Mindscapes: Thinking Environments in Your Way of Living

• Sep 25th, 2024
• by Sascha

Thinking needs space. Without this space, we cannot think. At least not with the depth and care required to achieve good results within a reasonable time frame. We create this space through thinking environments.

One of these thinking spaces is the simple walk. A special aesthetic of erudition emanates from this form of walk. I would be surprised, for example, if someone imagined this walk in the industrial facilities of a chemical company. It is much more likely that one walks in nature or at least in a park to think.”¹

This aesthetic of scholarship is lived out in a variety of ways:

1. Beautifully crafted notes are admired and displayed for others to see.
2. The walks of scholars such as Leibniz, Franklin or Kant is described with romantic longing.
3. There is an aesthetic fascination with notebook collections by classical scholars such as Leonardo da Vinci.
4. Hardly anyone can suppress their enthusiasm for wonderfully furnished scholars’ study rooms. An extreme version is Umberto Eco’s library.

This sense of beauty is an intuition that the environment in which we think is an important prerequisite for our thinking. This goes beyond mere enjoyment. Of course, we feel good in beautiful surroundings. But our thinking gains a new clarity. All you have to do is listen to yourself after spending a few hours outdoors in nature.

Different thinking environments color our thinking in different ways. Sometimes we can think better about certain things, sometimes we can think about the same things in different ways. From personal experience, I can attest that the different thinking environments in my life are important prerequisites for my work.

The practical conclusion I draw from this is that I design my way of living in such a way that I can accommodate very different thinking environments in it.

Let’s take a look at the walk as a thinking environment to delve deeper into the matter.

The Walk as a Thinking Environment

Cal Newport himself is a fan of the walk as a thinking environment. In his book Deep Work, he describes Productive Meditation:

Productive Meditation means being fully focused on a single clearly delineated problem during a period of time when you are physically but not mentally active. While in mindfulness meditation you always bring your attention back to the object of meditation (for example, the breath), in productive meditation you always bring your attention back to the problem. This is an exercise to train the ability to focus on a single problem, but also the ability to ward off distractions. This exercise takes you to deeper and deeper states of concentration.²

But Newport doesn’t go into detail about the thinking environment itself. We’ll make up for that here:

Optical flow The walk provides an optical flow. Optical flow means that the way objects pass us by creates a kind of perception that the world is passing us by. An extreme caricature of this would be the classic animations before entering the speed of light in science fiction films. This visual flow reduces stress and helps us to calm down (see Huberman for a more detailed explanation). In this way, walking itself ensures that our thinking is freed from emotional baggage: In motion, we can think more clearly because our thinking is not clouded by our negative feelings – at least not as much.

Time in nature and fresh air. There is a lot of research on the effect of spending time in nature or even just looking at nature in the form of pictures. Our immune system works better,³ stress is reduced,⁴ and our mood is lifted.⁵ Being in nature might even satisfy our spiritual need for which we otherwise need religious practices.⁶ These are just some of the effects of nature. Walking in nature gives our minds a psychologically balanced environment.

Exercise acutely improves our executive functions.⁷ Executive functions concern, for example, setting goals, calculating obstacles along the way, working memory, concentration (attention control) and the like. In short: the quality of thinking. We not only think more clearly, but simply better.

Rhythmic movements: I believe that rhythm has a special effect over erratic movements. I cannot yet justify this systematically, but it seems very obvious to me that rhythm in the form of music, dance and also religious rituals such as the dervish dance has a strong influence on our mental state.

All these factors create a very special mental environment that not only helps, but is unique in and of itself. To emphasize this uniqueness, I would like to explain the thinking environments in my life.

The Thinking Environments in My Way of Living

I organize my way of living in such a way that I spend a lot of time in a whole range of thinking environments. This is extremely important for me because what I do constantly pushes me to the edge of my cognitive capacities. Like a high-performance athlete, I try to take into account all the measures that allow me to reach my full potential. Only this is about my mental performance and not my physical performance.

These are some of the most important mental environments in my way of living:

Ice bathing. In the winter, I practice ice bathing (I wish: I couldn’t this winter because breaking the ice in my barrel on the balcony would have woken up my wife and child). Of course, I can’t spend that long in this thinking environment, it’s 20 minutes at most when it’s freezing. But the time is unique. I use it to pray and meditate. I don’t use the time to think directly, but the ice bath is a fantastic preparation for the thinking that follows. This may have to do with improved dopamine and noradrenaline metabolism because of the cold stimulus. I want to focus on my personal feelings for now: For a few hours, it increases the clarity of my thinking. It is less erratic, less fragmented, and I have the impression of a “cool” distance. In short: 20 minutes of ice bathing increases the Vulcan in me by 20%.

Endurance training in zone 2. I go running 4 times a week in the morning right after a cold shower. Zone 2 is an intensity that would still allow you to talk to someone, for example. I consciously use this time as productive meditation. I don’t follow Newport’s precise instructions, but simply set myself a mental task and work on it while running.

The higher intensity colors my thinking in a different way than a walk would. Almost all the special characteristics that I have attributed to walking apply. This is not surprising, because zone 2 is not much different from walking due to its low intensity. Subjectively, however, walking seems to focus my thinking more. While I can still ponder in a relaxed manner when walking, my mind works in a narrower corridor when running. On the scale from divergent to convergent thinking, the higher intensity pushes me towards convergent thinking. I take this into account when choosing the thinking task.

