I WONDER whether you will stay completely still until you reach the end of this article. If you do, then perhaps I have done a good job – fidgeting, as you might expect, is a pretty reliable indicator of waning attention.
But is there more to it? For those incessant pen-clickers, hair-twirlers and foot-tappers among us, the urge to fidget is irresistible. The popularity of the fidget spinner is a case in point: earlier this year, variants of it made up every one of the top 10 bestselling toys on Amazon. Many of these gadgets come with claims they can help children with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), anxiety or autism. Some people say fidgeting aids focus, or could even boost efforts to lose weight. So should we all harness the powers of restlessness?
Our interest in the subject has a long history. In 1885, the polymath Francis Galton – a cousin of Darwin – found himself in such a tedious meeting that he measured the amount of fidgeting in the audience, publishing his findings in Nature. Freud ascribed deeper meaning to fidgeting, interpreting it as a manifestation of sexual problems. And then in the 1950s, when “hyperkinetic disorder†– later ADHD – came to prominence, fidgeting began to be seen as a pathological symptom.
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Underlying the claim that fidget spinners can help boost attention in those with ADHD, especially children, is the idea that the disorder is associated with chronic under-arousal at a neural level. This hampers mental performance, but the thinking is that movement can compensate by stimulating the neurotransmitters associated with arousal. “When I watched [children with ADHD] working, I could see that they were concentrating, or at least attempting to concentrate, but also that their legs might be moving back and forth,†says of the MIND Institute at the University of California, Davis. “They might be tapping their fingers, humming to themselves or somehow producing some other movements. I thought that these might be serving a purpose.â€
Positive spin
Schweitzer and her colleagues put this idea to the test in a paper published last year. They asked children to wear an ankle gadget that measured movement during a tricky mental task. For those with ADHD, but not a control group, in those trials where they got the correct answer.
The finding is consistent with the idea that fidgeting helps kids with ADHD compensate for low arousal levels and pay more attention, although the results need to be replicated. Even so, Schweitzer warns that fidget spinners are unlikely to be beneficial. “The fidgeting I recorded was naturally produced by the children and not external or a toy. The fidget spinners that I have seen are likely more distracting than helpful.â€
Pouring more cold water on claims of fidget spinners’ therapeutic benefits, a recent review in a paediatric journal concluded that these “fad†gadgets simply . “Thus, their alleged benefits remain scientifically unfounded.â€
But what about the rest of us fidgets? While modern psychology has been relatively quiet on the subject, we know fidgeting is a clear sign of a restless mind. One recent study – you could say that those prone to mental fidgeting also tend to be prone to bodily fidgets. “When the mind is spontaneously released from the burden of attending to the task at hand, the body is likely to follow suit,†concluded the researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
But even if the mind is wandering, fidgeting could, paradoxically, be a way to help us concentrate on that task. “I see fidgeting as a natural strategy that develops for getting tactile stimulation that may help us to stay focused mentally,†says at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
This would fit with what is known in cognitive psychology as perceptual load theory, the notion that additional sensory stimulation can actually help us focus. The idea is that the sensory stimulation fidgeting provides uses up “spare†attention that might otherwise get grabbed by distractions. The same principle underlies the finding that doodling appears to help people stay more focused.
“Fidgeting can help weight loss, apparently burning 800 calories a dayâ€
James Farley at the University of Alberta in Canada is one of the few researchers to have studied the impact of fidgeting on our powers of concentration. “The missing piece here,†he says, “is whether fidgeting is demanding enough to ‘soak up’ those free resources that could otherwise process distractions.†Conversely, he warns that fidget spinners or other forms of “complicated fidgeting†might boost our cognitive load, which would make it harder to focus on the main task at hand.
To test some of these ideas, Farley and his colleagues recently filmed 21 students as they watched a 40-minute video of a lecture, and later measured how much they fidgeted throughout. Every 5 minutes, the students also noted whether they had been paying attention or daydreaming. Afterwards, the researchers quizzed them about the different sections of the lecture.
Many of the results were unsurprising: attention tended to stray more the longer the lecture went on, and the students’ memory of what was presented was poorer during the bouts of distraction. Crucially, fidgeting also increased through the lecture and, unfortunately for the fidgets among us, , even after factoring out the influence of daydreaming.
