🪷 Wellbeing
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Apr 4, 2025
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6 min read
It’s a universally accepted fact: moving is good for your health.
👣 Walking and Its Benefits
“Only thoughts had while walking are worth anything.” —Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1889)
With this slightly provocative phrase, the philosopher emphasized the virtues of walking, which he believed could liberate the mind.
According to him, being “a desk-sitter,” that is, philosophizing while remaining sedentary, without moving the body, was even a sin against the spirit.
Exclusive bipedalism is a unique characteristic of the human lineage. Walking is a natural function, like breathing, heartbeat, or digestion. Although it’s a complex process, it’s an automatic one.
When walking, you can do other things: talk, think, read. It was our only mode of transportation until the recent arrival of other means of locomotion.
These are mostly motorized and involve sitting down. It’s a universally accepted fact: moving is good for your health. We immediately think of physical health. However, modernity also gives walking a new role, which helps restore attention.
A 2009 study showed the effects of walking on adolescents’ cognitive performance. They compared intellectual exercises done after:
20 minutes of rest
20 minutes of walking
Result? students performed significantly better after the walk. Scientists concluded that walking, even at moderate intensity, improves attention control and cognitive performance. This is evident in the difference in brain activity right after rest versus right after walking:
Another more targeted study, conducted in 2014 by a team of researchers at Stanford, delved into the impact of walking on creativity. The goal: to show that moving the body helps boost creativity. Their study is titled “Give Your Ideas Legs.” It sounds like a political campaign slogan, but at least it’s catchy.
They conducted a series of experiments with 176 participants. These participants were placed in different situations: walking (indoors on a treadmill and outdoors) or sitting (facing a wall or outside in a wheelchair).
Several experiments were conducted, including a “divergent thinking” test (or Guilford test), which asked participants to come up with as many uses as possible for a set of objects. For example, a button or a tire.
The results are striking: Participants were 60% more creative when walking than when sitting. Walking activates neural connections. In fact, physical movement prepares the brain to receive and retain more information.
How? Walking increases blood flow to the brain, delivering essential nutrients and oxygen. This improves concentration and mental sharpness.
This phenomenon can be explained by an alertness effect: walking keeps the body in action and, to some extent, the mind alert. The brain is better irrigated, and attention is less likely to wane.
You can see where this is going — to talk about the effectiveness of walking during a workday.
🎯 Incorporating Walking Into Your Work Routine
The goal of Jomo isn’t to promote complete digital detox, as you’ve probably gathered by now. I’m not going to prescribe you “Screenssucks 500 mg.”
It’s simply about:
Knowing how to get the most out of your screen time
Knowing how to create the conditions to achieve that
Something we know but often fail to act on (both collectively and individually): humans weren’t made to sit in front of screens all day. We’re programmed to walk.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors, 40,000 years ago, walked an average of 20 kilometers a day. On our end, we’ve never been more sedentary in history: an average of 7 hours and 24 minutes per day in France.
At the office, in front of Netflix, in public transportation. We, the knowledge workers, mentally exhaust ourselves with these sedentary, hyper-connected days.
As Hubert de Saint Louvent summarized in his article on walking: “To be more efficient, let’s show humility: slow down and walk in our ancestors’ footsteps.”
In the digital whirlwind of our days, taking screen-free breaks is essential to recharge and get the most out of your work time. Incorporating a half-hour walk into your workday seems ideal.
By the way, you don’t necessarily have to associate walking with a break. Steve Jobs held meetings while walking. Mark Zuckerberg goes for walks in the forest with job candidates. The phenomenon of walking meetings is an emerging trend in American tech.
The concept is simple: turn small meetings (3 people or fewer) into active walks instead of sitting in a poorly lit meeting room. When possible, there are several benefits:
You recharge your batteries
You stimulate creativity
You connect better with your colleagues
You free up meeting rooms
Walking meetings are not a new idea. Aristotle, Rousseau, and Dickens were all avid practitioners. Aristotle even gave lessons to his students while walking. It seems like this practice is still relatively rare in France.
Yet, concentration is a limited resource, subject to fatigue after prolonged use. Screens act as a catalyst for this mental fatigue. It’s essential to incorporate moments that effectively restore attention.
It’s like a sprint.
The body can do it, but only for limited intervals. Once concentration capacity is depleted, you can’t reach the same cognitive level again, making breaks essential.
They even become a productivity hack. Deep work followed by intentional, meaningful rest intervals is the secret to working better and enjoying it more.
This race toward “busyness” is counterproductive. You have to adapt your workday to your brain’s functioning. Deep work isn’t just a work concept; it’s a lifestyle that alternates focused work with energy restoration.
We must try to counterbalance the harmful effects of daily digital sedentariness. Walking can be a temporary escape from the urgency and hyper-connectedness of modern life. I love this quote by Sylvain Tesson, a great walker if ever there was one:
“Whatever direction you take, walking leads to the essential.”
💪 The Challenge of the Week
It’s simple. Try to integrate slots into your daily work routine for walking (without your phone, of course). Whether alone or with colleagues. Some good times for this:
When you’re tired
After lunch to digest well and avoid a crash
When you need to think deeply about a topic
When you have a difficult conversation ahead
S.O.S: Lacking motivation?
No worries, Jomo is here to help. Jomo, available for free on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, allows you to set blocking rules. In other words, it’s a simple and effective way to block your apps under certain conditions: during specific time slots, after spending a certain amount of time on them, or even until you’ve completed a certain action… like walking, for example!
Yes, you can block access to certain apps to force yourself to walk 400, 4,000, or even 40,000 steps—it’s up to you! To do this, go to the “Rules” section > “+” > “Action.” From the list, select a health goal and choose “Walking.” It’s a great way to motivate yourself to get a few steps in each day!
Ready to give it a try?
