Move!

Have you ever noticed how a brisk walk clears your mind or how stretching after a long day instantly lifts your mood? In Move: How the New Science of Body Movement Can Set Your Mind Free, science journalist Caroline Williams explores the deep, often neglected truth that our minds are built to move. She argues that movement is not just something we do with our bodies—it’s the foundation of how we think, feel, and connect with the world around us. Our brains evolved not for abstract thought but to coordinate movement; thinking, in her words, is the evolutionary internalization of movement.

Williams weaves scientific discoveries from neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology with vivid stories of movers—from a stuntman performing backflips to a choreographer restoring emotional connection in troubled teens. The result is a revolutionary reframing of what it means to have a mind: a moving mind is a healthy mind, and stillness is the true enemy of well-being.

The Crisis of Stillness

We are living through a silent epidemic of stillness. Williams opens by describing the modern world as one where people have “outsourced movement” to machines and devices. Most adults spend 70% of their lives sitting; children are glued to desks and screens; older adults are stationary for up to 80% of their waking hours. The consequences are staggering: lower IQ scores, diminished creativity, rising depression and anxiety, and even measurable brain shrinkage. She calls this the “sedentary collapse of the species.”

What makes this even more insidious, Williams notes, is our cultural misunderstanding of exercise. We treat it like a pill to counteract sitting, cramming 30 minutes of cardio into days spent immobile. But short, isolated bouts of exercise cannot undo the cognitive and emotional dulling that comes from being sedentary for hours at a time. True movement health, she insists, must be spread throughout the day and integrated into the fabric of life.

The Evolutionary Blueprint of Movement

To understand why movement affects us so deeply, Williams goes back to evolution. She begins with a quirky creature called the sea squirt, which swims freely as a juvenile but digests its own brain once it anchors to a rock for adult life. The point? When movement ceases, thinking becomes useless. Drawing from neuroscientists like Rodolfo Llinás, she explains that early animals developed brains not to ponder but to plan movement—to escape predators, chase food, and navigate terrain. In this sense, the brain and body evolved as one system, tightly bound through the act of motion.

Williams later traces this linkage through primate evolution: as our apelike ancestors swung through trees, their cerebellums expanded, enabling finely sequenced coordination. This same brain circuitry later powered our abilities to plan, imagine, build tools, and speak language—mental movements descended from physical ones. When humans took to walking and running long distances, the mind’s problem-solving prowess expanded again, merging physical endurance with cognitive foresight. Evolution, Williams concludes, wired our brains to run on movement-dependent fuel.

From Embodied Life to Modern Disconnection

The tragedy, Williams explains, is that modern living has severed this embodied link. Drawing on research in embodied cognition (pioneered by thinkers like Guy Claxton and Antonio Damasio), she challenges the notion of the brain as a command center controlling a passive body. Instead, cognition emerges from the interplay between body, brain, and environment. Our muscles, viscera, and posture constantly send sensory data that shape thought and emotion. Ignore these signals—by staying seated or detached from movement—and the mind begins to malfunction.

Her exploration of concepts like proprioception (our sense of body position) and interoception (our awareness of internal sensations like heartbeat and hunger) reveals just how deeply bodily rhythms influence our mood and awareness. A sluggish posture can perpetuate stress, while deliberate breathing or walking can interrupt rumination and spark creativity. Williams argues that to feel alive—and even to perceive reality clearly—you must literally move through it.

Movement as Medicine for the Mind

Throughout the book, Williams organizes movement into layers of psychological healing. Each form—walking, dancing, strength training, stretching, breathing, and rest—offers unique cognitive and emotional rewards. Walking organizes thought and boosts memory; dance fosters empathy and joy; strength training rebuilds confidence; stretching moderates inflammation and self-awareness; and even stillness, when earned after movement, becomes a mindful reset.

Her claim is profound yet practical: motion is not an optional fitness choice but the software update for our emotional and cognitive systems. Ignoring it, she warns, may lead to the same fate as the sea squirt—comfortable but thoughtless. Rediscovering movement, by contrast, reawakens the full spectrum of human potential: intelligence, creativity, resilience, and connection. As Williams puts it, “The brain, body, and mind are parts of the same beautiful system—and the whole thing works better when it’s on the move.”

Charles Darwin’s daily walks around his “thinking path” weren’t just breaks from work—they were the foundation of his revolutionary insights. In Move, Caroline Williams uses Darwin as a prototype of the moving thinker, exploring how walking rewires the brain for clarity, creativity, and emotional balance.

Why Walking Makes the Brain Thrive

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors, Williams explains, evolved to be “cognitively engaged endurance athletes.” The same activity that once helped us track prey now serves as mental maintenance. Walking increases blood flow and oxygen to the brain, stimulates the release of neurotrophic factors like BDNF (which supports neuron growth), and synchronizes heartbeats to the rhythm of our steps. Engineer Dick Greene discovered this synchronization—roughly 120 steps per minute—as the optimal tempo for pumping blood and enhancing mental focus. When you walk, in other words, your brain literally beats in time with your body.

