Walking is a great way to clear your head—or so anecdotes would have you believe. Now a new long-term study published in Scientific Reports is putting some intellectual heft behind this advice. Researchers from the Baylor College of Medicine uncovered the relationship by analyzing 14 years of health data from more than 3,000 adults aged 18 to 93 as part of the NIH’s All of Us Research Program.
The team relied on daily step counts recorded by FitBits monitors, rather than self-reported daily activity (which tends to be less accurate). Additionally, the participants took cognitive assessments to measure their sustained attention, cognitive control (the ability to filter out distractions), delay discounting (the ability to delay gratification), and emotion recognition (the ability to read facial expressions). Read more: “Here’s Why Our Walking Gets Slower as We Age” Per the team’s analysis, people tended to cluster in three different groups according to their daily steps.
Group A had the lowest activity levels, walking on average only 5,100 steps per day. Group B walked about 8,900 steps each day, and Group C was the most active, getting in roughly 14,200 steps per day. After controlling for factors like age, education, and income, the team found that the two more active groups tended to perform better in cognitive tests than the least active group.
Each additional 1,000 steps per day (relative to a person’s average steps) led to incremental improvements in sustained attention, cognitive control, and delay discounting (emotion recognition showed no association with activity). Unfortunately, because the team only performed one cognitive assessment over the period, they can’t speak to how increasing or decreasing step count can alter our ability to stay on task or delay gratification. But it’s nice to know that those who get their steps in can reap mental rewards as well as physical ones.
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