I was a doubter until COVID. Then I built a habit of 30 to 60+ minutes of walking a day, ~1.5 to 5mi depending on length and pace.
Geez, the amount of stuff I got done, problems I solved, and general boost to well-being I achieved was lost on me until a job pushed those walks out of the workday. My productivity wasnât the same.
Definitely going to block off a walk around the harbor during most workdays going forward so I can refresh the slate so to speak.
It reminds me about this video where John Cleese talks about creativity. One of his points is that his work was better than some of his more talented peers simply because he set aside more time to let ideas mature:
Jumping spiders are extremely intelligent for their size. Something they do when they encounter a complex problem is sit and apparently simulate potential solutions until they settle on a plan.
Their solutions can involve indirect routes, paths that initially increase the distance to their targets, etc.
Walking, or jumping, is inherent to their existence. But the ability to wait and iterate on possibilities is uncommon strategy for tiny things.
> Something they do when they encounter a complex problem is sit and apparently simulate potential solutions until they settle on a plan.
Now imagine what ingenious plans they could come up with if only they took a walk instead of sitting while thinking!
Have you read this?
Would be fun to see if they could learn to think with Portals
How did we find that out? Are they physically acting out the stuff theyâre simulating or is there an EEG for insects?
It's our evolutionary background.
Land animals first evolved intelligence when we emerged from the cloudy, murky sea and developed the ability to see shapes (predators, prey) really far into the distance. This required the ability to understand the future and perform spatial reasoning. Not all aquatic species were exposed to such pressures (opportunities), since line of sight vision (especially traveling at speed) is limited.
We got really smart when we became endurance hunters and out-walked and out-ran our prey. Bipedal locomotion and sweating were clutch advantages for sure, but our brains became especially attuned to multi-tasking when walking and running. We could see our prey far into the distance and could plan hours in advance for how to exhaust and corner it. Especially as a group activity. This engaged spatial, temporal, collaborative, and complex reasoning.
We didn't evolve to think at a desk. We evolved to think because it greatly enhanced our hunting skills and survival fitness.
When you walk or run, you're directly engaging machinery that was fine tuned over hundreds of thousands of years.
Iâm always very cautious of âevolutionâ as a justification for any health/wellness advice. Iâd like to preface this point by saying I am a fan of daily walk, and do about 30mins of very hilly terrain daily. I just donât like your argument for it.
1. Itâs really easy to create a fictional narrative of what our ancestorâs activity was 50k years ago because of the lack of empirical evidence. The truth is we know only a little and guess at a lot.
2. Itâs been associated with many false claims. So many fad diets, fad supplements, and fad exercise routines have made use of evolution to build a narrative of why itâs healthy. Iâve seen both carnivore and vegans use evolution to explain why their diet is correct.
3. The modern environment is just different than the pre-historical environment. We have clean drinking water, unlimited sodium, modern medicine, air conditioned and heated shelter. To me the real question is what is the healthiest decision for me, not what is the healthiest decision for someone 50k years ago.
There are highly intelligent species such as whales and dolphins, which cannot walk nor run. There are also highly intelligent species that generally do not walk, such a octopuses and birds. Also you skipped other ways of locomotion, such as crawling and climbing. Sure locomotion is crucial, but it's not a simple just a switch to walking. You made it seem like intelligence is only about walking and running, but in reality intelligence was acquired as a long process of various adaptations. Other examples for crucial adaptations that are completely missing from your narrative would be communication, prosociality, or tool-using
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I'm convinced that humans can't (or at least, shouldn't) actually work 8h a day. I'd argue that taking an hour to exercise or walk during the work day and working maybe 6 hours would make people more productive and happier than just working 8h.
Unfortunately management thinks that lines of code written or token usage or seats in butts or {insert random quantitative metric} equals peak productivity.
Relatedly, I'm convinced that humans cannot achieve any form of peak performance in any domain (athletics, art, business, community organizing) without consistently going for walks. We're all aware of the programmer working at a problem for hours, going for a walk, sitting down, and then elegantly solving the problem in a few lines of thoughtful code (haven't we all experienced this?), and here is an example in another domain...
I have never been at my best rock climbing performance without a substantial amount of walking; even if I am training well, eating well, sleeping well, climbing with others, and super enthusiastic, the element of walking is for some reason critical.
My suspicion is that the human body is designed for walking (eg, we are upright, our shoulders adapted to swing the arm) and that myriad processes simply will not occur or will not occur optimally without walking. I believe restoration on a cellular level is enhanced by walking, that various cognitive and sub-cognitive processes are aided by walking, and that many of these processes sync up with a sort of supermodular (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermodular_function) effect when walking.
that all sounds great, but what if we just use AI to increase velocity and implement a 996 work schedule to squeeze everybody?
I argue that taking a minute or two every hour or so to do a few reps of an exercise clears people's thinking, lends perspective, provides fresh ideas, is great for general mental health, and hence, makes people more productive and happier than sitting for 8 hours or more and going to a gym after.
