The Last Word On Nothing

When I first decided to become a full-time writer, I did what any red-blooded American would do: I bought stuff. I purchased a bulletin board so I could pin up my to-do lists and story leads. I ordered a new planner to mark my new beginning. And I splurged on a new standing desk so I could become my best self. Once I became my own boss, I would stand all day, and be so productive! After all, a 2013 WIRED article declared that sitting was the new smoking; as an able-bodied person, I had the means to improve my health by standing, so why not take full advantage? Once I got the hang of the standing thing, I’d invest in a treadmill desk and reach my final actualized form. Becoming a freelancer meant becoming a master of my own fate. 

The joke was on me: I quickly discovered that I cannot write standing up. Any time I had to get down more than a paragraph, any time I got stuck in my thought process, or even if I had to write a medium-stakes email, I found myself pulling up the uncomfortable, shoddily made chair I’d bought “just in case.” (As a meta note: I actually started writing this while standing, but once I sat down, I deleted almost all of what I’d written and started over.) Sometimes, back when I could still have company over, friends would see my desk and ask, “How do you like it?” I felt like a fraud admitting the desk wasn’t working out the way I’d imagined. 

I was relieved to learn that several writer friends have the same issue, which one called “stander’s block.” One writer says he struggles to stand for “long stretches” or in-depth writing; another says she can send emails, transcribe, or even revise while standing, but can’t do any “real” writing. LWON’s own Emily Underwood says she “can only really write when I’m crouched in my chair like a gargoyle, horribly contorted.”

Is there some scientific basis to stander’s block? Perhaps there’s some link between body position and deep thought that helps explain why some of us have a hard time doing both at the same time. Some research revealed to me that this is a common intuition; in a paper about embodied attention, German philosopher Diego D’Angelo writes (bolding mine):

First of all, it is necessary (and not at all trivial) to notice that listening with attention to a scientific talk while standing impairs–at least to a certain extent–our capacity to focus. While it is certainly possible to understand a talk while standing, we tend to be distracted by our own body (switching the leg we put most of our weight on, for example). But we do not only try to avoid standing in order to understand the talk: even while sitting, we look for the right position of our legs and arms, the right posture of our back. Indeed, the posture of our body is crucial in determining our ability to really pay attention to something. In all these cases, we try to find a posture in which we do not have to think about the body any more; the body functions in such a way that we do not have to pay attention to it, allowing us to direct our attention toward something else that occupies us.

Beyond that intuition, though, there are few studies that offer convincing evidence to explain the role of body position on attention or concentration while working at standing desk. In fact, the vast majority of the research I found was tailored towards informing workplace policies, designed to explore whether employees will tolerate using standing desks. The handful of studies examining attention or concentration use methods that aren’t quite comparable to sitting down and writing. For instance, one oft-cited 2017 study found that college students’ performance on a reading comprehension and creativity game did not differ significantly whether they were sitting or standing, though students in the standing group reported feeling more engaged with the reading, while the sitting group reported being more comfortable. But those measures hardly map on to my daily life; a writers’ work rarely requires reading a passage from the GRE and answering comprehension questions, or generating a list of creative uses for everyday objects. (That does sound really fun, though!) Other standing desk studies’ metrics, like call center employees’ work output, were similarly ill-fitted to shed any light on stander’s block.

I can see why the NSF and NIH aren’t throwing money at this esoteric question, but the former researcher in me wants more definitive answers. My pet theory is that perhaps stander’s block results from force of habit. I’ve been writing since I was 6, and a solid 20 of those were the butt-in-chair kind of writing. Perhaps stander’s block can be kicked like a bad habit. After all, it appears there are some writers who can stand and write well. Rumor has it a certain person of LWON can write while walking. Susan Orlean, too, wrote about her treadmill desk, and some writers swear that standing even helps them write. 

If any students are desperate for a science fair project or thesis project, here’s a not terribly well designed starter study: Assemble writers with stander’s block, and require each of them to write 300 words as a baseline. Then, assign half the writers to practice standing while writing, and the other half to continue their current habits. After some period — say, a month — ask each to write another 300 words. Tell them all this writing will be judged, so you provoke the maximum amount of self-hatred, but actually measure the amount of time it takes them to write and their subjective ratings of the experience. Did the standing-practicers write faster, or report a less painful writing experience? Or are some of us just forever bad at thinking-while-standing? 

(Image from Wikimedia Commons. Clearly this person is sending emails, not writing a piece.)