Don't Feel Ashamed of Your Tendency to Fidget
It's not a bad habit. It's embodied self-regulation.
Fidgeting gets a bad rap in our culture. Our society heaps shame on anything that has to do with our corporeal selves. We don’t like being reminded that we’re not just minds, but bodies—bodies that are subject to decay and death, stink and filth, bodies that bleed and break.
We prefer, instead, to imagine ourselves as inhabiting the mind: an immaculate sphere of pure cerebration. No wonder the metaphor of brain-as-computer is so powerful and pervasive. That analogy was first applied during the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, when scientists invented computers and then likened humans to humans’ own creation. But the notion was rooted in a much older belief: that mind and body are separate, and that mind is made of superior stuff. We identify ourselves with that superior stuff, and try to ignore the rest. These days, with our hot showers and our deodorant and our climate-controlled interiors, we can almost pull it off.
Almost. Because the body has a way of erupting into consciousness, insistently reminding us that we are not clean machines but grubby animals. So we double down on rejecting the body and shunning its needs. We suppress our own bodies’ demands, and we shame those with the effrontery to remind us that we are all alike in having bodies. We try mightily, in our schools and workplaces, to pretend that the body doesn’t matter. We have constructed a thoroughly “brainbound” society, to borrow a coinage from the ever-quotable philosopher Andy Clark.
But there’s a problem here, a serious one. The brainbound orientation cuts us off from vital aspects of our own intelligence. This is true in many ways, but especially true of physical movement. Our bodies evolved to move. Andy Clark (him again) likes to say that we inherited “a mind on the hoof,” a mind that finds its stride when in motion.
Thinking is a full-body activity, and forcing ourselves to remain still as we engage in thinking is counterproductive. Research demonstrates that inhibiting the urge to move actually consumes mental bandwidth—cognitive resources that are then not available for the work at hand. Moreover, expecting ourselves to sit still while thinking deprives us of the mental benefits that movement can provide.
To take one example: the body’s state of arousal profoundly affects how well we think: how intently we focus, how clearly we reason, how accurately we remember, how energetically we persevere. What is the ideal state of arousal for performing mental work? Picture a curve shaped like an upside-down U. In terms of arousal, you want to be in the fat middle of that curve. Not on the left slope of the inverted U, so relaxed that you’re drowsy. And not on the right slope of the inverted U, so overstimulated that you’re jittery.
We have ways of maneuvering ourselves into that sweet spot. Think about how you might down a cup of coffee before tackling a difficult task, knowing that the caffeine will propel you into a zone of focused alertness. Bodily movement serves the same purpose. It’s a natural stimulant that wakes us up and prepares us for action.
The degree of stimulation required differs among individuals; it even differs for the same individual, at various times of the day and in relation to various kinds of tasks. This is why fidgeting is so brilliantly adaptive: it’s a fine-grained way of regulating our arousal up or down, depending on the needs of the moment. Some fidgeting activities are energizing, while others are soothing and relaxing.
Research supports the notion that fidgeting can enhance our thinking. Earlier this year, for example, scientists at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute in New Zealand reported that fidgeting increases blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for focused attention and careful judgment. It may be that when we fidget, we are unconsciously directing biological resources to precisely that neural region that is centrally involved in doing complex cognitive work.
And yet, we scorn this kind of movement—disdain it, disparage it. Even the word “fidget” carries a whiff of something compulsive and embarrassing. Perhaps we should call it something else—“embodied self-regulation,” to borrow a phrase from researcher Katherine Isbister, a professor of computational media at UC-Santa Cruz and an expert on fidgeting and fidget objects (see my interview with Isbister, below).
We engage in embodied self-regulation when we stand up and stretch in the middle of a long meeting, when we pace the room while solving a problem, when we take a break and go for a walk outside. By moving the body, we’re priming the brain to think better. The micro-movements known as fidgeting deserve a place in a suite of embodied self-regulation techniques.
For the fidgeters among us, here are three tactics to try:
Bring self-awareness to your fidgeting. Observe when and where you do it—what the triggers are. Notice the effects of fidgeting on your physical state and on your state of mind. Take note of when and where, and in whose presence, you feel the need to suppress or hide your fidgeting.
Become a connoisseur of fidgeting. Push back against the stigma associated with fidgeting by elevating it to an art form. Check out the selection of fidget objects curated by Katherine Isbister on this Tumblr account; amass a collection of fidget objects of your own, and display them proudly on your desk.