Small training sessions at work, throughout the day, are also great to build a strong team spirit and feel pumped all day. Unfortunately, people tend to rigidly compartmentalize rather than seamlessly integrate physical activity into their lifestyles.
I tend to agree. I had a gym trainer tell me that the best way for me to learn to do 100 pull-ups in a row (ie the Murph challenge) was to do a few pull-ups every hour or so (grease the groove) until I can do 100 in a day. Then just keep improving from there.
So it's good for strength too!
I found that my best 5-6hrs a day are enough to do the work that I could do in 8hrs. With less time I'm also forced to prioritise, prune more heavily, and be creative, but at the same time, there's stuff that in the short term is always a bad idea to automate and some dumb grunt work can get it done, in which working for longer gets more done if you only care about the short term (like management loves to do).
Same here. I have a personal mind frame of:
"If you have the option to work on something you like on your computer or just even glance outside into the sun for a moment, always choose the latter."
I always found walking around throwing a stress ball as I think out a new feature far more effective then heading straight to the computer. Much easier to think out the abstraction then getting stuck in the details of my first solution, and only realising a the flaws/a better way hours later.
Convincing people it's an important part of working though, that was the tough one. And now if you spend any time thinking people want you to use Ai for the thinking bit...
Take advantage of canceled meetings.
I step outside and enjoy nature for those few minutes, even if it is just to watch nature.
Besides the productivity boost (and I know you already mention a boost to your well-being), this is one of the simplest yet effective things you can do to improve your cardiovascular health. I had a heart attack at 40 and 30 mins a day is the minimum recommended, so 60+ is great.
But back to your productivity angle: Stephen Wolfram wrote about the productivity benefits (for him) of walking while working: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...
Walking, showering, sleeping, and riding a bike are great ways to debug code.
It's very cool to go to sleep and wake up knowing what the solution to the problem is.
The key for incubation for me is to make sure my brain can churn without distractions (that means no listening to podcasts, music, etc while performing said action).
Yup, that's the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network
It's the daydreaming/mind-wandering state that occurs when you're not focused on an external task. With all the stimuli of the modern world, I feel like we're being starved of crucial DMN time if we don't engineer conditions like the ones you describe.
Quite the interesting but unapproachable topic. Doesn't help that neurology logic on brain-level is dynamic and general rules are hard to extract.
Walking with no music + not using your phone. Leaves you plenty of space to think.
but sometimes I need a little burst of the phone/music to serve as a distraction and force me to unplug from the hard problem that i'm fixated on. once i've successfully started thinking about something else, phone/music off and let the productive mind wandering begin
And sometimes to not think. Taking a walk is a great way to clear ones head.
I find that even if I use my phone while walking I will eventually stop paying attention to the phone.
I remember during covid, cyclists were the ones in my town in a poll answering they missed their commute. It's such a nice way of thinking things through and then clearing your mind, then arriving home not thinking more about work.
Truth. Nothing is a greater spurn to creativity (cyclic mental exertion) than time away focusing on cyclic bodily exertion.
The hard part for me is stepping away when I'm grinding on some problem. It always feels like I'm sooo close and this next idea could be the one that lets me walk away victorious.
Usually I'm wrong though and taking a break would be a much better use of my time. Walking, biking, noodling on my guitar, or even going for a drive all seem to work for me.
Same. When you're grooving/flowing it's different than when you're "just on the cusp".
My only reliable "hack" is to have a workout/exercise partner and/or trainer so it becomes a mutual shared commitment.
It makes sense. It hard to think creatively when your environment is stagnant. You need some new sights and sounds to kick things along, especially when youâre stuck on something.
I like the story of Shigeru Miyamoto getting the idea for flying through archways in Star Fox from walking through archways in a Shinto shrine near the Nintendo headquarters. It wasnât from playing other video games or reading about game development, it was just from thinking creatively about his real world environment right outside the office.
I have really noticed recently that a lot of modern media (film, TV, videogames, etc) seems much more based on prior media than on the author's experience of the world. Like everything is now operating at a meta level. It's a little sad.
I wrote a response to this, but then I realised I was responding to the claim that modern media was more derivative, rather than what you actually said, which was that modern media is more _meta_.
Can you go into that a little more? Do you have specific examples that make you sad?
The first example that comes to my mind is the show Community, which I really enjoy, and which doesn't make me sad at all.
P.S. an article I linked to in my original response was https://www.filfre.net/2025/01/the-crpg-renaissance-part-1-f... which I mentioned as it talks about a historical standout in the genre but puts it in the context of the copycats and the schlock. It's now irrelevant to my comment, but I'd like to link to it anyway.
Not OP, but there is a wide chasm between what Community does and what OP was referring to.
