What do Albert Einstein, Virginia Woolf, Stephen King, Henry David Thoreau and Friedrich Nietzsche have in common?
They all credit walking as essential for helping their creative thinking.
Though walking may seem mundane, it has many health benefits, including improving longevity and making your brain younger. Research also shows that walking helps people come up with an essential ingredient for creativity.
“It really helps you generate ideas, novel ideas, original ideas,” said Alex Thabane, a researcher at McMaster University and the lead author of a recent meta-analysis that looked at walking and creativity.
Walking inspires new ideas
By definition, creativity is a cognitive ability that lets you generate something new and useful. To be creative, you need to use two types of thinking: divergent and convergent.
Divergent thinking is a spontaneous process that generates many different new ideas. Convergent thinking evaluates the quality of these ideas and narrows them down to find the best option.
Psychologists typically test divergent thinking in a lab with the Alternate Uses Task — asking people to come up with as many new uses as possible for common objects in a set time frame. For example, newspapers are not only great sources of information, but can also be hats, boats or airplanes.
In one meta-analysis of 23 studies published in May in PLOS ONE, which included trials involving the Alternate Uses Task, walking was found to have a large effect on improving divergent thinking.
The studies, however, found that walking didn’t have as much of a benefit for convergent thinking. “So it’s not particularly as effective in improving your ability to evaluate those ideas,” said Thabane, the meta-analysis’s lead author.
How people moved and walked in everyday life was also linked to their creativity.
In one 2024 study, researchers monitored the physical activity of 157 young adults over the course of five days and sent them creativity test questions modified from the Alternative Use Task as they went about their normal lives.
Walking in both the short and long term was linked to better creativity. People who had more steps right before answering a creativity prompt gave more original answers. And people who walked more in general also produced more creative ideas.
Your ability to think up new uses for a pen may not make you the next Leonardo da Vinci. But being able to work your mind this way are the “small little things that might be the ingredients of creativity” writ large, said Christian Rominger, a postdoctoral psychology researcher at the University of Hildesheim in Germany and lead author of the 2024 study.
Indeed, more physical activity is correlated with doing more creative activities — such as cooking, music and performing arts — and creative achievements, meaning how much work and recognition people have received in these areas.
In a 2024 study in Scientific Reports, Rominger and his colleagues fitted 156 people with activity sensors for five days. Those who had more moderate-to-vigorous physical activity and less sedentary behavior reported engaging more frequently in creative activities. They also reported higher creative achievements.
Moving freely may be the key
It isn’t exactly clear why walking wakes your creativity, but something is clearly afoot. Experts think the reasons may be part psychological and part physiological.
Getting up and about “creates a little separation from the problem at hand,” Thabane said. “And it gives you an opportunity to kind of like mind wander and think about things in a kind of unstructured fashion.”
Walking may activate the cognitive benefits of exercise in general by increasing blood flow to the brain and improving mood, which may help you come up with better ideas. However, Rominger did not observe a link between positive mood and more creative ideas in his research, he said.
But it could be that the freedom of movement that comes with walking may free the mind.
In a 2022 study, researchers found that walking was not as beneficial to creativity when people were restricted in how and where they walked. When told to walk back and forth inside an empty office room within a predetermined path, people came up with fewer novel ideas than when they were allowed to roam freely.
Interestingly, the same pattern held when people were sitting; when they were told to sit staring at a fixed point on a screen, their creativity decreased compared to when they were allowed to sit more comfortably how they liked.
“We didn’t evolve sitting; we evolved moving,” said Barbara Händel, a cognitive neuroscientist who was the senior author of the 2022 study. Whether finding food or shelter, learning, sensing and remembering things, “All these things were mostly done during movement. So it might be that because of that, our cognition is actually deeply ingrained in our motor system.”
Walking also changes what your brain receives from your senses of sight, hearing and touch. “All this processing will be qualitatively different once you start moving, and then you would also profit more from it,” Händel said.
In the longer term, walking (and other exercise) increases brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is important for neuroplasticity and growing new neurons, and improves sleep — all of which benefits cognition more broadly.
How to get more creative
The next time you feel your mind is stuck in a rut, remember you have a ready creativity boost at your feet.
“Walking is a highly accessible thing for most people,” said Thabane, who keeps it simple with a walk during lunch every day. “It helps me break up my day; it helps me work through problems,” he said.
Taking a stroll outside might add another benefit: Exposure to nature may help restore your attention. But studies show even a quick jaunt around the house or office can help you get unstuck.
Bring something to jot down all your great ideas — a phone or notepad can help you capture your epiphanies before they dissipate into the ether. “The problem with walking is that you are not able to be at the desk” to work on them, Rominger said.
And remember that “idea generation is not everything,” Thabane said. “I think walking can help you come up with those ideas, generate those ideas. But it’s important to evaluate them, and you might have to sit down and collaborate with others to do that,” he said.
Do you have a question about human behavior or neuroscience? Email [email protected] and we may answer it in a future column.
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