The Bones Remember

One of the book’s most striking revelations is courtesy of Nobel laureate Eric Kandel and geneticist Gerard Karsenty: our bones are endocrine organs that secrete hormones influencing the brain. Weight-bearing movement triggers the release of osteocalcin, a hormone that boosts memory, reduces anxiety, and communicates directly with the hippocampus. Without regular walking, jumping, or running, osteocalcin levels plummet—explaining why sedentary people experience cognitive dulling similar to astronauts after weeks in zero gravity. Simply put, when you neglect your skeleton, your mind atrophies too.

“Movement is essential,” says Kandel. “The older one gets, the more important it becomes.”

Walking Away from Worry

Psychologically, walking changes how you perceive time and self. People who move forward physically also think forward mentally. Williams cites studies showing that motion stretches our cognitive “timeline,” making the past feel distant and the future more attainable—an antidote to depressive rumination. Ultrarunner Marcus Scotney captured this insight beautifully: when you’re depressed, he said, “it’s like you’re tied to a chair. Running gives you the strength to know that you can move forward.”

Forward motion doesn’t just symbolize progress; it creates it. Experiments show that people walking forward generate more ideas about the future, while those walking backward think about the past. Even imagining forward movement sparks optimistic thinking, which may explain why walking therapy and long nature hikes often produce breakthroughs that sitting therapy alone cannot.

Creativity on the Move

Walking also nurtures what neuroscientists call hypofrontality—a brief quieting of the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s “executive” region responsible for judgment and control. Temporarily silencing this inner manager allows creative ideas to surface unfiltered. Researchers at Stanford confirmed this: their participants solved 60% more creative problems after walking than while sitting. Williams calls this the Darwin effect—thinking best happens when the body leads the brain.

It might explain why visionaries like Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf, and Steve Jobs swore by walking meetings. The act keeps the body busy enough to unshackle the mind, letting insight arise as naturally as breath. Williams concludes that to solve your toughest problems, you don’t need more thinking—you need more footsteps.

In a chapter aptly titled “Fighting Fit,” Williams explores how strength training reshapes the mind as much as the body. Physical strength, she argues, acts as an internal vote of confidence—a biological message that says, “I am capable.”

The Mind–Muscle Connection

Psychologist Jean Barrett Holloway first noticed in the 1980s that teenage girls who improved their strength by 40% in twelve weeks also gained self-efficacy far beyond the gym, resolving social conflicts more effectively. Williams connects this early insight to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s theory that our sense of self arises from the body’s constant assessment of what it can handle—its homeostatic commentary. When your muscles grow stronger, your brain updates its narrative: you are resilient. This physiological feedback subtly rewrites emotional reality.

“If our eyes are our window on the world,” writes Williams, “then our flesh and bones are the vehicle that allows us to act on it.”

Confidence Is a Muscle

Strength training cultivates what psychologists call global self-efficacy—the belief that you can influence outcomes. Neuroscientist Micah Allen describes how mastering climbing routes built a “visceral sense of capability” that spread to every area of life. Studies confirm this: people who lift, push, or pull regularly report higher self-worth, better anxiety management, and improved sleep, independent of muscle size.

Reclaiming Natural Movement

Williams introduces natural-movement advocates like Jerome Rattoni and Erwan Le Corre from the MovNat system, which revives climbing, lifting, crawling, and jumping—functional movements akin to early human survival skills. Their motto, “Be strong to be useful,” reframes fitness as adaptability, not vanity. Crawling on all fours or vaulting obstacles may look eccentric, but these compound motions teach your nervous system efficiency and your mind courage. Each squat or crawl whispers the same message to your brain: I can handle life.

Strength After Trauma

The healing power of strength extends even to trauma recovery. Williams describes studies of veterans and abuse survivors showing that physically “finishing the action” of fight or flight—through boxing, martial arts, or resistance training—can resolve chronic PTSD symptoms. As psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk (author of The Body Keeps the Score) observed, trauma freezes both muscles and mind; movement “unfreezes” the body and restores agency. Survivors like blogger Sonia Lena found that learning Krav Maga transformed panic into power: the body internalized safety long before the mind believed it.

Whether you’re rebuilding after hardship or simply navigating everyday stress, Williams concludes, each repetition is psychological reprogramming. Strength says what words sometimes cannot: you are no longer helpless.

When life becomes overwhelming, Williams suggests you do something radically simple: dance. In “Slave to the Rhythm,” she shows that dancing is not trivial entertainment but a primal technology for emotional regulation, connection, and joy. From tribal rituals to nightclubs, humans have always used rhythm to sync body and mind.