The walk with my dog: I can only use this as a thinking environment to a limited extent because my dog is highly energetic and nervous. This means that I always have to keep an eye on my dog so that she doesn’t decide to confront another walker. But in the majority of cases, I walk my dog without having to keep a close eye on her.

I take my dog for a long walk at lunchtime. Depending on whether I meet others with their dogs, I use this time to think (divergently). In the majority of cases, I don’t turn it into productive meditation. At least not consciously. In conversations with other people, it seems to me that I intuitively tend to spend my mentally free time thinking intensively. At least that’s what I’m told when I talk to others about what their inner lives are like.

The other long walk I take with my dog is in the morning. 4 times a week, it’s actually my run. Afterward I walk for another 10–20 minutes so that my dog can roam around in peace, because she runs just by my side or slightly behind me when I’m jogging. But twice a week I don’t jog, I just go for a walk. That’s around 5:20 am (I get up at 5:00 am). Because I walk straight after getting up and doing my morning toilet, my mind is still free, or at least freer than at lunchtime. I can think differently. From my gut, I would say that my thinking is clearer and freer. Walking invites me to divergent thinking, jogging to convergent thinking. But this early on, it feels like there is no invitation. I feel more alone with myself because I walk in the knowledge that pretty much everyone is asleep, and I hardly ever meet anyone outside. Everyone can probably relate to that: Being alone early in the morning and late at night is a very special feeling.

Sleep. I just want to briefly mention this to sensitize you to a more complete way of looking at things. Everyone knows how important sleep is. Therefore, I’m not going to have a footnote celebration. Sleep has the characteristic that we are unconscious during it (unless we are lucid dreaming) and the respective stages of sleep have different functions to support our thinking.

Talking. A conversation is also a special thinking environment because thinking takes place in the medium of spoken language. We are constantly irritated, as Luhmann would say, so that we can overcome barriers to thinking. But speaking itself changes our thinking and can help us to overcome dead ends that we have thought ourselves into. I myself consciously look for certain people to talk to about certain problems. I have kind of a conversation partner inventory in the back of my mind.

Application: Designing the Way You Live as an Interplay of Thought Environments

Cal Newport’s productive meditation is a habit I’ve practiced myself for a long time. Exercise, in my opinion, is a temporary crutch for someone who doesn’t yet have much control over their mind. When one is practiced, one should be able to sit down for 1–2 hours and think about an issue. This is not to say that the goal is to stop practicing productive meditation in the Cal Newport sense by walking or jogging. Rather, it is a skill that should be developed for two reasons:

1. It is an indicator of how well-trained the mind is. Those who have mastered this level of concentration think better in all other thinking environments. (This is no different in meditation, by the way. It is not for nothing that lying down in yoga is considered the most demanding meditation posture.)
2. So you have another thinking environment at your disposal.

The Deep Life that Cal Newport talks about needs a conscious and careful design of the thinking environments.

Example: My Morning Walks as A Thinking Environment

I start my usual workdays with a jog. As mentioned above, my jogs lend themselves to convergent thinking. In most cases, I spend my usual workdays working on a task where I have to choose one of many solutions. This article (I’m writing the outline on a Monday morning) is such a task. I know what I want to write, I just don’t know how I want to write it yet. I’ve already had a chance to think about it during my jog.

On Wednesdays and Saturdays, I don’t jog in the morning, but go for a quiet walk. I don’t concentrate on a specific task or look for the best solution among many for a problem, but allow many possibilities to open up. I think in different ways. Wednesdays and Saturdays are my Zettelkasten days. This means that on these days I work with my Zettelkasten and work in a relatively open-ended way. For example, when I work on Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg, I can’t yet know what will come out of it. The walk is an excellent warm-up phase for the work in the Zettelkasten.

To summarize, I have aligned my mornings with the work that follows:

1. The first thinking environment (jogging or walking) is aligned with the subsequent thinking tasks.
2. Both thinking environments are also coordinated with each other. 4 times a week I think in two environments (jogging and e.g. outlining) that push me towards convergent thinking and I choose thinking tasks that match these environments. 2 times a week I think in two thinking environments (walking and Zettelkasten) that push me towards divergent thinking and choose thinking tasks that fit these environments.

Productive meditation is a first step in the direction you need to go to live a deep life. But it is only a first step on a long journey. I can tell you from my own experience that the creation and harmonization of all the thinking environments in my life have elevated my thinking.

Practical Implications

• Cultivate the thinking environments in your life. Each thinking environment not only has a simple facilitating effect on your thinking, but has an impact on the way you think. You don’t need science to do this. Pure self-observation is enough. Explore how each thinking environment influences your thinking and make the most of each one.

Christian’s Comment: I notice a tremendous difference in the way I’m thinking when I talk with Sascha via FaceTime where I’m standing in front of my desk, versus when we’re out walking for 2 hours, versus when we’re walking just a bit into the nearest grove and hang out there. Standing stifles the conversation and hinders the flow for me. I have yet to take a laptop with me to try to program or write while on a walk to see how that works :)