Psychology says people who pace while talking on the phone may be using movement as a thinking aid

Have you ever started walking around the moment a phone conversation becomes interesting, complicated or emotionally demanding? You may begin pacing from one room to another, walking back and forth while explaining something, or unconsciously moving around while trying to remember a name or formulate an answer. From the outside, it can look like nervous energy or an inability to sit still. But research into gesture, embodied cognition and cognitive load suggests that movement can sometimes accompany, and potentially support, thinking. Psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues have found that bodily movement can reduce cognitive load during certain speaking and problem-solving tasks, suggesting that the body is not always separate from cognition.

Psychology Says Movement Can Help the Brain Manage Cognitive Load

One of the most interesting explanations comes from cognitive load theory. Working memory is limited. When you are talking, you have to retrieve words, organize ideas, remember what the other person said and decide what to say next.

Now add a complicated topic. Perhaps you are explaining why you changed jobs or trying to describe how to solve a problem. That requires considerable mental processing.


Research by Goldin-Meadow, Howard Nusbaum, Spencer Kelly and Susan Wagner found that people who gestured while explaining mathematical problems remembered more information than people who did not gesture. The researchers proposed that gesturing may lighten cognitive load, leaving cognitive resources available for other tasks.

Pacing is not the same as gesturing, so the study does not prove that walking around during a phone call improves thinking. But it provides an important clue: movement and cognition can interact.

Why Walking and Talking Might Feel Surprisingly Natural

When you are on a phone call, the person you are speaking with is not physically in front of you. That changes the sensory environment.

You are not maintaining eye contact, monitoring facial expressions or coordinating your body with another person's physical presence. This may leave you with greater freedom to move.

For some people, that freedom may make it easier to think aloud.

There is a broader concept known as embodied cognition, which proposes that cognitive processes are influenced by interactions between the mind, body and environment.

Research on gesture provides some of the strongest evidence for this broader relationship. Goldin-Meadow and Martha Wagner Alibali have argued that gestures are not merely decorative movements accompanying speech; they can interact with speaking, learning and thinking.

Psychology Says Movement Can Become Part of How People Think

Consider someone trying to explain a complicated route over the phone. They might say, “You go past the supermarket, turn left, then there's a road…”

At the same time, they may start walking around the room. The movement is not necessarily consciously planned. It may simply accompany the process of organizing spatial information.

Research examining gesture and mental representation has found that gestures can be connected to the way people represent information while speaking. In one study, researchers compared gesture production with verbal and visuospatial working-memory demands, exploring how gesture relates to different forms of mental representation.

This suggests that bodily movement can sometimes become intertwined with the cognitive process itself.

Why Complicated Conversations May Trigger More Movement

You may notice that you pace more during certain calls than others. A quick conversation about dinner may leave you sitting comfortably.

A conversation about work, relationships, finances or a difficult decision may have you walking around the house. That difference makes psychological sense.

The more demanding the conversation, the more information you may need to hold and manipulate in working memory. Movement can potentially become part of a person's strategy for regulating that mental demand.

In research on gesture, speakers who moved their hands while explaining problems sometimes performed better on concurrent memory tasks than those who were prevented from gesturing.

The fascinating implication is that movement may sometimes support the thinking process rather than merely express the result of thinking.

Psychology Says Pacing Is Different From Fidgeting

It is important not to treat every form of movement as psychologically identical. Fidgeting, nervous movement, habitual walking and purposeful gesturing can have different causes.

Someone may pace because they are anxious. Another person may pace because they are bored. Someone else may simply have developed a habit of walking whenever they are on the phone.

And another person may find movement helps them organize their thoughts. Psychology therefore cannot look at pacing alone and conclude that someone is more intelligent, anxious or cognitively active.

The context matters.

The Phone Call Itself May Encourage Movement

There is also something distinctive about telephone conversations: the absence of visual feedback.

During face-to-face communication, gestures can be directed toward another person and can contribute to the communication process.

During a phone call, those gestures have no visual audience. Yet people may continue moving.

Research on gesture suggests that some movements are produced for the speaker's own cognitive benefit, rather than solely to communicate information to another person. Goldin-Meadow's review notes that proficient speakers gesture as they talk and that these movements can have a relationship with cognition.

That helps explain why someone might gesture or move around even when nobody can see them. The movement may be serving the speaker.

Psychology Says Walking Can Also Compete With Thinking

There is an important catch. Walking is not automatically helpful. Walking and talking simultaneously creates a dual-task situation, meaning cognitive and motor activities are being performed at the same time.

Research on “walking while talking” shows that the two tasks can interfere with each other, particularly when the cognitive task becomes demanding. Studies have used walking combined with verbal fluency tasks to examine precisely this interaction.

More recent research similarly shows that walking while performing verbal tasks can produce measurable cognitive-motor interference. So pacing may feel helpful for one person during a phone conversation while making another person less focused.

The Complexity of the Conversation Matters

Imagine two phone calls. During the first, you are casually chatting with a friend.

During the second, you are negotiating a difficult work issue while trying to remember several details. The second call requires much greater executive processing.

You may begin walking because the conversation itself has increased your cognitive and emotional activation.

Movement could potentially help organize some of that processing, but it could also compete with it if the walking becomes physically demanding or distracting.

This is why psychology does not support a simple rule that pacing improves cognition. The relationship is much more nuanced.

Psychology Says Gestures May Make Information More Memorable

Movement may also influence memory encoding. In experiments by Susan Wagner Cook, Terina KuangYi Yip and Susan Goldin-Meadow, participants who gestured while explaining information showed better subsequent recall than participants who did not gesture.

The researchers controlled for the amount of speech produced, suggesting that the physical component of gesturing itself contributed to the memory effect.

Again, this was research on gestures rather than pacing. But it strengthens the broader psychological idea that bodily action can become part of how information is processed and remembered.

Why Some People Pace Without Realizing It

The behavior can eventually become automatic. A person might discover, through repeated experience, that walking feels natural when talking.

Over time, the brain may associate phone conversations with movement. This resembles other forms of habitual behavior, where a repeated context becomes associated with a familiar response.

The person does not need to consciously decide, “I am going to walk because it will help me think.” They simply stand up and start moving.

That does not necessarily mean the behavior is consciously serving a cognitive function. It may be a mixture of habit, arousal, attention and embodied processing.

The Psychology Behind Pacing While Talking on the Phone

In certain situations, bodily movement may interact with working memory, cognitive load and speech production, potentially helping the person organize thoughts.

Research on gesture provides particularly strong evidence that movement can influence cognition, while walking-and-talking research demonstrates that cognition and movement can also compete for limited resources.

So the next time someone walks circles around the room while talking on the phone, it may not mean they are impatient to end the conversation. Their body may simply have become part of the way they think.

FAQs

Why do people pace while talking on the phone?

There is no single explanation. Pacing can reflect habit, emotional arousal, nervousness or the use of movement alongside cognitive processing. Research on gesture suggests that bodily movement can sometimes reduce cognitive load during demanding speaking tasks.

Does walking actually make you think better?

Not necessarily. Walking can sometimes accompany or support cognitive processing, but it can also compete with demanding mental tasks. Research on walking while talking demonstrates that simultaneous motor and cognitive tasks can interfere with one another.