By Paula Baniotaite, Healthier Jupiter Intern

Mental health is a key element to a person’s overall health. It plays an equally important role as healthy eating and active living to ensure people live their healthiest life. To help make sense of mental health’s role in healthy living, Healthier Jupiter worked with a student intern from Florida Atlantic University’s John D. MacArthur Campus to research various topics related to mental health and healthy eating or active living. In the HEAL (Healthy Eating and Active Living) Series, read about promising interventions encouraging people to engage both mentally and physically in healthy behaviors. The following blog post looks at the connection between walking, the outdoors and creative thinking.

If you’ve ever come back from a walk with a brilliant new idea, you may agree with the notable philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who once said, “all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking” (Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014).

The 2014 research report by Oppezzo and Schwartz goes over four experiments which aim to demonstrate the positive effects of walking on creative thinking. In these experiments, creative ideas were defined by novelty as well as appropriateness to the topic presented. The first experiment examined differences that walking on a treadmill or sitting played on creative (divergent) thinking and cognition in general (convergent thinking). The tasks that involved convergent thinking saw a mild decline while walking compared to sitting still. When it came to tasks that required creative thinking, there was a 60% increase when walking than while sitting down. Walking also increased the total number of appropriate responses in the creative category.

The second experiment slightly differed from the first by an inclusion of an additional condition in which the participants walked then sat; this was done to see if walking had residual effects on creativity after walking ceased. This experiment, as with the first, found an increase in creative thought production when walking. It was also discovered that creative thoughts were higher while seated after walking when compared to those who did not walk at all.

The third experiment wanted to see if the effects on creativity would be comparable when participants walked outside as opposed to on a treadmill indoors. The findings were similar to those previously discovered; individuals who sat after walking outside showed almost the same amount of creative thoughts as they did while they were walking outside. Also, those who sat and then walked outside showed an increase in creative thoughts.

The fourth and final experiment tried to differentiate the effects between walking outdoors, simply moving outdoors while sitting in a chair, and walking inside. The researchers found that simply walking produced the most structured creative ideas, while the outdoors showed to influenced creative idea flow (Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014).

Over all, these four experiments exemplified the positive influence that walking has on generating creative ideas; the researchers also showed that if one is not able to walk, being seated outdoors is more beneficial for creativity when compared with sitting indoors.

Likely partners to address some of these practices may include organizations such as America Walks as well as education focused organizations.

The HEAL Series focusing on mental health’s connection to healthy eating and active living is part of an internship opportunity with FAU John D. MacArthur Campus at Jupiter student Paula Baniotaite. Holds a Bachelor's in Psychology. Strong advocate for mental health and spending time in nature. Animal lover. Avid hiker and camper. Dedicated to spreading the message about healthy eating habits and living an active life. Proud vegan. If you are interested in interning with Healthier Jupiter, please contact joanna.peluso@jupitermed.com

HEAL Series: Brain Block? You Should Take a Walk!