Your employees aren't burned out. They're indoors too much

"In 30 years of internal medicine, I have found that the most underestimated factor in health and longevity is where people spend their time. Indoor work is cognitively rich but biologically poor and screen-intense. I call this Digital Obesity: so overloaded on screen input that the baseline of the American knowledge worker has become brain fog, exhaustion, and an undercurrent of anxiety."

"What's unrecognized: this is predictable physiology, not a character flaw. What comes with it medically is chronic low-grade inflammation from indoor confinement. Inflammation underlies cardiovascular disease, diabetes, dementia, and depression. We treat these as separate diseases, but they have an unrecognized root cause. Together, they are an indoor epidemic."

"Our biology did not evolve to handle the constant monitors, artificial light, stale air and circadian disruption we now experience. The environment is not a background for work, professional practice or study. It is the platform."

Chronic health issues affecting modern workers—anxiety, insomnia, depression, cognitive decline, and burnout—stem primarily from excessive indoor confinement rather than individual character flaws. Indoor work environments, while cognitively stimulating, are biologically impoverished and screen-intensive, creating a condition termed Digital Obesity. This constant screen exposure produces predictable physiological responses: fatigue despite adequate sleep, caffeine dependence, sugar cravings, and nighttime hyperarousal. The underlying mechanism is chronic low-grade inflammation from indoor confinement, which drives cardiovascular disease, diabetes, dementia, and depression. These conditions are typically treated as separate diseases, but share a common root cause: human biology evolved for outdoor environments and cannot adapt to constant artificial light, stale air, and circadian disruption inherent in modern indoor work settings.

Read at Fast Company