Look across any office or café and you will see most people fidget. Some people ‘have ants in their pants’, others fidget less, but all people fidget. People jiggle, wiggle, shuffle, and jive from birth until death.
Don’t discount fidgets as random or irrelevant; they are neither. Fidgets are brain sparks that detonate movements emanating from a rhythm programmed deep in the oldest parts of the brain and discharge across the body via neuromodulators and neural networks. Not just mammalian, fidgets characterize primordial slithering wormlike lifeforms too.
The importance of human fidgets went unrecognized because they were hard to measure, that was until the invention of ‘fidget pants’ a decade ago at Mayo Clinic. Since then, fidget sensing technologies have allowed scientists to learn how fidgets promote people’s limb movements, muscle strength, and the calories they burn.
Fidgeters are thinner, faster, more mentally agile, and have greater productivity than sloths. Babies learn to use their limbs through fidgeting and as people age, they fidget less and slowdown. Fidgets are more than nature’s reminder that you are alive, they are the brain’s programmed method to keep you alert, smart and, moving.
Are you born a fidgeter or can you acquire the Fidget Factor? Will Fidget-fit classes usurp Yoga, Pilates, and sweat-like-crazy boot camps? Life is in the detail; the smallest of small movements has much to offer. Get up and fidget yourself free.