Born to Dance

Studies show newborns detect and respond to rhythm before they can walk. Neuroscientist Morten Kringelbach explains that moving to a beat triggers dopamine, rewarding synchronization between body and sound. This may be why toddlers stomp instinctively and adults rediscover elation in pulsating drums. Even tapping your foot harmonizes auditory and motor brain regions, calming internal chaos through a process called entrainment.

Syncing with Others

Dancing together blurs the line between “me” and “you.” Studies at Oxford University show people moving in unison experience surges of bonding hormones and a softening of social boundaries—a phenomenon historian William McNeill called “muscular bonding.” This explains why even strangers at a concert feel connected after moving to the same rhythm. Williams suggests that synchronized movement evolved to unite tribes and may still heal modern loneliness.

Embodied Emotion

Choreographer Kevin Edward Turner’s story exemplifies dance as therapy. After hospitalization for depression and psychosis, movement became his path back to mental health. Working with young people, he encourages them to “lead with feeling,” transforming anxious postures into open, confident shapes. This reflects psychologist Charles Darwin’s observation that emotion and body movement are deeply intertwined. To express joy or fear physically is to regulate it internally; in Turner’s studio, teenagers rediscover self-respect through motion, not talk.

Dance as Self-Knowledge

For those uncomfortable “dancing their feelings,” neuroscientist-dancer Rebecca Barnstaple reframes it as emotional training. Dance movement therapy increases serotonin, lowers stress hormones, and helps people sense internal states—building interoception just like mindfulness does. Even simple gestures matter: dancing lightly, hopping, or reaching upward boosts mood instantly, says researcher Tal Shafir. You don’t have to be graceful; what counts is moving the emotion through.

Williams ends with a charming insight: the joy of dancing isn’t just in sound or steps, but in balance itself. The dizzying thrill of movement excites the brain’s vestibular system, linking physical play to pleasure. Whether you dance in a studio, your kitchen, or secretly while waiting for the kettle, you’re triggering ancient neural rhythms that bring you home to yourself.

In “Core Benefits,” Williams examines one of the most underestimated mind–body links: the muscles around your trunk. Neuroscientist Peter Strick discovered neural pathways connecting the core’s movement centers directly to the adrenal glands—the engine of the stress response. This means that when you engage your core, you’re literally messaging your stress system to calm down.

Why Posture Shapes Emotion

Research by Elizabeth Broadbent and others confirms what mothers have said for generations: standing up straight makes you feel better. Upright posture correlates with lower cortisol and more positive thinking, while slumping feeds fatigue and defeatism. When we sit hunched over screens, we trap the breath and signal the brain that we’re under pressure. By lifting the spine and opening the chest, we release the diaphragm and alter emotional chemistry. Tai chi master Peter Wayne calls these postures “shapes that encode calm.”

The Body’s Stress Loop

Strick’s tracing experiments, using modified rabies virus to map neurons, show that the brain areas governing trunk stability are deeply wired into the body’s “fight-or-flight” command center. This discovery validates why yoga, breathing, or laughter exercises work so reliably: rhythmic engagement of abdominal and pelvic muscles tells the adrenal glands the emergency has passed. The core, Williams writes, is both stabilizer and communicator—bridging thought and physiology.

Laughing yoga, she adds, is a perfect biological hack. Studies show that hearty laughter activates deep abdominal muscles, slows the heart, and releases stress hormones just like genuine joy. By working from body to mind, you can back your way into relief—no affirmations required.

At the Gut Level

The gut, nested within the core, adds another feedback channel. Strick’s collaborator David Levinthal found that people with gut disorders like IBS often have impaired abdominal reflexes. Training these muscles through yoga or Pilates not only improves digestion but also normalizes emotional regulation, highlighting how “psychosomatic” conditions are really two-way traffic between belly and brain.

As mindfulness traditions long suggested, the center of the body isn’t metaphorically powerful—it’s neurologically sacred. Strength in the core doesn’t just support good posture; it stores agency, stability, and self-belief. Every time you brace your center, Williams says, you realign the mind’s sense of safety.

Stretching, often dismissed as a fitness afterthought, emerges in Williams’s narrative as cellular-level medicine. Inspired by Harvard researcher Helene Langevin, her exploration of fascia—the connective tissue webbing that envelops muscles and organs—reveals how gentle stretching triggers biochemical processes that reduce inflammation, ease chronic pain, and soothe the mind.

The Intelligence of Fascia

Fascia acts like liquid silk wrapping the body’s muscles, organs, and vessels. When we sit too long, these sheets thicken, stiffen, and restrict flow—both physical and energetic. Langevin discovered that stretching causes fascial cells to flatten and release ATP, which signals cellular relaxation and anti-inflammatory repair. In her lab, even rats doing “downward dog” regained tissue elasticity and showed reduced immune activity around injury sites.

