Comment by beacon294
2 days ago
Walking is considered by einstein and pretty much all thinkers to be critical to deep work. It's also covered in Cal Newport's book "deep work" briefly. Which is a short audiobook worth reading.
One such prescription would be to do deep work early in the day then walk after and walk again 2 hours before bed. Another would be split the deep work with a 1 hour walk and do the 2nd walk after the 2nd block.
It may be more fulfilling with lots of interesting ideas rattling around. YMMV
I desperately want to do this type of walking, but I live in a major city. There’s always something to distract me, which is great for boredom perhaps, but ruins any sense of zen or reflection. I would say half of every walk involves people yelling, loud vehicles, and louder music. Noise-cancelling headphones are only useful for distraction through podcasts and music, not for decompressing. I’m starting to wonder if the solution, the sad solution, is to walk on a treadmill at a gym during off-peak hours.
Have you considered earplugs? The firearms community have some pretty great ones which are readable and fit really well. Check out Axil x30i for example.
You could try white/pink/grey noise on the headphones, or a binaural beat generator (I use the brainwave app on iOS).
I find thunderstorm noises superior to white/coloured noise - because it's a natural sound the brain filters it out, and obtrustive noises are camouflaged within it, and filtered out too. So the loudness required is less than the loudness needed for white/coloured noise to be effective.
All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.
-Friedrich Nietzsche