You may have heard it before: Walking is good for your overall well being. It’s important for our health—besides burning calories—and the benefits gained when we put one foot in front of the other.
But that isn’t all there is to walking. I recently read an article on Leslie Sansone’s Walk At Home Facebook page that highlighted a Sanford University study on walking and creativity. How does walking help you? Does it contribute to your better health? Does it enhance your mental capacities? Does it boost creativity?
These were some of the questions Stanford researchers had when they looked at two groups of people: those who walked and those who just sat at their desk. We already know that walking is beneficial for all of us and contributes to our better health but could walking boost our creativity levels enhancing mental capacities? According to co-authors Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz, both with Stanford Graduate School of Education, creative thinking improves while a person is walking as well as shortly thereafter.
Maybe you can related if you’ve been stuck on something you’ve been working on for some time, and you even got up and paced back and forth in an effort to come up with some new ideas. Did it help? Probably more times than not, walking as you paced actually enhanced your mental ability to think.
The study found that walking—either outdoors or indoors—boosted creative inspiration. They concluded that the walking itself was the main factor, not so much the environment in which they walked. Another of their experiments found that walking indoors or outdoors produced twice as many creative responses compared to a person staying seated at their desk. Creative juices flowed for those sitting yet the ‘walkers’ had increased creativity.
Many well-known CEO’s have practiced the creativity increase when they’ve held some of their meetings ‘on foot’. Steve Jobs was one to have walking meetings as well as Mark Zuckerberg.
We definitely agree with Marily Oppezzo when she concluded that physical activity is important and sitting too long in unhealthy. They discovered that walking can increase your creativity and thinking ability.
So, do you need a new idea? Do you need some inspiration? Get out into God’s world, enjoy the beauty He’s created, and expect that He’ll give you some new creative ideas as you walk, walk, walk.