Slow, mindful stretching may also prompt release of specialized molecules called resolvins, which tell the immune system the threat has passed—offering hope for diseases of chronic inflammation, from arthritis to depression.

Movement as Immune Cleansing

Fascia’s sponge-like structure enables fluid exchange with the lymphatic system, the body’s natural detoxifier. Tiny muscle contractions or twists wring out fluid like a wet towel, helping immune cells patrol tissues. Anatomist Neil Theise has even proposed calling this spongy network a “new organ”—one that connects fluid flow, movement, and vitality. Every twist or stretch is, quite literally, an internal rinse cycle.

Stretching the Mind

Psychologically, stretching amplifies interoceptive awareness—the ability to sense inner states. Williams cites links between flexibility and calm: yoga practitioners, tai chi students, and even casual stretchers report lower stress and anxiety. Yet she also warns of balance: too much flexibility can fuel anxiety. In people with hypermobile joints (sometimes called double-jointed), overstretchy collagen can confuse brain–body signals, leading to racing hearts and panic sensations. Neuroscientists Jessica Eccles and Hugo Critchley found that strengthening stabilizing muscles and naming bodily sensations early in life can restore calm, especially in neurodiverse children.

The message is moderation. Productive stretching is about tuning, not twisting—communicating with your tissues, not punishing them. As Williams writes, “Go gently. Respect the tissue. Don’t yank it—listen to it.”

In her chapter “Breathless,” Williams unveils perhaps the simplest mental upgrade of all: conscious breathing. Drawing from yogic traditions and modern neuroscience, she argues that the breath is the remote control of the brain. Breath rhythms orchestrate brainwaves, emotions, and physiological balance.

The Science of the Sigh

Every five minutes, our brainstem triggers a sigh—a built-in reset that reinflates lung sacs and, emotionally, releases tension. Neuroscientist Jack Feldman identified clusters of neurons (the pre-Bötzinger Complex) that regulate these rhythms. When we sigh consciously after stress, we mimic the natural “system reboot,” grounding mind and body together.

Breathing and Brainwaves

Williams reveals research by Christina Zelano showing that nasal breathing physically synchronizes brain activity in emotional and memory centers. When participants inhaled through the nose, their brains reacted faster to fearful stimuli and improved memory recall. Mouth breathing bypassed this coordination entirely. This explains why traditions like pranayama emphasize nasal inhalation: it’s how the brain keeps rhythm with the world.

The Magic of Six

Among all methods, one stands out: breathing six times per minute—five seconds in, five seconds out. This tempo syncs heart rate, blood pressure, and brain oscillations into coherence. It boosts oxygen efficiency, activates the calming parasympathetic system via the vagus nerve, and lowers inflammation. Even ancient prayers like the rosary naturally follow this rhythm, hinting that human rituals evolved around biological harmony.

“Six breaths per minute is a shortcut to a sense of calm and contentment,” Williams writes.

In a culture of shallow, hurried breathing, this slow rhythm is revolutionary. Practiced on its own or paired with walking at about 120 steps per minute, it creates a natural moving meditation that resets stress, improves focus, and deepens awareness—no incense required.

After so much motion, Williams closes with an equally vital truth: we also need deliberate rest. But rest, she clarifies, is not laziness—it’s active recovery that allows the mind to integrate movement’s effects. Drawing from Claudia Hammond’s “Rest Test” project, she notes that people who feel well-rested report the highest life satisfaction, yet most believe they aren’t getting enough.

Rest vs. Lethargy

Williams distinguishes genuine rest from sloth. True rest refreshes energy and perspective; lethargy drains it. Physical fatigue after movement often feels like stillness combined with alert serenity, while sedentary lethargy feels dull and heavy. The goal is to earn stillness through motion—so that the body, having expressed itself fully, can truly relax. This ancient rhythm mirrors the yogic idea that the body must move before the mind can meditate.

Movement to Rest

Counterintuitively, movement may cure modern exhaustion better than sleep. Stress-related inflammation fools the body into believing it’s tired, but light physical activity such as walking, tai chi, or stretching rebalances this false fatigue by resetting hormonal and immune feedback loops. The body isn’t asking for sleep; it’s asking to move out the stress.

Rest as Reflection

Williams also highlights the mental art of pause. Rest means solitary reconnection—reading, listening to music, or simply noticing breath. Most of the world’s restful activities, data shows, are quietly solo. This supports her ultimate argument: movement and rest are not opposites but partners in a healthy mind. We must move to be still and be still to move well.

To live fully embodied, she concludes, is not about constant action but rhythmic alternation. The good life, physiologically and spiritually, is lived as a dance between motion and pause.