A recent study from Stanford has found that walking can really get your creative juices flowing. Researchers looked at how creative people were when they were walking compared to when they were sitting down. Turns out, folks were about 60% more creative when they were on the move!
You might have heard that Steve Jobs loved to have walking meetings, and Mark Zuckerberg has been spotted doing the same. And let’s be honest, we’ve all paced around a bit to brainstorm ideas, right?
The study, led by Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz, shows that walking—whether indoors or outdoors—helps spark creativity. It’s not about where you walk; it’s the act of walking itself that makes a difference. Across the board, people walking came up with way more creative ideas than those just sitting around.
“Many people say they think better when they walk, and now we might know why,” Oppezzo and Schwartz noted in their study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
Walking vs. Sitting
While other research has looked at how exercise helps brain function, this study specifically focused on how just walking (not running or other intense workouts) affects creativity. They found that even walking on a treadmill in a boring room led to double the creative responses compared to sitting down. Oppezzo was surprised that even a treadmill session produced such strong results.
And get this: the creative vibes didn’t stop when people sat back down after walking.
How They Tested Creativity
The study involved 176 college students and adults who tackled tasks designed to measure creative thinking. Participants walked on treadmills or sat facing blank walls, both indoors and outdoors. They even had some seated participants in wheelchairs outside to mimic the visual movement of walking.
They tested different setups, like walking followed by sitting, and timed the sessions from 5 to 16 minutes. Most of the creativity tests involved “divergent thinking,” where participants had to come up with different uses for random objects. The results showed that most people were way more creative while walking.
In one test, when participants walked on a treadmill, their creative output shot up by 60%. Another experiment looked at how well people could come up with complex analogies, and 100% of those who walked outside generated at least one high-quality analogy, compared to just 50% of those sitting inside.
Not All Thinking is Created Equal
However, the study also found that walking didn’t help with focused thinking tasks that require a single correct answer. For example, when participants had to come up with a word that fits with “cottage, Swiss, and cake,” those walking didn’t do as well as those sitting.
Oppezzo pointed out that while walking can help kickstart creativity, it’s not a magic solution for every type of thinking. “We’re not saying walking will make you a genius, but it can definitely help in the early stages of creativity,” she said.
The researchers are excited about the findings and plan to dig deeper into how walking affects the brain. They’re curious if it’s just walking that helps or if other light physical activities do too.
In the meantime, this study gives us another reason to get moving. “Physical activity is important, and sitting too much isn’t great for us. This study supports the idea of mixing in some activity during the day, whether it’s a break at school or a walking meeting at work. It could make us healthier and maybe even more innovative,” Oppezzo added.
