Try a walking meeting

2/12/2013

Never forget that physical exercise has been shown to be the best brain stimulus. Try walking meetings to get a more creative output!
Don’t feel guilty walking away from your desk. In fact, quite the opposite: Studies have shown that taking short breaks can help you do your job better. It's in your (and your employer's) best interest to take a break and going one step further, going outside the building, has also been shown to reduce stress levels and make you happier.

Sitting in the same place all day, like behind your computer, can leave you uninspired, while walking outside provides additional stimulation and enhances creativity.

2 Comments

Arthur P

7/5/2014 08:05:49 pm

At LSE, the SU promotes free exercise classes: "get your blood pumping and your brain working". Now I get why :)

Sam Pepys

1/6/2014 08:22:12 pm

This takes things one step further:
At Stanford University, graduate student Marily Oppezzo and her adviser would go for walks to discuss thesis topics and one day, she thought: “Well, what about this? What about walking and whether it really has an effect on creativity?”
With the support of her adviser, Daniel Schwartz, a professor in the Stanford Graduate School of Education, Dr. Oppezzo recruited a group of undergraduate students and set out to see if she could ‘goose’ their creativity. She asked the students to sit and complete tests of creativity, which in psychological circles might involve tasks like rapidly coming up with alternative uses for common objects, such as a button. Then the participants walked on the treadmill, at an easy, self-selected pace that felt comfortable. The treadmill faced a blank wall. While walking, each student repeated the creativity tests, which required about eight minutes.
For almost every student, creativity increased substantially when they walked, most being able to generate about 60% more uses for an object, with associated ideas that were both “novel and appropriate”.
But most of us cannot conduct brainstorming sessions on treadmills, so Dr. Oppezzo went on to test whether the effects lingered on after walking had ended. With her next group of students, walking again markedly improved their ability to generate creative ideas, even when they sat down after the walk. These volunteers produced significantly more and subjectively better ideas than in their pre-exercise testing period.
She went on to move portions of the experiment outdoors, thinking that maybe walking outside would be much better for creativity than being inside a drab office. But surprisingly, her study showed that the volunteers strolling Stanford’s pleasant, leafy campus for about eight minutes generated no more creative ideas than when they sat inside. They were no more creative as a result of their plein-air walk than when using an indoor treadmill, facing a blank wall.
The full study was recently published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Try a walking meeting

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