The Truth About Exercise and Creativity

What science and experience say about mind, body and making...

For more than forty years, Haruki Murakami has dazzled the world with his beautifully crafted words, most often in the form of novels and short stories.

But his book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running opens a rare window into his life and process, revealing an obsession with running and how it fuels his creative process.

An excerpt from a 2004 interview with Murakami in The Paris Review brings home the connection between physical strength and creating extraordinary work:

When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit, and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long–six months to a year–requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

Murakami is guided by what the great scholars, writers, thinkers, and creators of ancient Greece knew yet so many modern-day creators have abandoned.

The physical state of our bodies, and our willingness to routinely move them through space to the extent we are able, can either serve or subvert the quest to create.

We all know this intuitively. But with rare exceptions, because life seems to value output over the humanity of the process and the ability to sustain genius, attention to health, fitness, movement, and exercise almost always take a back seat. That’s tragic.

Choosing art over wellbeing rather than art fueled by the same adds unnecessary suffering to the process, and potentially diminishes the depth and quality of our creative expression.

As Dr. John Ratey noted in his seminal work Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, exercise isn’t just about physical health and appearance. It also has a profound effect on your brain chemistry, physiology, and neuroplasticity (the ability of the brain to literally rewire itself). Movement affects not only your ability to think, create, and solve, but your mood and ability to lean into uncertainty, risk, judgment, and anxiety in a substantial, measurable way, even though until very recently it’s been consistently cast out from lists of commonly accepted treatments for anxiety and depression.

In 2004 the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published a review of treatments for generalized anxiety disorder that noted thirteen pharmaceuticals, each with a laundry list of side effects, but nothing about exercise. In response, NEJM published a letter by renowned cardiologists Richard Milani and Carl Lavie, who had written more than seventy papers on the effect of exercise on the heart, eleven of them focused on anxiety. That letter criticizes the original article for omitting exercise, which, the writers note, “has been shown to lead to reductions of more than 50 percent in the prevalence of the symptoms of anxiety. This supports exercise training as an additional method to reduce chronic anxiety.”

Ratey details many data points on the connection between exercise and mind-set; among them the following:

• A 2004 study led by Joshua Broman-Fulks of the University of Southern Mississippi that showed students who walked at 50 percent of their maximum heart rates or ran on treadmills at 60 to 90 percent of their maximum heart rates reduced their sensitivity to anxiety, and that though rigorous exercise worked better. “Only the high intensity group felt less afraid of the physical symptoms of anxiety, and the distinction started to show up after just the second exercise session.”

• A 2006 Dutch study of 19,288 twins and their families that demonstrated that those who exercised were “less anxious, less depressed, less neurotic, and also more socially outgoing.”

• A 1999 Finnish study of 3,403 people that revealed that those who exercised two to three times a week “experience significantly less depression, anger, stress, and ‘cynical distrust.'”

That last finding about movement and cynical distrust landed deeply in the context of making things.

There is room for skepticism in the creative process. It’s a form of discernment, which is necessary and valued. Cynicism, however, collapses the mantle of possibility upon which creativity sits. It is death to the quest to make something from nothing.

Ratey points to a number of proven chemical pathways, along with the brain’s neuroplastic abilities, as the basis for these changes, arguing that exercise changes the expression of fear and anxiety, as well as the way the brain processes them from the inside out.

Studies now prove that aerobic exercise both increases the size of the prefrontal cortex and facilitates interaction between it and the amygdala. This is vitally important to creators because the prefrontal cortex, as we discussed earlier, is the part of the brain that helps tamp down the amygdala’s fear and anxiety signals.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Jennifer Heisz, author of Move the Body, Heal the Mind for a conversation on the Good Life Project® podcast about this very topic. She shares deeply compelling insights and updated research about the intimate connection between movement and anxiety, depression, working memory, inhibitory control, mental flexibility, and creativity.

