#ThinkfullyHabit: Follow your feet
As we know, walking helps our creative juices flow. What is also becoming clearer is that how we walk is important too. As Dr Barbara Handel, neuroscientist from Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg reveals, “It is not the exercise itself that helps us think more flexibly.” It’s moving with the freedom to go in any direction that’s most helpful.
“There was nowhere to go but everywhere.”
WHY?
Walking without a prescribed route is most beneficial when we need to come up with more creative solutions. Moving freely in any direction of our choice is important for our minds. If our walk requires us to look for visual markers along our path or follow a map on our phone or our route is stipulated, it reduces creativity. Walking without restriction encourages and supports our divergent thinking because as our attention broadens, we become less focussed. It is this that encourages cognitive flexibility to switch between different ideas that are not usually strongly associated with each other.
A recent 2022 study went even further. It looked to see if the benefits of unrestricted walking are also seen with sitting. They found that freedom of movement is critical to improve performance when sitting and walking. It’s the unrestricted nature of movement and not the type of movement that seems to be important. Essentially, when we need ideas, we need movement - and movement that’s not suppressed or forced into regular or prescribed patterns.
So, if we’re sitting and we need to come up with new ideas we shouldn’t sit fixated at a computer screen with minimal movement of our eyes, head and body. Instead we should freely look around the room, swivel around in our chairs and change positions. Even small movements can help. If we are walking, either alone or with others (perhaps on a walking meeting) to brainstorm ideas, we shouldn’t worry about where we walk. Instead we should give ourselves the freedom to randomise and divert our path as we go.
When our bodies are free to wander in whatever direction or pathway they like, our minds are also free to wander to make new neural pathways in our brain. Freedom to move and freedom to think go hand-in-hand. As Dr Barbara Handel sums up, "The important thing is the freedom to move without external constraints.”
REFERENCES
Murali, S., Händel, B. Motor restrictions impair divergent thinking during walking and during sitting. Psychological Research (2022).