alt Hacker NewsTaking a walk may lead to more creativity than sitting, study finds (2014)
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Walking, showering, sleeping, and riding a bike are great ways to debug code.
It's very cool to go to sleep and wake up knowing what the solution to the problem is.
The key for incubation for me is to make sure my brain can churn without distractions (that means no listening to podcasts, music, etc while performing said action).
It makes sense. It hard to think creatively when your environment is stagnant. You need some new sights and sounds to kick things along, especially when you’re stuck on something.
I like the story of Shigeru Miyamoto getting the idea for flying through archways in Star Fox from walking through archways in a Shinto shrine near the Nintendo headquarters. It wasn’t from playing other video games or reading about game development, it was just from thinking creatively about his real world environment right outside the office.
Days after I graduated high school in 2004, my parents moved me and my family out to a 15 acre property in the middle of nowhere. Mowing the lawn on a riding mower was an all-day affair. The time I spent on that mower with just my own thoughts were some of the most meditative and creative of my life.
There is even a latin phrase for it: solvitur ambulando.
I now take two very long walks/day- a "working walk" where I walk and answer emails and think, and a "relax" walk where I leave my phone at the desk and just look at the flowers and houses and dogs. It's been amazing for my mental health, physical health, and productivity.
I was chatting to a therapist friend the other day about EMDR [0] therapy. In short it’s often used in treating PTSD through alternating eye movement, but also alternating sound in headphones or tapping the body on alternating sides.
The theory is that it helps connect the left and right halves of the brain to allow trauma to be processed emotionally.
I’ve been wondering since if that’s why walking / running helps with creative processing?
[0] https://www.bacp.co.uk/about-therapy/types-of-therapy/eye-mo...
I’d say it’s possible to have creativity when you’re sitting as well. I like to think that’s it’s all about staying active. Reading, diarying, calling a friendind. All of that.
I can attest to this. I work in Midtown Manhattan. You'd think walking around meant getting distracted by the all the activity around you that you'd forget about the problem you're trying to solve.
But I've found that distraction is the catalyst. Creativity for me comes when I focus on something else for a while, not grinding on the same problem with unwavering focus.
I started doing this at work in the late 1970s: if I had to talk with someone at work about new code, design, etc., I would always suggest we walk outside for a while and talk+walk. Big win in creativity, making good group decisions, and making the work day better.
I started doing "powerwalks" on most of my mornings. I aim for the upper end of zone 2 (ca. 135 bpm in my case), which is basically walking as quickly as I can without running, for about 30 minutes. It's really great, as it's both a form of sport/cardio and a mentally refreshing walk. No headphones or input, but I do take a pocket notebook with me so I can write stuff down that pop in my head. On the days I manage to do it, I feel better, calmer, more focused, and my sleep the following night is more restful.
I'm lucky I walk twice a day with my coworkers, it's a parking lot not the previous place where it was a trail. It was beautiful in the summer under all that green. And there were paw paw trees so got to eat those when they were ripe.
Funny too like 3 years ago we were discussing ingesting manuals for a RAG thing and now that is my day job.
If they made a shower you could walk in, every single problem facing humanity would be solved in three weeks.
Steve Jobs transformed four industries.
One transformation, for example, required getting permission to sell songs for $1 each when the labels all wanted to price each song differently. That required getting alignment from various titans at the record companies.
The way he accomplished this was to take these leaders on walks in the hills behind apple hq. Read about it in the biography of Jobs by Walter Isaacson.
I would always walk around in a tight circle in my room for a quarter hour. If on a voice call, for hours.
Some of the most complex problems I've ever solved were solved when I was mowing my own lawn with a push mower. Just in a trance. Many of the best life decisions I've ever made were when I was on a walk, thinking things through.
Hear me out. One of the better things I did for myself. Electric standing desk (IKEA idasen, it's cheap and good), samsung ultrawide oled 49, and a small walking pad. Walking pad is like a treadmill, but small so I can easily put it aside and I can switch between sitting and standing and walking and I do all three during the day. It doesn't need much space even. I also have two chairs, one regular (also ikea, marcus - not great, not terrible) and a kneeling one for posture so I switch between when sitting. Really not much of an investment but overall great QOL improvement.
Kant was so famous for taking a daily walk at precisely 3:30 p.m. that the residents of Königsberg could set their clocks by it.
To add to the historical references, here's a quote from Nietzsche: all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.
Reminds me of this
Men who stare at walls (alexselimov.com) 724 points by aselimov3 28 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 337 comments
In the field of hacking, a great way to make progress on a thorny programming puzzle is to be anywhere other than in front of an actual computer.
Can confirm. Pomodoro is an essential productivity and creativity hack. We coders always knew it was true, that your breakthroughs come from walking away from your work, but until you find something like pomodoro you don't realize this is a great habit to normalize. It even works for the shortest breaks.
I think walking for around an hour at a time, with no music/earbuds, can be extremely enlightening. I find the first 15-25 minutes my brain is doing like a “cleaning” cycle almost where I think about very surface level things, and then once that is out of the way, my brain just goes on wild explorations of ideas.