Community's thing is that it is a meta show. It uses the meta it references to get a point across, make a joke, or provide a spectacle (a good example of spectacle are the Paintball episodes)
What OP referred to, and what I've noticed, was that media nowadays is just a mashup of what came before with little to say about it. Or to put it in other words: not transformative. The creator likes something, and they put it in their work because it's cool. There's nothing wrong with doing just that, but when you start seeing the same thing over and over again in different works, it gets tiresome.
We're so obsessed with filling every waking moment with something that we don't allow ourselves to have the "a-ha!" moment any more, so we default to "what if X and Y?" where X and Y are thoughts on the surface of our mind rather than two unrelated things that somehow click when the default mode network activates. For example: what do archways in a Shinto shrine have to do with a fox piloting a starship around? Absolutely nothing, and yet for Miyamoto that thought made sense.
I don't know if I have a good argument for it myself. I have seen a lot of people saying specifically that they based their {thing} on {prior thing} rather than something from life, but I haven't exactly kept a list. Beyond that it's mostly a feeling.
To give an extreme example, just to make what I'm talking about obvious, this recent Instacart superbowl ad comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXGTaGjqERc
Nothing about the scene or anyone in it is really connected to any reality; the whole thing is like a second-level simulation of prior media.
> The first example that comes to my mind is the show Community, which I really enjoy, and which doesn't make me sad at all.
"Yeah. This is a bottle episode."
How could you mention Shigeru Miyamoto and not mention that Legend of Zelda is primarily about exploring the countryside?
https://web.archive.org/web/20100204115941/http://www.gamesp...
> the intent of the original Zelda game (and every Zelda title since) was to give players a "miniature garden that they can put inside their drawer." His inspiration came from the fields, woods, and caves outside Kyoto that he had explored as a boy, and he has always tried to impart this sense of exploration and limitless wonder to players through his Zelda titles.
Days after I graduated high school in 2004, my parents moved me and my family out to a 15 acre property in the middle of nowhere. Mowing the lawn on a riding mower was an all-day affair. The time I spent on that mower with just my own thoughts were some of the most meditative and creative of my life.
I grew up driving tractors and diggers, it's a very similar thing. Up and down, up and down, Perkins AD3 at 1700rpm for 540rpm PTO shaft speed, it all sounds like a mantra. Write a prayer on a strip of paper, wrap it round the shaft, offer up a prayer nine times a second.
Poetry. I'm not Buddhist but I find the 'metaphysics' of their prayer wheels fascinating.
I'm not a Buddhist either but the Tao helps me find the Way to accept diesel being nearly two quid a litre right when the good weather starts and all the fields need worked.
> some of the most meditative and creative of my life
This sounds like a worthy pursuit. We control the most powerful machines to ever have existed, yet it's all too easy to use them for anesthetic distraction. Offline relationship and meditation help develop our capacity to use these machines for something better.
There is even a latin phrase for it: solvitur ambulando.
This is not what this means. This is not, "had an idea by walking", this means, I can prove the absurdity of certain philosophical ideas by just common sense observation (roughly).
I merely thought it interesting to say that the literal translation vs. the philosophical application (the link) would add to the interpretation and discussion of the posted article.
Solvitur bibando is Balmerâs peak?
Alcohol is not the solution.
Alcohol is the solvent. It dissolves the problem into a solution.
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Nice, new to me. Similar in meaning to "cut the Gordian knot"
Is there one for showering?
They didnât have showers, but you may recall Archimides shouted âEureka!â after a famous bath time discovery
auri imbres
Steve Jobs transformed four industries.
One transformation, for example, required getting permission to sell songs for $1 each when the labels all wanted to price each song differently. That required getting alignment from various titans at the record companies.
The way he accomplished this was to take these leaders on walks in the hills behind apple hq. Read about it in the biography of Jobs by Walter Isaacson.
Similarly, https://sfstandard.com/2026/05/24/los-gatos-netflix-headquar... (with trail photo)
> One place where youâd always find someone from Netflix: the Los Gatos Creek Trail, a paved walking path right behind the office. âWe would take our one-on-one [meetings] by just walking out of the building, down to the river, up to the reservoir and back, chatting,â .. Among the people frequently seen on the trail.. was [Reed] Hastings himself. That walk-and-talk tradition is still alive: On a recent spring day, it took just a few minutes after arriving for two people to emerge from Netflixâs office complex to stroll alongside the water, deep in discussion.
I was chatting to a therapist friend the other day about EMDR [0] therapy. In short itâs often used in treating PTSD through alternating eye movement, but also alternating sound in headphones or tapping the body on alternating sides.
The theory is that it helps connect the left and right halves of the brain to allow trauma to be processed emotionally.
Iâve been wondering since if thatâs why walking / running helps with creative processing?
[0] https://www.bacp.co.uk/about-therapy/types-of-therapy/eye-mo...
I can attest to this. I work in Midtown Manhattan. You'd think walking around meant getting distracted by the all the activity around you that you'd forget about the problem you're trying to solve.
But I've found that distraction is the catalyst. Creativity for me comes when I focus on something else for a while, not grinding on the same problem with unwavering focus.
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