If you’ve ever felt your mood flatline somewhere around 3 p.m. after a full day in your chair, new research has an almost insultingly simple fix: get up and walk for five minutes, once an hour.
A study published June 24, 2026 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine followed 11,484 people through a two-week program called the Body Electric Challenge. Participants were split into groups that took a five-minute walk at a comfortable pace every 30 minutes, every 60 minutes, or every 120 minutes — and then reported back on how they felt.
The people who moved most often, every half hour, got the biggest lift in mood and the steepest drop in fatigue. But the hourly group landed in the sweet spot: most of the benefit, without a break interrupting your focus every 30 minutes. The researchers called the once-an-hour walk the best balance between actually working and actually being doable on a normal workday.
In recent years I’ve made sure I’ve incorporated this as much as I can into each hour of the day. Five minutes is such a short time that all it really takes is a bit of reminding. If you remember to do it, then you can do it. If you’re on a phone call, don’t do it while sitting down, just walk. It can be pacing, you don’t have to go far! Or if you are heading to the bathroom, take the long way. Remember, a 5 minute walk is two and a half minutes one way and then two and a half minutes back. It’s so easy.
There’s nothing better than a quick walk to get your blood moving during the 3pm crash most people suffer from. The moment you start to feel drowsy, just go for a stroll. If you can go outside for a couple minutes even better. Even though getting up and walking is the last thing you want to do, your body will thank you for it.
Journalist Manoush Zomorodi, who created the Body Electric series that ran the challenge, traces the idea back to one Columbia researcher.
“Keith Diaz is a physiologist at Columbia University Medical Center, and he has spent his entire career trying to figure out how little can we get away with moving so that sitting doesn’t kill us, basically. And in 2022, he published a small study that gives us a great idea. He found that just five minutes of gentle movement every 30 minutes had dramatic effects. It slashed blood sugar and blood pressure. In another study, he found that inactive people who traded 30 minutes of sitting for 30 minutes of movement every day could lower their risk of a premature death by 18 percent.”
— Manoush Zomorodi, TED
The five-minute rule
What makes this worth paying attention to isn’t “exercise more.” It’s that how often you break up sitting seems to matter as much as how much you move overall. Five minutes, easy pace, once an hour. No gym, no gear, no arriving at your next meeting out of breath. And because work performance held steady across the groups, this isn’t productivity you’re trading away for the sake of your step count.
The practical version is about as low-effort as health advice gets: set an hourly nudge on your phone and use it. A lap around the block, a slow walk to refill your water, a phone call you take on your feet. The point is just to interrupt the sit.
Sitting still all day has a quiet way of draining you. It turns out standing up and moving — even a little, even just at the top of every hour — is enough to push back.
If you’re not motivated to get up and out of the chair, then you need some kind of trigger. A dog walk is always great. But one sneaky way to get yourself up and out of your seat and walking around is drinking lots of fluids. This serves two purposes. One, if you are drinking water that is a great thing to do for your body in general. And it gets you up and going to the fridge. But second, it also makes you pee a lot! Which also gets you up. I drink so much water each day that I typically am going to the bathroom every hour or so. And every step counts no matter where it’s taking you!
Remember, to stick with any new habit, you just have to keep doing it. Getting a smart watch that tracks your steps and stand hours is also a great way to gamify these numbers. Keep at it and do whatever it takes to make it a daily ritual.
Source: British Journal of Sports Medicine (June 2026); reported via Good Morning America.
Joseph has been writing and editing for a wide variety of publications over the last decade. He loves covering news in the health and wellness space and has written extensively about all aspects of wellness for a wide range of publications.
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