Act as an ambassador of fidgeting. With the fidget-skeptical, share scientific studies like the one cited above (more such research is referenced in my new book, The Extended Mind). Normalize fidgeting by modeling an accepting attitude toward physical movement. Refuse to be embarrassed by the needs of your body.
Three Questions About Fidgeting for Researcher Katherine Isbister
1. Why do people fidget? What does it do for them: physiologically, mentally, emotionally?
In my research, we've asked both adults and kids why they fidget, and they tell us that it helps them in different ways. Some say it helps with focus in a classroom or work setting, others say it's useful for managing stress as it arises when they are stuck in a situation. Some say it helps with emotions like anger (such as squeezing a stressball hard). What's interesting is that there hasn't yet been much basic research on the underlying mechanisms for why this works for people. But we know from clinicians who are, for example, helping kids focus better in school, that providing (teacher approved) fidgets seems to help them. And my collaborator Julie Schweitzer at UC-Davis showed that body fidgeting (sort of wriggling around, not using an object in the hand) does seem to improve focus in people with ADHD. She and I are working on an NIH-funded study looking at how fidget objects affect attention and emotion, so we hope to learn more in the near-term future.
There's a psychologist at Stanford, James Gross, who has a whole model (the Extended Process Model) for how people regulate their emotions. He posits that people use many different strategies for handling emotions that arise. One way is to shift where one's attention is—“attentional deployment.” It may be that fidgeting is working partly in this way. So, if you can't get out of a situation, and feelings are arising, or you feel really distracted, then fidgeting may help you to 'redeploy' your attention away from those unpleasant feelings. I'm also very interested in the physiological feedback loop that may be happening. I suspect that fidgeting with different materials that respond in different ways (a cold, smooth stone, or the sharp, sproingy prong of a paper clip's end) may be a way of playing with one's own nervous system to create different kinds of states—waking oneself up a bit, or soothing oneself from the hands to the brain.
2. Why do you think fidgeting is often regarded with disapproval, and is that attitude misplaced?
I think that in modern desk-based work life, it's really important to be able to sit still for long periods of time. In a school setting, kids are being trained to do this while they are learning. In a classroom with many kids, somebody wiggling around or playing with an object could be seen as distracting to others, and maybe as not paying sufficient attention to what is going on. But based on the reports from people who fidget, on the individual level I'd say the opposite is usually true—the person is using the fidget as a way to help them continue to focus and pay attention, and to manage distracting emotions.
I think we've seen a change in the last few years, as educators have come to realize that functionally these behaviors can help kids to focus. We've also seen the rise of a whole category of fidgets as desk toys, taking some of the stigma away from this behavior in adults in the workplace. In a nutshell, I think the common understanding is that fidgeting somehow signals a lack of self-control, but actually, it may be a useful form of self-control that is holding more distracting behavior and lack of focus at bay.
Kids in our study said that the kind of fidget was important—noisy or flashy fidgets get taken away by teachers. The design of more subtle, quiet fidget devices that don't distract others is also helping to reduce the stigma and irritation of this behavior in group settings, I think.
3. You have written about "embodied self-regulation." How do you define this phenomenon, and how is it different from how we usually think about regulating ourselves?
I think most people have a kind of brain-to-body model of self-regulation—“I calm myself down with my thinking, by force of will.” But in a model like Gross's, that's only one of many ways we regulate ourselves. He points out that we may do things like leave the room—just walk ourselves out of a bad situation! I suspect that fidgeting is a kind of bodily way to manage feelings and focus when we can’t for whatever reason walk out of that room or think ourselves out of it. We're in a stressful meeting and have to pay attention. We're in the classroom all day. We simply have to finish the work task. In these cases, I think that fidgeting may be a sensorial way to help us adjust focus and how we feel. Holding and turning a cool stone in the hand might soothe my nervous system a bit. Poking the sharp end of a paperclip gently with the pad of my thumb may subtly up my focus.
In a way, it's a miniature version of the things we do when we're doing whole-body soothing. If you had a stressful day, you might put on your comfiest pajamas, pet your dog or cat, and eat comfort food. If you are trying to focus in a late night study session you might turn down the temperature in your room, sit in a non-comfy chair, drink caffeine to amp up your energy level. Or do some exercise to help you wake up. We do these things intuitively in a whole-body sense to help ourselves regulate how we feel and focus. I think we can see fidgeting with different materials as a kind of miniaturized version of this when we are not able to use those other strategies. So, a useful tool in the human bag of tricks for working with ourselves in our daily lives.