As a writer living in Bushwick, Brooklyn, I typically use going outside as a reward—but more often than not, I power through days on deadline without stepping away from my laptop. This week, however, I’ve committed to an experiment, the goal of which is to start to see walking as an important source of stimulus during the workday.
The study that will serve as my inspiration, published last month in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition and reported in The New York Times, had subjects walk for eight-minute blocks of time, then tested their capacity for brainstorming and creative thinking. According to Marily Oppezzo—who came up with the idea for the study as a Ph.D. student at Stanford University while out for a walk with her adviser—subjects were then asked to think of as many new uses as they could for a button. Post-walk, the undergraduates in the study increased their innovative output by 60 percent.
Given that I spend much of my time writing about fashion, I’d like to think that I would have been particularly successful in this button brainstorm, but, a few days into my experiment, it becomes clear that just getting out the door for the walk is the real mental exercise. I keep waiting for a time when I perceive a genuine need for it—a morning case of writer’s block, for example—or a pure moment when I know I won’t miss an email. But after speaking to Oppezzo on the phone (as a dietician, trainer, and yoga instructor, she also specializes in what she calls “motivational intervention”), I realize that the way I think about the walking needs to change.
Rather than using those eight minutes (or longer) as an opportunity to meditate on one specific solution to a problem, Oppezzo explains, walking should be a time to let your mind wander without a filter. This is also known as analogical thinking and “the best recommendation is to not judge your ideas,” she says. “Don’t filter!”
The results can be powerful whether you’re walking in perfect golden-hour sunshine in Griffith Park, Los Angeles (the site of my last, truly great walk, during which a friend and I brainstormed our personal goals for the year), doing a mini lap around Times Square, or making tracks in a carpeted cubicle-packed office. Even on a treadmill, in “a small room with construction noises and a slit window” or in the pouring rain—both of which were settings for walks in the study—the mere act of walking boosted creativity.
Around the Vogue offices, the mind-clearing effects of a scheduled stroll are well-documented in the less official sense. Fashion News Editor Emily Holt likens her daily constitutional to a “shower for the mind,” while Contributing Editor Lynn Yaeger has been known to whiz across town and back on foot between deadlines. A bit of digging reveals that Vladimir Nabokov, Constantin Brancusi, Virginia Woolf, John Muir, and Friedrich Nietzsche were all big walkers, as was Steve Jobs—a man whose visionary instincts make the case for stepping out regularly. Definitive proof that eight little minutes may be just the thing to help you find your creative footing.
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