For artists, entrepreneurs, and any other driven creators, movement is a powerful tool in the quest to help transform the persistent uncertainty, fear, and anxiety that accompanies the quest to create from a source of suffering into something less toxic, then potentially even into fuel.

This is not to suggest that anyone suffering from a generalized or trait (that is, long-term) anxiety disorder avoid professional help and self-treat with exercise alone. People who suffer from anxiety should not hesitate to seek out the guidance of a qualified mental health-care professional.

The point is to apply the lessons from a growing body of research on the therapeutic effect of exercise on anxiety, mood, and fear to the often sustained anxiety that rides organically along with the uncertainty of creation. Anyone involved in a creative endeavor might consider movement, to the extent it is accessible to them, as a potent elixir to help transform the uncomfortable sensation of anxiety from a source of pain and creative stagnation into something not only manageable but harnessable.

Exercise is an incredibly powerful tool in the quest to alchemize fear, uncertainty, and anxiety into unbridled creative potential.

At the same time, circling back to Murakami’s words, “writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.”

The creative process, especially in the context of a larger work, is an endurance event. We need to not only train in the craft, but also do what we can to equip ourselves to flourish, on a human level, along the way. And, cultivate the energetic capacity needed to give our brains what they require to function long enough, and at a high enough level, to have even a shot at closing the gap between taste and expression.

Mason Curry’s fantastic book, Daily Rituals, brings the point home, speaking more to the value of movement on the process of ideation. Of the 161 iconic creators whose daily routines he documented, from writers to artists, composers to philosophers, many took daily, long walks. Often, intense ones.

He writes in SLATE:

…the majority of the composers in my Daily Rituals book—most of them required a long (and sometimes very long) daily walk to keep the ideas flowing.

Beethoven went for a vigorous walk after lunch, and he always carried a pencil and a couple of sheets of paper in his pocket, to record chance musical thoughts. Gustav Mahler followed much the same routine—he would take a three- or four-hour walk after lunch, stopping to jot down ideas in his notebook. Benjamin Britten said that his afternoon walks were “where I plan out what I’m going to write in the next period at my desk.” Working outside of Paris in 1971, Morton Feldman described his routine: “I get up at six in the morning. I compose until eleven, then my day is over. I go out, I walk, tirelessly, for hours.”

Living on the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains in Boulder, Colorado, I’m blessed with incredible access to nature. Three to four days a week, I find myself hiking, alone, in the woods, for an hour or two. I often avoid listening to podcasts or music, and try not to take calls. Instead, I allow my mind to wander, and to savor. Without fail, the blend of nature and effortful movement ignites my brain, and I find myself pulling out my phone not to consume anything, but rather to capture the cascade of ideas that tumble from the ether.

Still, a large number of artists, creators, makers, and entrepreneurs resist regular, committed movement as a key element in their ability to do what they most want to do–make cool stuff that fully expresses a creative vision, and speaks to a lot of people.

I often wonder if that resistance is born of a cultural chasm, where jocks were jocks, artists were artists, nerds were nerds, and never the twain would meet. For more sedentary solo creators, historical assumptions about who exercises and who doesn’t can impose some very real limits on a behavior that could, to whatever extent is available, be very beneficial on so many levels.

On the entrepreneur side, the excuse I’ve heard over and over is “I’m launching a company, brand, or product. I don’t have time to workout.” Makers on deadline often default to a similar refrain. I’ve got to get the manuscript in for publication, the collection delivered for the show, the tracks in for the album. There are not enough hours in the day! I’ve uttered these very lines, time and time again. And, paid the price. Both in lost humanity, and creative output that I knew, deep down, wasn’t what it could’ve been.

Truth is, to whatever extent movement is accessible to us, the more we elevate it to the domain of a non-negotiable, the better our minds, bodies, lives, and creative expression fare. And, it just makes us so much happier, grounded, and better at the art of creation along the way.

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So, what’s your take on movement and creative expression?