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%.
