Take a walk on the wild side: how hiking can boost your creative thinking

I’m writing this article – or the introduction to it, anyway – while on a country walk. It is freezing cold, but very pretty today, and the sentences feel like they come out much easier on my phone than they would if I stared at my laptop screen for the same amount of time, umm-ing and ahh-ing over each word. I do a lot of my writing wandering around – I even have a tendency to baffle my colleagues by going out for a walk in order to get something written, rather than sitting down at my desk.

Why do I find this helpful? And why does walking through a natural setting seem more useful than tramping down the high street? It has occurred to me on more than one occasion that I’m just being weird and the whole thing is an elaborate form of superstition. But, in fact, a little research shows that it’s official: a Stanford University study from back in 2014, called Give Your Ideas Some Legs: the Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking, came to the arresting headline conclusion that taking a walk can increase your creativity by up to 60%.

There is, if you can believe it, quite a bit more to the paper’s findings than this complicated-to-quantify statistic but, in essence, simply walking was found to boost creative thinking, while walking outdoors – under a blue/grey/white sky – was found to stimulate the most novel thinking.

We’re getting somewhere, then. A walk in nature can help you think in new ways. Novel thinking can constitute all sorts of problem-solving – it could be a way of tackling a tricky work situation; it could be a way of dealing with a difficult decision in a relationship; presumably there’s a fair chance it might work if you’re stuck on what to have for dinner that evening.

If it’s a major decision, a big walk might be in order – pull on your boots and get into nature for a few hours and you’ll be surprised by what might happen. The study also found that the benefits of the walk frequently continued for some time afterwards, so a lunchtime walk or walking into work could sharpen you up for the day ahead.

That clears that up then. Well, kind of. The Stanford study, being an exquisitely lofty work of scientific research, doesn’t actually seek to pin down the reasons why walking and walking in nature boost creative thinking – it just ascertains that it does. So I spoke to some people who might hazard a very educated guess.

Dr Alison Greenwood is the founder and chief executive of Dose of Nature, a charity that aims to improve the mental health and wellbeing of individuals through increased engagement with the natural world.

“Over the past four decades, the body of scientific research supporting the psychological and physiological benefits of going for a walk outside has been growing,” she says. “There is a wealth of evidence demonstrating the positive impact of any kind of exercise on brain functioning. But additional benefits of being outside in nature once the impact of exercise has been controlled for are now widely recognised.”

There are a lot of reasons for this, though they come heavily down to natural environments being more mentally relaxing.

“Most natural environments are ‘softly fascinating’,” says Greenwood, “requiring effortless attention, and are undemanding on our senses.” By contrast, she says, “our modern urban and indoor world is full of unfamiliar stimuli, geometric shapes and harsh sounds that demand our attention”.

She ventures some more esoteric reasons too. “The number of trees and plants in an outdoor environment affects the environment’s potential health benefits,” she explains. “One of the reasons for this is the intensity of phytoncides, chemicals secreted by all trees and plants to protect themselves from threats such as insects, fungi and disease. When we breathe in these chemicals it increases the activity of a type of white blood cell that kills infected cells in our bodies, boosting our immune functioning.”

Miles Richardson is professor of human factors and nature connectedness at the University of Derby, whose most recent book The Blackbird’s Song is about the importance of reconnecting with nature.

“Walking is a natural state for us as bipeds,” he says. “Generally, doing things we evolved to do is a good thing. The rhythm of walking can also be mindful, another route to creativity. Add nature to the mix, and creativity and imagination get a further boost.”

The truth is that, generally speaking, city-dwellers can have very little to do with nature at all, moving between flats and offices, exercising in striplit gyms. I’m lucky to live opposite a nice park, but I don’t have a garden, and actual countryside is something I have to save for the weekend. Clearly, if you have the opportunity to take regular hikes it’s going to boost your brain matter. But what’s a pragmatic step that somebody living in a metropolis can make to improve their problem-solving skills?

“Research shows that it’s about moments, not minutes,” says Richardson. “Walking around a city park with a renewed sense of awe and wonder at the significance of trees or the flight of birds brings greater benefits. The first step is simply to notice nature.”

Greenwood agrees: “Consider how much better you feel when you’ve been inside all day and you go for a little walk around the block. It might only be 10 minutes, but you come back feeling refreshed and revived, and with your attention restored.”

And as she points out, it scales up: “How much better than that do you feel when you’ve taken your full lunch hour to go for a longer walk in the local park? And how much better do you feel if you go for a full day’s walk in the countryside?” Facing a problem? You might be surprised where a walk can lead you.

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