However, for Farley, “fidgeting is probably a symptom, but not a cause†of waning attention. He says his results are consistent with the idea that fidgeting is a strategy people use to cope with increased boredom as a demanding task – like paying attention to a lecture – wears on. Unfortunately, it also happens to be an ineffective strategy, as the experimental findings suggest, although it is still plausible that fidgeting helped the students deal with the physical discomfort of sitting down to watch the lecture.
Of course, it is also possible the students’ memory of the material would have been even worse had they been made to sit completely still. Indeed, from a practical point of view, Farley says, it is unlikely to be helpful for teachers to tell students to stop fidgeting. “If you’re trying to inhibit something that your body has a tendency to do, that is likely to be taxing in and of itself and may have a further detrimental impact on your ability to direct focused attention elsewhere,†he says.
But even if fidgeting isn’t great at keeping us focused, it may serve another function – to help beat stress. Early evidence comes from work done in the 1970s by psychologist at the University of Washington. He spent several hours observing people in a Seattle dentist’s waiting room and found that those about to get their teeth seen to were much more likely to fidget than those accompanying them.
Much more recently, researchers at the University of Roehampton, UK, set volunteers a stressful task – doing arithmetic in front of an audience – and found that the more the male volunteers fidgeted, they experienced – measured both subjectively and according to their heart rate. The same benefit wasn’t found for female volunteers, who fidgeted about half as much as the men and who found the challenge more stressful. The researchers speculated that perhaps women try harder to avoid fidgeting and as a result get more stressed.
So it seems there might be two types of fidgeting: one to help calm us down in times of pressure, the other to help keep us alert when boredom strikes. The two may even be connected, as the students in Farley’s experiments discovered – because trying to pay attention to something tedious can be uncomfortable and stressful. Either way, this difference may explain the results of a new study that found that how much we fidget seems linked to our personality.
Paul Morris and Amy Warne at the University of Portsmouth, UK, asked volunteers to sit doing nothing for 10 minutes on a specially designed chair fitted with a secret pressure mat that recorded how much they shifted around. Afterwards, the participants completed personality questionnaires. What emerged was that . This makes sense because neuroticism is associated with greater anxiety, and extroverts are thought to have a lower baseline level of physical arousal when resting, which makes them want to seek out stimulation. Presumably, the neurotic folk fidgeted in the chair as a way to keep calm, while the extroverts simply struggled to cope with the boredom of the situation.
The underlying reason why you fidget could help determine what best to fidget with. Isbister has been researching the different things that people use to fidget, and asked them to submit pictures of their favourites via a . If you want to up your focus, “clickable, bendable, twistable things – items that may have mechanical parts and more defined edges – may help you to bring up your arousal levelâ€, she says. For stress relief, on the other hand, a smooth, soft object like a worry stone or stress ball may be just the ticket.
I hope you got to the end of this article without too much fidgeting. However, if you did resort to swinging your legs or thumb-fiddling, take heart – it could have an unexpected upside.
In 1999, researchers at the Mayo Clinic and Mayo Foundation in Minnesota instructed volunteers to eat an extra 1000 calories per day for eight weeks while their weight and exercise were monitored. For those who kept the weight off, the key turned out to be increased fidgeting and other subtle movements, even as small as posture control. Fidgeting, it seemed, . Other, similar research backs this up – all the jiggles and wriggles that the most fidgety among us do apparently burns 800 calories a day. No fidget spinner required.
When fidgeting is no joke
In extreme cases, the urge to fidget can lead to huge distress. People with a disorder known as restless leg syndrome, or Willis-Ekbom disease, often describe unpleasant sensations such as crawling or aching in the legs or other parts of the body, including the mouth or genitals. They can only relieve these by moving the affected body part. The sensations usually worsen during rest and especially at night. More than 10 million adults in the US are thought to be affected by the condition.
The triggers vary from iron deficiency to pregnancy, and there is a clear genetic component. Lifestyle changes, such as taking more exercise and avoiding caffeine, can help. In more extreme cases, people may have to take drugs that alter levels of dopamine, the neurotransmitter involved in movement control. For some, though, a simple technique may also boost dopamine levels and have the same effect on the brain – masturbation has been found to relieve the symptoms.
This article appeared in print under the headline “State of unrestâ€
