How exercise can impact your creativity
Posted on March 21, 2023 by Heide Lindgren, One of Thousands of Health and Fitness Coaches on Noomii.
You've probably heard the health benefits and even the cognitive benefits of exercise - but have you heard about exercise and creativity?
Let’s get science-y! (and creative!)
Everywhere you look, you’ll find research and evidence to support the idea that exercise has a positive impact on our moods. Less frequently, but still available and growing, is research suggesting that exercise can also have a positive impact on our creativity. Often, the assumption is that our creativity is improved through the mechanism of an improved affect (i.e. a more positive mood). However, research from 2020 that I recently read in the scientific journal Nature, found evidence that exercise can help improve our creativity independent of an improved mood. In other words, regardless of whether our mood improves due to exercise (which it is shown to!), there is now research with fancy statistical tools supporting the idea that exercise increases our levels of creativity all on its own! Pretty cool, huh? In fact, the study found that positive mood was associated “with the fluency of ideas, but bodily movement seemed to be linked with the quantity and quality of ideas.” So a positive mood helps us connect ideas more quickly, but it’s the bodily movement that helps with generating more ideas of better quality.
If you follow Whole Foundations on social media, you may have seen a few posts this past week talking about how exercise doesn’t have to be so hard. The intensity and nature of our goals certainly dictate the amount of effortful and dedicated exercise required of us, but the type of movement required to achieve general health improvements can actually be quite simple. It just might require some reframing – which is what I’m here to help with.
Anyways, this article in Nature got me extra excited because it also stated that it’s simple everyday bodily movement that can have a positive impact on our creativity! Vigorous exercise appears to be much more effective in producing a positive mood, but low intensity movement is where we see improvement in creativity all on its own, with vigorous activity having an added positive effect through the addition of a better mood.
Much of the research in this space is correlational, meaning that it’s not for certain whether creative people are more active or active people are more creative. And the mechanism of action is yet to be understood. However, there bits of evidence here and there (like randomized controlled studies having people solve creative problems while sitting at a desk versus while walking) that point towards movement being what leads to improved creativity and not the other way around. As one 2021 NY Times article (which briefly describes this study, among other research) states: it appears possible that “active imaginations start with active lives.”
It certainly is obvious that we need to learn more about this correlation, but I nevertheless find it incredibly exciting that we have even more encouraging reasons to move our bodies!
So…what’s one small way you can incorporate some movement into your life next week? It doesn’t have to be hard. And if you need some ideas, well, you know where to find me. :)
