‘Solvitur ambulando.’ Especially relevant when working from home.
Arranging your thoughts, coming up with solutions to complex problems and meeting the daily exercise quota. A real 3 in 1. It can be done when you only make one decision at the right time…. #success4life
Of course, you know it’s wiser not to have lunch at your desk. But yeah, the things on your to-do list don’t magically disappaear and you’re already busy enough. However, you would be surprised how much more you could finish if you do go out for a while.
No matter how drowsy a block around sounds, the opposite is true. Walking is Superman, dressed as a librarian. Clark Kent, so to speak. Simply walking is the ideal way to organize your thoughts and come up with solutions to complicated problems.
Beneficial for body and mind
‘Solvitur ambulando.’ That’s Latin for: it’s solved by walking. It is the philosopher Diogenes who seems to have spoken the words for the first time, in the fourth century AD. He must have had no idea what a burnout is, but he already knew that going out is beneficial for body and mind. Well-known and influential figures from history followed, from writers Ernest Hemingway and Henry David Thoreau to U.S. President Thomas Jefferson.
Promotes creativity
You don’t even have to literally think about what’s bothering you. In psychology, there is the phenomenon of ‘creative incubation’, in which ideas unconsciously develop while you think about something else. That is why some organizations, for example, put a table football game on the work floor, also for use during breaks: playing promotes creativity, scientists discovered.
New insights come from changing environments and meeting people, or any other situation where your brain has trouble predicting what’s going to happen, writes neuroscientist Gregory Berns in the book Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently.
Lunchtime stroll
You won’t be the first to get a genius raid during a block turn. No wonder there’s even a Wikipedia entry for “lunch walking.” With a lunch walk you already meet the recommended thirty minutes of exercise per day and it is a great excuse to leave your workplace for a while. In addition, the movement ensures the production of endorphins,the ‘happiness hormone’.
In 2015, the Scandinavian scientific publication Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports published a study that showed that a 30-minute walk provides far-reaching positive effects. The participants, all office workers, felt considerably more enthusiastic and relaxed than the group of people who did not take a walk during the lunch break.
Also more productive
ead researcher Cecilie Thøgersen‐Ntoumani told The New York Times that there is strong evidence that enthusiasm contributes to an overall positive attitude of employees, which benefits productivity. ‘So you can assume that those who take a walk at lunchtime are also more productive’, says the scientist.
In addition, a daily detour naturally contributes to better physical health. In half an hour you cover about 2 to 4 kilometers. That is equivalent to at least 200 calories that you burn: exactly the unplanned treat during your teabreak that you no longer have to feel guilty about.
