Get ready to banish the mid-afternoon coffee and sugary snack to combat those slumps in enthusiasm and focus.
A new study finds that even gentle lunchtime strolls can perceptibly — and immediately — buoy people’s moods and ability to handle stress at work.
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.
The 56, mainly middle-aged female 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 healthy physically and emotionally, reports Cecilie Thogersen-Ntoumani, the study’s lead author and now a professor of exercise science at Curtin University in Perth.
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 specialised 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.
Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani 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.
Each volunteer was allowed to walk during one of several lunchtime sessions, all of them organised 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 taken a lunchtime stroll. On the afternoons after a 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.”