I do see more and more that people are either afraid to be with their own thoughts, or don’t know that it is even an option given the amount of technology around.
"Walker" here and glad to see so many others agreeing this helps them. I also talk to myself and find it incredibly helpful, despite my wife thinking I'm a weirdo.
I hope as leaders and future leaders we can create a culture more tolerant of these practices, changing the perception that "if you aren't at your desk, you aren't working."
I used to go home during lunch every day to let my dog out. Many days, I was so busy that it seemed like a super chore that would really put me behind. But, it's insane how many insights I had and problems I solved when I forced myself to step away for a bit and do something else. Oddly, now that I work from home, and probably have more time to step away for 10-15 minutes, I do it less. Good reminder to start doing this more!
I get that effect while walking, but also from multi-hour highway (not local) driving when the road isn't crowded. Somehow, having my body do something that takes only a slight amount of continuous awareness, but not zero, seems to enable me to escape mental ruts more easily. For me, it allows for deeper concentration in the creative realm than I can have while sitting.
Friedrich Nietzsche: "Only thoughts reached by walking have value."
The best investment I've made in my mental health and productivity was a dog.
Don't know where I'd be without my executive assistant.
I like to take a long lunch break during work to eat and take a walk for an hour/two maybe a short swim aswell if i have the time. I find it very pleasant and that problems i was working on or things I was trying to understand more manageable. Usually its just an aimless walk around the city I live in, its nice to see things going on outside my tiny office/bedroom
Unless you like me, like to walk fast so you go back home ungrier than never because:
1. people walking like turtle in front of you
2. people on phone not looking at where they go
3. both
Any light intensity physical activity that allows you to disconnect.
I do the dishes manually for that reason.
This is one of the factors that make working from home better for employers than being oxygen starved under some flourescent lamp. Doing some chores is good for thinking too, though historically it has been considered unmanly so we're not going to find prominent philosophers and politicians promoting it.
EMDR therapy was invented by Francine Shapiro. She found walking to be effective on herself, and later found that most any form of "bilateral stimulaition" at the right pace will cause certain kinds of brain activity.
This is exactly why I am bullish on voice AI! Walking and voicing my thoughts out to an AI agent who can talk back or take actions for me is very liberating.
Two of the best things for my mental health is maintaining a 7 day moving average of +10k steps and working out every Mon-Fri during lunch time.
Realized this during a particularly stressful time in 2021 - back then, I used to spend hours walking just thinking through problems, all night long. I’ve since abandoned the all night long part, but have an almost daily ritual to walk around thinking about whatever problem - small or big - I’m working on at the moment.
I’ve also found that during these walks, the more I talk out loud to myself and move my hands as if I’m writing on a whiteboard, the faster I get to an answer.
In german, there is an idiomatic way of saying "I don't understand" (especially after attempting to do so multiple times) that literally translates to "Standing on the hose/tube", which is extra fitting here considering that, in both cases, a fix consists of getting up and walking away ;)
Best habit, by far. I'd also recommend taking a walk free of any devices. I leave my phone at home and walk through the park few mins away form my home.
Each morning, I take a 5K walk (about 3 miles).
It’s a good opportunity to “triage” the day ahead.
If I have a vexing bug, I often “fix” it, during my morning walk.
We needed a study for this? I've always had the best ideas while walking. Granted, I always forget them if I don't write them down, but I do have them
With agents, you can set them to work on a task, and then head out for a walk while having a think about next steps. Come back, review the results, give it the next steps, and then head out for another walk.
I wonder how hard it would be to get an agent to send me a text message if it gets stuck on something.
I’ve solved many technical problems on the way to or from a coffee shop about a 30min walk from my house :)
I am a runner and have a standing desk. When I run, my mind is more on than at the computer. These days when I run I mentally compose prompts for the LLM when I return to my computer. So beware the illusion that simply walking away is inherently, and unintentionally, meditative. Likewise at my standing desk, the physicality of standing turns all at-desk time into an almost combative wrestling match with my tasks. Just sharing… some optimizations from 15 years of life hacking but still can’t escape the deeper psyche stuff.
If you like this, you would love meditation!
I wonder what's the difference on creativity between people deeply specialized in a field and those that have invested interest in many different, unrelated fields, like programming, music and beekeeping for instance.
Always wonder whether this fits with Jeff Hawkin's "Reference Frames" where he ties movement to learning and understanding - and I would also say creativity.
Im not sure if Im being old and grumpy but why isnt this obvious?
I agree, this is how I solved one of the advent of code problems last year.
Completely agree. I used to take walks during the day to think through problems. I was put on a disciplinary for not being at my desk enough.
I did challenge it, saying walking helps me think, and asked whether they paid me to type or solve problems? They obviously said they paid me to solve problems, but at my desk... Sigh. Didn't stay there long.
I was a doubter until COVID. Then I built a habit of 30 to 60+ minutes of walking a day, ~1.5 to 5mi depending on length and pace.
Geez, the amount of stuff I got done, problems I solved, and general boost to well-being I achieved was lost on me until a job pushed those walks out of the workday. My productivity wasn’t the same.
Definitely going to block off a walk around the harbor during most workdays going forward so I can refresh the slate so to speak.