Jobs's constant roaming wasn't just about a love of the outdoors or physical exercise. The late Apple boss intuited something that neuroscience is now proving – walking makes your brain work a little bit better, helping you crack problems that stumped you while sitting. — Stanford University/The New York Times
Say you're facing a difficult problem at work, and even though you've been sitting at your desk for the last 10 minutes straining your brain to think of a solution, you're still coming up blank.
What do you do?
If you happened to be Steve Jobs, the answer to this question would be simple. You'd stand up and go for a walk.
"Taking a long walk was his preferred way to have a serious conversation," reports Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson. "So much of our time together was spent quietly walking," recalled legendary designer Jony Ives. Read any profile or book on Jobs, and you'll find he spends a great deal of it padding around barefoot.
Jobs's constant roaming wasn't just about a love of the outdoors or physical exercise. The late Apple boss intuited something that neuroscience is now proving – walking makes your brain work a little bit better, helping you crack problems that stumped you while sitting.
That's why at least one modern neuroscientist recommends we all make like Jobs and follow the 10-minute rule: If you haven't solved a tough mental problem after 10 minutes of trying, stand up and go for a walk.
Your brain isn't like a muscle
This recommendation comes from Mithu Storoni, a University of Cambridge-trained neuroscientist and author of the book Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain To Transform The Way You Work. In a recent appearance on the HBR IdeaCast podcast, she shares a slew of ideas to make your brain work more efficiently, including the 10-minute rule.
"I have some clients, and... one managing director has adopted a rule of, if he's sitting in front of his computer with a problem that he hasn't managed to solve for 10 minutes, he leaves his desk, he goes for a walk," Storoni reports.
Brains aren't like muscles, she explains. If you do a physical job like screwing in widgets on an assembly line, you can just push your muscles to keep screwing in widgets until they become fatigued. More effort generally leads to more results.
But for jobs where we rely more on our brains than our muscles, this more-is-more approach often backfires. Sure, for routine busywork, heads-down focus is often best. You do not need to be creative to power through emails. Just sit at your desk and get it done.
Whenever you have to come up with a new idea or solve a problem, however, you need a more open, loose mental state where your mind can make novel connections and discover paths around obstacles. Just sitting there struggling for long periods of time leads to frustration, not eureka moments.
Instead of trying to force ideas, Storoni argues, we need to nudge our brains into the optimal state for innovative solutions to arrive.
Why the 10-minute rule makes your brain work better
How does giving up after 10 minutes of mental struggle and going for a walk help put you in the right mental state to find a solution?
How you move your body changes how your mind thinks, Storoni says. (This insight can also help you break out of entrenched conflicts, other neuroscientists claim.)
Taking a walk "keeps you in the right alert mental state, so you don't just drift off, you don't just fall asleep, or feel lethargic, or [look] at your phone. But at the same time, it keeps your attention moving, because your surroundings are moving while you walk, so your attention can't really fix on anything. So it drifts into your head and explores your problems and tries to solve them from different avenues," she says.
Walking nudges you to think about many new things. But it also blocks you from thinking obsessively about any single idea.
"You can't ruminate, because your attention can't stick to one problem for too long because you also have to pay attention to where you're walking," Storoni continues.
When you go for a walk, you physically move through the landscape, paying light attention to your surroundings so you don't crash into a streetlight or fall in a pothole. Which encourages your mind to pay light attention to various thoughts and ideas passing through it, too. And that, it turns out, is the ideal mental state for coming up with new ideas.
Other great thinkers agree
If you want more details about what all this looks like on a physiological level, including the neurotransmitters and brain processes involved, you can check out the complete podcast. But if your main concern with the 10-minute rule is whether it works, then Jobs's accomplishments should reassure you.
So should the many other famous thinkers, from Charles Darwin to Mark Zuckerberg, who swore walking helped them be smarter and more innovative.
Both biographical and scientific evidence point to the fact that, if you're stuck on a hard problem for more than 10 minutes, you should stop beating yourself up at your desk and get up and take a walk instead. – Inc./Tribune News Service
