This isn’t about walking – walking as a topic has been done to death
– by me, among others –
Don’t get me wrong.
You get fresh air, you get a mental reset – you get exposure to fractal patterns in nature… bird song, calming neurotransmitters, fresh air – it’s a heady cocktail.
It’s a thinker’s drug of choice. Nietzsche paced, Dickens wandered, Stephen King, Tesla, Darwin, Wordsworth…
…anyone really. If you want incubation, percolation, the slow untangling of mental knots, then yes: go and wander lonely as a cloud.
walking works & as an incubation exercise, it can’t be beat.
But sometimes you’re not incubating.
Sometimes you’re at the coal face of execution. Pretend you’ve already done the thinking & you don’t have several hours to spare.
You have an idea,
you have an outline,
you have work to do
You are in the groove, more or less. A long walk now would feel more like procrastination.
This is where I’ve found “exercise snacks” oddly effective.
Tried & tested
Stravinsky, when he felt stuck, would stand on his head. August Wilson kept a heavy bag behind his desk and would turn around and punch the living daylights out of it before returning to the page. Dan Brown, apparently, hangs upside down in gravity boots between writing stints, like Agent Dale Cooper. These are not fitness regimes. They are state changes. Physical jolts to the system. A way of knocking the nervous system out of mental ruts.
There’s real neurology here, if anecdotes and epistemological evidence don’t grab you. Movement increases blood flow to the brain. It gives you a hit of oxygen & glucose & changes your chemical environment – with BDNF & Dopamine both released. In poetic terms it shifts attention out of the narrow, clenched focus of the prefrontal cortex and into something a little looser, a little more associative.
Diffuse.
You can certainly feel it: the moment after a few squats or a brisk walk up the stairs, when your body wakes up and your mind seems to come back online with it.
It’s a supreme stress-buster, too. So if work anxiety starts to grow more debilitating than stimulating there’s no better remedy than to move vigorously
Streamlined
None of this requires a gym membership, special kit, or a costume change.
In fact, keep it streamlined.
Relying on good weather, on being able to find your walking boots, and your training gear, and your headtorch, and your reflective vest… that opens the door to procrastination. The more elements you introduce, the less likely you are to do it.
(Now, this isn’t a health blog – but if fitness WERE your goal, these exercise snacks apply here too…
…even those who exercise diligently either side of long seated days suffer the negative health impact of being still all day. See Here
…an exercise snack is a tonic for body AND mind)
A brain break
It is genuinely startling how little movement it takes – how small the dose can be.
Thirty seconds of push-ups. A minute of stepping on and off a crate. A few exaggerated stretches, body weight squats or pull ups. The effect is not subtle. It’s a reset. A change of state. The difference between sitting in the same cognitive posture for two hours and standing up, quite literally, inside your own head.
There’s growing evidence that regular movement improves cognitive performance, mood, and creative fluency, especially as we age, but from childhood, too.
Many schools now build movement breaks into lessons because attention wanes in continuous and sedentary settings.
Bodies and brains are not separate projects. Neglect one and the other sulks. Nudge one awake and the other often follows.
From inertia to ignition
So by all means, take the long walk when you need space for ideas to breathe. But when you’re already in the work, when the problem is not insight but inertia a change is as good as a rest. Try a short sharp shock – a circuit-breaker interruption.
Stand up. Do something physical that’s slightly out of character. Then sit back down while the afterglow of movement is still in you.
If you are using Pomodoros – that’s a good prompt for 30 seconds of air squats, some star jumps or a few box jumps.
Or you could work a bag or wrestle a bear if your style is more Hemingway than Joyce.
If your mind won’t move, move your body and see what follows.