Psychology says pacing during phone calls isn’t restlessness, it’s thinking with your whole body, because movement and speech share machinery and walking genuinely helps the words come

I pace when I’m on the phone. Not a little. I have a route.

Kitchen island, hallway, window, back. My wife once watched me do roughly forty laps during a single call and asked afterward if I was aware I’d been “orbiting.” (I was not.)

For years I filed this under personal defects, somewhere between “checks the stove twice” and “can’t nap.” Restless. Fidgety. The guy who apparently needs to burn calories to form sentences.

Then I tried taking calls from a chair, like an adult, and noticed something I couldn’t explain: the sentences got harder to build. I’d lose words I knew. I’d um my way through points I could have nailed at walking speed.

So I finally looked into it, and it turns out psychology has been on my side this whole time. Speech and movement share machinery in the brain. The research is decades deep. And it starts with the most charming study I’ve ever cited: people who have never seen a gesture in their lives.

Talking is a full-body activity

In 1998, psychologists Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow published a paper in Nature about people blind from birth. Speakers who have never once watched anyone move their hands during a conversation. No model to copy. No habit to pick up.

They gestured anyway, at rates comparable to sighted speakers. And here’s the part that settles it: blind speakers gestured even when talking to a listener they knew was also blind. As the authors put it, gestures “require neither a model nor an observant partner.”

Nobody taught them. Nobody could see it. The hands moved anyway, because moving is apparently part of how humans build sentences. Gesture doesn’t get added to speech. It ships with it.

You’ve got this data on yourself, by the way. You gesture on the phone, at people who cannot see you, and it has never once felt weird.

Translation: your body considers talking a physical event. It’s not asking for your permission.

Hold still and the words come slower

Okay, but does the movement actually do anything? Researchers tested it the obvious way: they took it away.

Psychologists Frances Rauscher, Robert Krauss, and Yihsiu Chen had people describe cartoons, sometimes free to gesture, sometimes with their hands restrained. With hands out of play, speech got measurably less fluent, and the filled pauses climbed.

The ums. The uhs. The sound of a brain patting its pockets for a word it had a second ago.

Restraining people’s gestures produced roughly the same signature as making word-retrieval harder by other means, which is why the researchers’ explanation is called the lexical retrieval hypothesis. The movement helps you find the words.

A later study from Goldin-Meadow’s lab got even weirder: people allowed to gesture while explaining math problems remembered more items on an unrelated memory task than people made to sit still. Moving didn’t cost them brainpower. It freed some up.

So all those years I spent trying to take calls politely, from a chair, with still hands? I was doing the conversational equivalent of typing in mittens.

Walking gives your brain a 60 percent head start

Now scale it up from hands to legs, because Stanford did.

In four experiments, researchers Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz compared people’s thinking while seated versus walking. On idea-generation tasks, walking boosted creative output by an average of 60 percent, and 81 percent of participants did better on their feet.

My favorite detail: it wasn’t the fresh air or the scenery. Walking on an indoor treadmill facing a blank wall worked too. “Walking on a treadmill in a small, boring room still had strong results,” Oppezzo admitted, sounding as surprised as anyone. The movement itself was doing the work.

The boost even lingered after people sat back down, like an engine that stays warm for a while.

Every lap of my kitchen is basically this experiment, running nightly, with no grant funding.

Phone calls are talking on hard mode

Here’s why all of this shows up on calls specifically, and why the pacing kicks in the second the phone rings.

Face to face, a conversation has help everywhere. Your expressions carry half the load. A pause gets covered by a look. You can point at things. On a call, all of that is gone, and every single thing you want the other person to understand has to be converted into words, found and assembled in real time, for as long as the call lasts.

That’s the most sustained word-production workout in ordinary life. It’s also exactly the operation the research says movement supports.

So the body sends in everything it has. The hands gesture, because gesture ships with speech. The legs add the walking boost. And walking is the one skill you’ve practiced so thoroughly it runs on total autopilot, costing your working memory nothing while the rest of you hunts for words.

Sitting down for a long call means doing the hardest verbal task of your day with half the machinery switched off. The pacing was never the malfunction.

The chair was.

Pace the brainstorm, sit for the fine print

One honest limit, because the Stanford data is clear about it.

Walking supercharged the generating kind of thinking: ideas, options, ways to phrase a hard thing. On tasks with one correct answer, only 23 percent of people improved, and tight precision work can actually get slightly worse mid-stride.

So I pace the brainstorm, the catch-up, the call where I need to find the right way to say something delicate. I sit for the contract review. (Learned that one the hard way too.)

Worth separating, also: this is about movement that helps. Pacing you can’t stop when you’re desperate to be still is a different thing, usually about anxiety, and it deserves its own conversation with someone qualified.

But the regular version? The laps around the kitchen while you talk something through?

Blind speakers who’ve never seen a gesture still make them. Restrained hands make words come slower. Walking made four experiments’ worth of people measurably better at exactly what a phone call demands.

So these days, when someone points at a perfectly good chair mid-call, I just smile and keep orbiting.

They’re thinking with part of their equipment. I’m using all of it.