by Vasco Duarte
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a story about coffee and how I think a walk to the great coffee place a block away is a very useful exercise. So when I came across this article on FastCompany.com called How Taking A 20-Minute Walk Every Day Transformed My Approach To Work I was pretty intrigued. It’s all about walking benefits and fighting ‘sitting disease’.
The story: Rachel Gillett and her colleagues at FastCompany performed a test; every day they took a 20 minute walk to see if it would restore energy, focus and creativity. Quite a challenge since, and I like this quote, “Looming deadlines have a way of making a walk in the park seem inconsequential”.
Actually, I’ve been familiar with the benefits of walking. When my ghostwriter was teaching copywriting he told me he came up with the idea of Concepting by Wandering Around since it had worked for him in the past. It worked quite simple: his students had to pair up, read a creative brief and were sent outside with nothing more than their wits and a couple of coasters. (From a Dutch saying: a good idea should fit on a coaster, as you often get the best ideas in a bar.) Walking around while talking about the problem helped the students not to lose their focus and they came up with great solutions, written down in one sentence. After my ghostwriter read this article, he knew why it worked.
So how did walking around work for Rachel Gillett? It indeed helped her focus and it did wonders for her creativity and freethinking. She also tells us that scientists found out walking increases creative thinking with 60%. I know quite some students who agree. So what can you do? Don’t get tempted by urgent, choose for important and just go out for a walk every day.
Image: Bernt Rostad, Creative Commons 2.0
I had a training coach for a while who wanted me to take 20 minute walks to boost my brain activity. He pointed to research which showed an increase in cognitive performance after moderate exercise. The research was done with pre-adolescent children, however I did notice that when I took a 20 minute brisk walk I would solve problems that I’d struggled with indoors. I also found myself with a lot of new exciting ideas for myself, but needed to jot them down quickly when getting back or risked forgetting them. I have also noticed that doing heavy exercise is totally useless for creativity, my body works too hard to have any space to think about anything else but how to breathe.
Links to the research:
http://kch.illinois.edu/research/labs/neurocognitive-kinesiology/files/Articles/Hillman_2009_TheEffectOfAcute.pdf
http://kch.illinois.edu/research/labs/neurocognitive-kinesiology/files/Articles/Drollette_2012_MaintenanceOfCognitiveControl.pdf
Love sources!
Here’s the source I found for the 60% increase in creativity mentioned in Melly’s article:
http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xlm-a0036577.pdf
Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking
Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz
Stanford University