How does walking help with creativity?

The world’s most expensive creativity machine is probably the office chair. Millions of people faithfully report to it every morning, sit in it for eight hours, drink two cups of coffee beside it, attend six meetings from it, stare at three screens on it, and then wonder why not a single original idea visited them all day. Meanwhile, somewhere outside, an elderly man wearing worn-out slippers is quietly walking around the neighbourhood and accidentally solving a problem that has defeated an entire corporate team. Evolution must occasionally look down at us and shake its head.

Doctors have been prescribing walking for centuries. Patients have been ignoring it with remarkable consistency. I have spent almost three decades asking people to walk for diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, arthritis, fatty liver and heart health. Nobody has ever frowned when I prescribed a tablet. But the moment I prescribe thirty minutes of walking, they negotiate as though we are discussing an international peace treaty. “Doctor, can I walk only on Sundays?” “Will climbing stairs count?” “Can I split it into three WhatsApp walks?” Yet one of the greatest medicines I have ever prescribed cannot be bought in a pharmacy. It silently manufactures something no tablet can produce—fresh thinking.

One consultation returns to me every time I read new research on creativity. A young software engineer sat across from me, looking utterly exhausted. His blood tests were almost normal. His blood pressure was normal. His sleep was not terrible. “Doctor,” he said, “I feel as though my brain has become old before the rest of me.” He wasn’t complaining about memory. He was complaining about imagination. The ideas had stopped arriving.

I asked him a question that had nothing to do with medicine. “When was the last time you walked without your phone?” He laughed. Then he stopped laughing. After nearly half a minute, he looked up and admitted, “I honestly can’t remember.” That answer disturbed me far more than anything I had found in his medical reports.

Three weeks later, he returned with the relaxed smile doctors love to see. “Doctor,” he said, “my manager suddenly thinks I’m becoming creative again.” He had not attended a motivational seminar. He had not bought an expensive productivity course. He had simply begun taking a forty-minute walk every morning with nothing in his ears, nothing in his hands and, for the first time in years, enough silence inside his head. It reminded me of something medicine repeatedly teaches us. Sometimes healing begins not by adding something to life but by removing what has been making too much noise.

The modern world has quietly declared war on boredom. Every empty moment must now be filled with a notification, a reel, a podcast, a message or another headline announcing something “breaking” that was apparently broken only five minutes ago. We have become frightened of our own unoccupied minds. The irony is delicious. Creativity has always preferred exactly those empty spaces we keep trying to eliminate.

Neuroscientists have a fascinating term called the incubation effect. It describes what happens when we stop attacking a difficult problem directly. Instead of wrestling with it endlessly, we temporarily step away. While we believe we are doing something entirely different, the brain continues working behind the scenes. Suddenly, often without warning, the answer appears. The ancient world called it inspiration. Modern science simply gave it a longer name.

Walking seems to be one of the most reliable ways to trigger that incubation process. The famous Stanford experiments found that creative output increased by roughly 60% while people were walking. What surprised researchers even more was that walking on a treadmill facing a blank wall produced almost the same benefit as walking outdoors. That finding overturned a popular belief. We assumed mountains, lakes and forests were performing the magic. They certainly enrich the experience, but the real miracle seems to begin the moment our bodies settle into the quiet rhythm of putting one foot in front of the other.

The newest evidence makes the story even more convincing. In 2026, researchers pooled data from 23 studies involving more than 1,000 participants. Their conclusion was remarkably consistent. Walking substantially improved divergent thinking—our ability to generate fresh, unusual and original ideas. It had little effect on convergent thinking, the mental process used to choose the single best solution. Suddenly, a mystery that has puzzled writers, scientists and entrepreneurs for generations began making sense. Walking fills the basket with ideas. Sitting at the desk helps us decide which fruit to keep.

That distinction is wonderfully liberating. We have been expecting our desks to do two completely different jobs. We sit there demanding that the brain invent, evaluate, organise and perfect an idea all at once. The poor brain protests by opening another email instead.

The biology behind all this is equally beautiful. Walking increases blood flow to the brain and encourages the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, a protein often described as fertiliser for brain cells because it helps neurons grow, connect and adapt. At the same time, stress hormones begin to fall, mood improves, and attention becomes less rigid. Imagine trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle while somebody keeps shouting instructions into your ear. Now imagine the room gradually becoming quiet. The puzzle itself has not changed. Your ability to see it has.

Another intriguing explanation involves what neuroscientists call the default mode network. This network becomes active when the mind is not intensely focused on an external task. It is during these apparently idle moments that the brain begins to connect distant memories, imagine future possibilities, replay conversations, and discover relationships between ideas that previously seemed unrelated. We casually dismiss this state as “daydreaming.” The brain treats it as one of its busiest working hours.

