and what is going on with their parents. What I worry about is that when we look at our kids, we’re only seeing their phones rather than the whole biological and emotional picture.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
