Got a nagging problem that you just can’t solve? Walking can help with that.

It’s dark when I leave for my morning walk. My body knows the 3km trek intimately, leaving my mind to wander. Some days I work through problems. Other days, solutions simply pop into my head. Almost always, I arrive home thinking more clearly. Most of us will have experienced this.

The Latin phrase solvitur ambulando means ‘it is solved by walking’, and history is full of famous thinkers who swore by a good walk. Thoreau said, “The moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Nietzsche believed “only thoughts reached by walking have value”, and Darwin took a daily stroll along his “thinking path”. But how and why does walking help us think more creatively and solve problems?

In 2014, a Stanford University study found participants’ creative output increased by 60 per cent when walking. Walking benefited ‘divergent thinking’ – exploring many possible solutions to tasks. (However, it did not benefit ‘convergent thinking’ – focused single-answer tasks.) The benefits were greater in nature but could also be noted on a treadmill, and continued after participants had stopped walking.

University of Otago psychology associate professor Liana Machado – who is known to pace her office when she reads and thinks – believes increased blood flow could be a factor, both during and after. “Sometimes you go for a walk and come back to the work and you realise you’re more productive, and it might be that you increased your brain blood flow, you got your neurons into a better physiological state and they can work more effectively.”

Walking, says Machado, “requires some cognitive function but is a fairly automated task, leaving plenty of resources for mind wandering”.

In 2017 and 2018, University of Auckland post-doctoral researcher Evija Trofimova facilitated events designed to do just that. ‘Walking, Talking, Writing’ aimed to get academics out of the office and into nature in an attempt to overcome writing blocks. While walking, they could discuss their projects and  challenges and, at designated points, write down ideas.

It wasn’t possible to quantify the outcome, but Trofimova says feedback was overwhelmingly positive. “Many commented on how they had arrived at new ways of thinking about their problems through conversation in the new setting.”

Trofimova points out that thinking – electrical signals between neurons – is a physical process, as is writing. Could this explain why walking marries well with both? There’s definitely room for more research. As neuroscientist Shane O’Mara observed in his 2019 book In Praise of Walking, psychology and neuroscience ‘have been slow to recognise the benefits of walking as a spur to creative thinking’.

So if you find you’re struggling to solve problems at work or elsewhere, try a walk. You may be surprised at how quickly a solution can be found.