To combat afternoon slumps in enthusiasm and focus, take a walk during the lunch hour.
A new study finds that
even gentle lunchtime strolls can perceptibly — and immediately — buoy
people’s moods and ability to handle stress at work.
It is not news, of
course, that walking is healthy and that people who walk or otherwise
exercise regularly tend to be more calm, alert and happy than people who
are inactive.
But many past studies
of the effects of walking and other exercise on mood have focused on
somewhat long-term, gradual outcomes, looking at how weeks or months of
exercise change people emotionally.
Fewer studies have
examined more-abrupt, day-to-day and even hour-by-hour changes in
people’s moods, depending on whether they exercise, and even fewer have
focused on these effects while people are at work, even though most of
us spend a majority of our waking hours in an office.
So, for the new study,
which was published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science
in Sports this month, researchers at the University of Birmingham and
other universities began by recruiting sedentary office workers at the
university.
Potential volunteers
were told that they would need to be available to walk for 30 minutes
during their usual lunch hour three times a week.
Most of the resulting
56 volunteers were middle-aged women. It can be difficult to attract men
to join walking programs, said Cecilie Thogersen-Ntoumani, the study’s
lead author and now a professor of exercise science at Curtin University
in Perth, Australia. Walking may not strike some men as strenuous
enough to bother with, she said. But she and her colleagues did attract
four sedentary middle-aged men to the experiment.
The volunteers
completed a series of baseline health and fitness and mood tests at the
outset of the experiment, revealing that they all were out of shape but
otherwise generally healthy physically and emotionally.
Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani
and her colleagues then randomly divided the volunteers into two
groups, one of which was to begin a simple, 10-week walking program
right away, while the other group would wait and start their walking
program 10 weeks later, serving, in the meantime, as a control group.
To allow them to
assess people’s moods, the scientists helped their volunteers to set up a
specialized app on their phones that included a list of questions about
their emotions. The questions were designed to measure the volunteers’
feelings, at that moment, about stress, tension, enthusiasm, workload,
motivation, physical fatigue and other issues related to how they were
feeling about life and work at that immediate time.
A common problem with
studies of the effect of exercise on mood, Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani said,
is that they rely on recall. People are asked to remember hours or days
after the fact how exercise made them feel. Given how fleeting and
mysterious our emotions can be, recalled responses are notoriously
unreliable, Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani said.
Instead, she and her
colleagues wanted in-the-moment assessments from people of how they felt
before and after exercise. The phone app questions provided that
experience, she said, in a relatively convenient form.
Then the first group
began walking. Each volunteer was allowed to walk during one of several
lunchtime sessions, all of them organized by a group leader and
self-paced. Slower walkers could go together, with faster ones striding
ahead. There was no formal prescribed distance or intensity for the
walks. The only parameter was that they last for 30 minutes, which the
volunteers had said would still allow them time to eat lunch.
The groups met and walked three times a week.
Each workday morning
and afternoon during the first 10 weeks, the volunteers in both groups
answered questions on their phones about their moods at that particular
moment.
After 10 weeks, the
second group began their walking program. The first group was allowed to
continue walking or not as they chose. (Many did keep up their
lunchtime walks.)
Then the scientists
compared all of the responses, both between groups and within each
individual person. In other words, they checked to see whether the group
that had walked answered questions differently in the afternoon than
the group that had not, and also whether individual volunteers answered
questions differently on the afternoons when they had walked compared
with when they had not.
The responses, as it
turned out, were substantially different when people had walked. On the
afternoons after a lunchtime stroll, walkers said they felt considerably
more enthusiastic, less tense, and generally more relaxed and able to
cope than on afternoons when they hadn’t walked and even compared with
their own moods from a morning before a walk.
Although the authors
did not directly measure workplace productivity in their study, “there
is now quite strong research evidence that feeling more positive and
enthusiastic at work is very important to productivity,” Dr.
Thogersen-Ntoumani said. “So we would expect that people who walked at
lunchtime would be more productive.”
As a pleasant,
additional outcome, all of the volunteers showed gains in their aerobic
fitness and other measures of health at the completion of their 10 weeks
of walking.
But, tellingly, many
said that they anticipated being unable to continue walking after the
experiment ended and a few (not counted in the final tally of
volunteers) had had to drop out midway through the program. The primary
impediment to their walking, Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani said, had been “that
they were expected by management to work through lunch,” suggesting
that management might wish to acquaint themselves with the latest
science.
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