Your Best Work Is Just a Walk Away

Doing our best creative work sometimes means tricking ourselves into leaving our minds alone. Here are six things to try while walking to achieve this.

Walking helps us balance between focused and diffuse forms of thinking. Illustration by author.

I’ve spent enough time indoors these last years to know my best ideas don’t happen at a desk. With only so many daylight hours, I’ve learned that sacrificing a few of them to do the seemingly unproductive is the surest path to new creative insights. Going for a walk is the best way to do this. It’s just a matter of planning such walks to get the most significant mental boosts. I call these my cognitive walks.

History is filled with famous walkers. Charles Darwin claimed to do his best work, not in his study, but outside on a d–shaped path at the edge of his property called the Sandwalk. “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” said Nietzsche, who walked with his notebook every day between 11 am and 1 pm. Dickens, the mentalist that he is, preferred to take long walks through London at night.

60% of people who walk are more creative than their non-pedestrian counterparts claims a recent Stanford study. Walking has been found to promote new connections between brain cells, staves off ageing brain tissue, increases the volume of the hippocampus (associated with memory and…