Why Walking Helps You Think | The Gaps That Used to Be Free

Hey Reader,

Welcome to The Compass, your written companion to The Strategic Thinker podcast. Here, we break down powerful insights and practical actions to help you think long term and build the life of your dreams.

This Week's Reflection

Two people at a restaurant table, both looking down. Both are fine. It simply became normal, and almost nobody noticed when.

The smaller version happens all day. The ninety seconds waiting for the kettle. The lift. The queue at the supermarket.

Those gaps used to be free. And they were doing something.

https://spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/Fiv1qFFMQ6b

The Idea Worth Sitting With

The gaps in an ordinary day were unoccupied, which is different from empty. Attention had somewhere to rest (the water, the pavement, the window of a bus), and the mind had nothing it was required to solve. So it wandered, and occasionally it came back with something.

That state has a fairly specific shape. It needs something to look at, because complete blankness becomes uncomfortable within minutes. And it needs nothing to solve, because full engagement leaves the mind with nowhere to go. What produces wandering is the low middle: enough occupation to hold you in place, and not enough to employ you.

The places this used to happen were almost never chosen. Walking a familiar route. Washing up. A long drive on a road you know. A train window, and fields you are not really examining. They came with ordinary life, at no cost and with no decision required.

They cost something now.

The exact number of minutes we have lost is something nobody has measured. What we do have is situational. Researchers who watched about two thousand people in waiting areas at a large American university found sixty-two percent on their phones, and a more recent study of working adults found a phone within reach during almost ninety-five percent of the times they had to wait.

What the Evidence Supports

Walking. This is the strongest finding by some distance. A large review published this year drew together twenty-three studies and over a thousand participants, and found that walking improves divergent thinking, meaning the ability to generate many different ideas from a single starting point. The same review found no reliable improvement in convergent thinking, the narrowing down to one right answer. Walking helps you produce options. It does little to help you choose between them.

Setting a problem aside. Researchers call it incubation. Step away from a difficult problem, do something else, and you tend to do slightly better when you return. It has been studied across more than a hundred experiments, and the effect is real and modest. It shows up most when you are generating alternatives rather than solving toward one answer.

Rest. A stretch of undemanding rest after learning something reduces how much of it you forget, a finding that holds across dozens of studies. What it shows is that rest helps. Whether daydreaming is what does the work remains an open question.

Three Ideas From This Episode

Ask which kind of stuck you are. Are you out of ideas, or unable to pick between them? A walk suits the first and does little for the second. If you have three good options and cannot decide, a walk will probably just give you a fourth.

Boredom is a signal rather than a strategy. Researchers describe boredom as the experience of failing to engage with what is in front of you, either because your attention has nowhere to fit or because the thing lacks meaning for you. It feels bad because it is meant to. The value lies entirely in what comes next. Boredom followed by a walk looks like creativity. Boredom followed by twenty minutes of scrolling looks like nothing at all.

Stay with the thought. Most of us meet the first thought that arrives and immediately reach for something else. The interesting one tends to be the second or the third, and it only arrives if you are still there. Steering it is unnecessary, and so is making it productive. Staying long enough for something to meet it is the whole practice.

What This Looks Like for Me

The shower is protected with no devices, no interruptions and a fixed stretch of time. The research behind the popular "shower effect" is thin, so this is my experience rather than a finding.

The practice is simple. Engage whatever thought arrives first, stay with it, and wait for a second one. When they meet, they rarely just sit side by side. They join and become something neither was on its own, like two clouds meeting in the sky.

The walk is the one I choose. No calls, no AI, no podcast. Just moving, with something to look at: a bird doing something odd, the shape of the clouds, a building I have passed a hundred times and never examined.

I also write things down, because these thoughts arrive and then leave. Writing is slower than speaking, and I suspect the slowness helps by forcing small gaps between thoughts. The research here is mixed, so this is my own observation rather than a finding.

And one I have yet to resolve. For most of my drive to work, I talk with an AI assistant about whatever I am working on. It is productive. It is also a gap I filled without really deciding to, and I have started wondering what would arrive if I drove without it now and then.

Why It Is Hard

The real obstacle is that empty time has come to feel like waste. Standing in a queue doing nothing registers as time you failed to use, so the moment a gap opens, the hand has already moved. When I catch myself and ask what I felt in the half second before, it is usually mild anxiety: I should be doing something, or something might need me.

Which makes the ask harder than it first appears. Space appears constantly, fifteen times a day. The harder part is tolerating it once it arrives.

Insight of the Episode

"The gaps in a day used to be free. Something happened in them that we mostly did not notice until it stopped."

Protecting them feels slightly uncomfortable at first, and slightly unproductive, right up until something arrives that could not have arrived any other way.

This Week's Reflection Questions

When did you last let a thought finish?

Where in your ordinary week could that happen, without building anything new to make room for it?

And the next time you feel stuck, is it for lack of options, or because you cannot choose between them?

A New Room is Now Open

A new room called At the Desk is open within Maison TST.

A place for deeper exploration. For those who want to spend more time with the ideas behind the public conversations. For those who feel that these episodes are the beginning of a discussion rather than the end of one.

If this resonates, you can find it on Apple Podcasts.

🎧 Listen to the Episode

If today's ideas resonated, the full episode is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or at MaisonTST.com.

It walks through a real example of this practice: a piece of consulting advice that arrived as fear, and what it turned into once I stayed with it.

Studio @ Maison TST

Explore the Compass Archive

Every past edition of The Strategic Compass is collected at journal.maisontst.com, reflections, strategies, and insights you can return to whenever you need them.

Join the Conversation

Share a thought with us on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, or YouTube (links at the bottom). And if this resonated with someone you know, invite them to find their seat in the sanctuary at MaisonTST.com.

Your future self is being shaped by the choices you make today. Stay focused on your direction, and take time to discover joy along the way.

Until next time, make your next best decision, and keep moving forward.

Greatness rewards the few who walk the path with intent.