Our ancestors understood this without functional MRI scanners. Indian philosophy has long celebrated mouna—not merely the silence of speech, but the silence within consciousness itself. Walking alone before sunrise naturally creates that state. Every step gently untangles another knot of mental clutter. Every minute without interruption allows another forgotten thought to surface. Perhaps silence is not the absence of sound. Perhaps it is the presence of space.

That may be why history’s greatest thinkers kept returning to the road. Aristotle walked while teaching. Charles Darwin wore out a gravel path behind his home. Beethoven carried a notebook because melodies frequently interrupted his afternoon strolls. Steve Jobs preferred walking meetings because movement softened disagreement and sharpened thinking. Friedrich Nietzsche once remarked that all truly great thoughts are conceived while walking. Looking back, perhaps civilisation owes rather more to comfortable shoes than we have been willing to admit.

The Japanese have a beautiful expression, shinrin-yoku, usually translated as “forest bathing.” The first time I heard it, I imagined earnest Japanese tourists carrying soap, towels and shampoo into the woods. Fortunately, the practice is much less complicated. It simply means walking slowly through nature with full attention. Researchers later discovered that such walks lower stress, improve mood and even strengthen certain aspects of immunity. Research arrived centuries after the habit, carrying clipboards to confirm what quiet forests had known all along.

Fortunately, creativity is not fussy. It does not insist on Himalayan valleys or European forests. A quiet lane in Mysuru, Cubbon Park before the morning rush, a lakeside path in Udaipur, a village road after the first monsoon rain, or even a silent treadmill before the household wakes up can become a laboratory of ideas. The brain appears surprisingly democratic. It rewards movement more faithfully than scenery.

History is crowded with famous walkers, but what fascinates me more are the countless unknown ones. Somewhere, a schoolteacher probably planned tomorrow’s lesson while walking home. A farmer solved an irrigation problem while inspecting his field. An entrepreneur discovered a new business idea while strolling after dinner. A grandmother quietly decided how to reconcile two quarrelling brothers during her evening walk around the courtyard. History celebrates the discoveries. It forgets the footsteps that produced them.

 Patients often tell me where their pain started. They remember where they fainted, where they slipped, where they first noticed a swelling. Curiously, when they speak about important life decisions, another sentence appears again and again.

“Doctor… suddenly while I was walking…” Not while checking email. Not while watching television. Not while scrolling endlessly through social media. Simply… while walking.

I have begun paying close attention to that word—suddenly. To the person experiencing it, the answer appears out of nowhere. But the brain has probably been working on it silently for hours or even days. Walking merely opens the door through which the idea finally enters consciousness.

Psychologists call this embodied cognition—the growing understanding that the body and the mind are not separate departments working independently. The way we move influences the way we think. Even subtle rhythmic movements appear to encourage mental flexibility. Our ancestors may never have heard the term, but they certainly lived it. Pilgrimages in India were never merely journeys from one temple to another. Whether it was the long walk to Sabarimala, the parikrama around Govardhan Hill, or the yatra to Pandharpur, people returned claiming not only that they had reached a sacred place but also that they had become different people themselves. Perhaps the road had unconsciously rearranged something inside them.

Modern life, unfortunately, has invented the opposite ritual. We sit to work. We sit to eat. We sit to travel. We sit to relax. We even sit while discussing the importance of exercise. Then we purchase ergonomic chairs to make prolonged sitting more comfortable, as though the solution to one problem were simply a more luxurious version of the same problem. Our bodies evolved over millions of years to move through landscapes. Instead, many of them now travel no farther than the distance between the office chair and the coffee machine.

There is one small caution, however. If your morning walk includes replying to office messages, watching short videos, checking the share market every two minutes and arguing with strangers on social media, you have taken your office with you. Your legs may have escaped the building; your attention has not. Solitude cannot survive continuous notifications. Creativity needs occasional unemployment.

If you decide to experiment, keep it wonderfully simple. Walk at a comfortable pace. Leave the headphones behind once in a while. Resist the temptation to measure everything. Not every walk needs to produce ten thousand steps, six hundred calories or a personal best. Some walks produce nothing visible at all. Until one ordinary Tuesday morning, when an idea arrives so unexpectedly that you stop in the middle of the road and wonder, “Why didn’t I think of this before?”

That question contains its own answer. You did not think of it before because your brain was busy doing what modern life repeatedly asks it to do—reacting, responding, processing, defending and remembering. Walking gently shifts it into a different conversation. It stops asking, “What demands my attention?” and begins asking, “What is possible?” That is a far more creative question.

After nearly thirty years of prescribing medicines, I have learnt that the finest prescriptions often refuse to look like medicines. A good night’s sleep rarely comes in a bottle. Peace of mind cannot be purchased with a strip. Friendship has no dosage printed on the label. And creativity, despite our desperate search for shortcuts, still seems strangely attached to one of the oldest human activities ever invented.

Tomorrow morning, millions of Indians will step out hoping to lose a few calories. I hope at least a few of them return carrying an idea. History, after all, has never counted the number of steps a person walked. It has remembered what they discovered before they came home.