Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Your Diet--and Your Job--Could Benefit from a Walk in the Park
Trouble resisting a late night dessert or shutting out distractions to finish up a project at work? The blog New Value Streams points to an interesting new study suggesting a pretty simple solution to help with either problem: Go for a walk in a park or among some trees. In effect, directed attention--that is, the ability to focus intently and analytically--is a finite mental resource that appears to rely on many of the same mental processes as exerting self-control, that, when it's depleted, can cause us to make poor choices and have trouble focusing. But tuning out--heading out to a park, say, or by taking other mental breaks--we can regain the ability to self-regulate and focus.
The study, by Stephen Kaplan and Marc Berman of the University of Michigan, notes a growing body of research suggesting direct attention and self-regulation tax the same parts of our brains. For example, they note previous research has found that students taking standardized tests consistently score lower when trying to filter out noises and distractions but that these negative effects "only appear during the more difficult forms of information processing and do not worsen performance in general." Similarly, remembering long strings of numbers makes it difficult to "inhibit socially inappropriate responses" in much the same way it makes it difficult to turn down a slice of cake.
Put differently, as Kaplan and Berman state, "self-regulation tends to put one's intention against one's inclination" and in much the same way that avoiding the cake requires ignoring tempting sites and smells, focusing intently requires ignoring other potentially enticing visual and mental stimuli.
Not surprisingly, taking a break from focusing can help restore attention and self-control. But according to Kaplan and Berman, three strategies seem to do the best at restoring this mechanism: sleep, meditation, and hanging out in natural environments, which they classify under the term Attention Restoration Therapy (ART). Natural environments, they note
[U]tilize involuntary attention... so as not to interfere with other thoughts... Natural environments, such as parks, gardens, and lakefronts, are able to capture involuntary attention without monopolizing attentional channel capacity... Natural environments are certainly not the only environments capable of attracting involuntary attention without interfering with other thoughts, but do serve as good candidate environments that have been shown to restore directed attention abilities across a wide array of populations and situations....
ART would appear to offer the potential to contribute in a wide variety of contexts. It offers an intervention with no known side effects that can be taken in a wide range of dosages. Initial studies have shown this approach to be elpful in treating a broad range of psychological problems, from information processing limitations, to aggression, to recovering from the disturbing cognitive side effects of cancer.
Of course, their research doesn't mean that a simple walk through the park can solve our considerable self-control difficulties. But I do think the next time I'm having trouble concentrating, I'm going to try to take a walk in the park. It sounds like it will do a lot more to help me think than would reading a newspaper or checking out twitter.