Your Body Was Built to Hunt, Not to Sit Still

Fidgeting isn’t misbehavior. It’s a Hunter’s engine idling, waiting for somewhere to run.

Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay

When I ran a residential treatment facility for severely abused kids back in the late 1970s, long before I’d ever heard the phrase attention deficit disorder, we had one particular boy who could simply never stop moving. He tapped, rocked, and bounced his knee under the table until the silverware rattled, constantly in motion. And every adult in his life had spent years trying to make him hold still, and every one of them had failed, finally turning to the violence to control him that led him to our place.

One afternoon one of our childcare workers, completely out of patience and ideas, tried something novel, mostly just to get him out of her hair for a little bit. She sent him out to run laps around the house before dinner. He came back flushed, grinning, and — astonishing everybody — for about an hour afterward was the calmest, most focused kid in the house.

None of us could understand why. But we knew for sure that whatever we’d been doing wasn’t working, and that that running circles around the house, of all things, had worked.

I think about that little boy every time a new study comes out confirming what his body already knew (and I later discovered). And lately they’ve been coming out fast.

A sweeping review published late last year found that plain old physical activity produces real, measurable improvements in hyperactivity, impulsivity, and impulse control in people with ADHD. It’s measurable right down to the electrical activity you can read off their brains.

The Child Mind Institute, summarizing the research this spring, reported that as little as a half hour a day of moderate to vigorous exercise can help kids focus and feel better. Not only that, the effect shows up in both the bouncing-off-the-walls type of ADHD and the quiet, dreamy, inattentive type. Move the body, in other words, to settle the mind.

I believe our species has known this since before we even thought about attention deficit disorder. We’ve known both Hunters and Farmers.

A Farmer’s mind and body, for example, are built for a Farmer’s life. Long hours in a fixed posture, bent over the same patch of ground picking off bugs or planting seeds or weeding, the same repetitive motion from sunup to sundown. Stillness and repetitive “boring” work, for a Farmer, isn’t a punishment: it’s the natural shape of their life’s work.

When the Industrial Revolution happened, picking bugs off plants was replaced by putting bolts on screws on an assembly line, but the motion, the type of life, the mindset necessary were all essentially the same.

So, when we built modern schools and offices, we built them around that Farmer’s mind and body, around the assumption that a healthy, well-behaved human can sit in a chair for six or eight hours and that anyone who can’t is somehow suffering from a “deficit” associated with a “disorder.” We even invented a phrase to describe the failure to sit still, Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, and called restlessness a symptom.

But the Hunter’s mind and body were never built to sit; they were built to move across a landscape. To walk for miles tracking an animal, to freeze, to sprint, to climb, to crouch in the brush and then explode into action when the prey finally came into view.

Movement isn’t a distraction from the Hunter’s attention: movement is the trigger for a Hunter’s attention that activates his entire system. When you take a body that’s calibrated for motion and pin it to a chair, the engine doesn’t switch off. It idles. Which is why idling, in a Hunter, looks like a tapping foot, a clicking pen, or a kid like me in Second Grade who keeps tipping his chair back until the teacher snaps.

We’ve spent decades trying to medicate and discipline that fidgeting away, when the fidgeting was a Hunter’s brain’s own crude attempt to crank up the level of arousal it needs to reach peak function. The body was self-medicating in the only currency it had: motion.

Movement is the oldest, cleanest, most available form of that endogenous stimulation there is. It’s the rocket fuel we Hunters were issued at birth. The boy running laps wasn’t burning off bad energy; he was generating the very best kind, the alertness and motivation that let his brain finally lock in.

It also helps when the movement is outdoors (although it’s not absolutely necessary).

Study after study has found that exercise outdoors, in green spaces, does more for ADHD than the same exercise done inside. When WebMD rounded up the evidence on the best exercise for ADHD, it reported bluntly that being in nature while a person moves around can reduce hyperactivity symptoms far more than moving indoors.

The researcher Frances Kuo spent years documenting this and found that the greener the setting, the better children with ADHD could focus afterward, to the point where she started describing time outside as “a kind of natural treatment.”

Some of the earliest work on this, out of the University of Illinois, also found that a simple walk in a park left kids with ADHD measurably calmer and more able to concentrate than the same walk for the same distance and time down a city street.

A Farmer might find these results puzzling. Why would the trees matter? Movement is movement, after all. But a Hunter knows the answer in his bones. Of course the green space helps: the green space is home!

The Hunter’s brain was tuned over hundreds of thousands of years to operate in exactly that forest or jungle environment, reading the wind and the light and the edges of the tree line or the savanna, and there’s a deeply felt nervous-system relief that Hunters experience when they’re finally in the landscape they were designed for.

The fluorescent lights in the box of the schoolroom drains the Hunter; the forest restores him. We didn’t evolve in a cubicle, and some deep, ancient part of us has never stopped knowing it.

Of course, exercise isn’t a replacement for medication, and I’d never tell a struggling parent or adult to throw out a prescription if it’s helping. The same researchers who praise movement are clear that for many folks, children and adults, medication works best alongside other supports, not instead of them.

As we all intuit, a Hunter’s life in a Farmer’s world is rarely helped by just one intervention. But movement belongs near the very top of our toolkit, and it’s the one tool that costs nothing, has no side effects worth fearing (it even makes us more healthy!), and was issued to every one of us standard upon birth.

So it’s time to stop fighting the internal Hunter’s engine and start feeding it. If you’ve got a kid who can’t sit through her homework, send her around the block first as fast as possible and watch what happens over the next twenty minutes.

If you’re an adult Hunter who hits a wall every afternoon, the answer might not be another cup of coffee but, instead, a brisk walk, ideally somewhere with grass and sky in it. While the complicated, mind-and-body sports tend to help Hunters the most (the martial arts and the trail runs and the things that make you pay attention while you move), a plain walk in the park is serious medicine too.

The point isn’t to become an athlete but to give a Hunter’s body the thing it’s been asking for all along: movement.

As I described years ago in these pages, my son used to get that wounded look whenever the subject of school came up. What I wish I’d understood back then is that some of what we were treating as a focus problem was actually just as much a body problem.

The fix wasn’t to make him more like a Farmer. It was to let the Hunter run and Louise figured that out when she started encouraging him to skateboard and get active instead of trying to keep him at the table with his homework. Short bursts of homework punctuated by a run down the hill on the board worked like magic.

If this astonishing but intuitive research struck a chord, take it for a walk and think it over, then come back and subscribe so you don’t miss what’s next. And forward it to any parent you know who’s been told their kid “just needs to settle down.”

Maybe what that kid needs is to get outside and move like the Hunter he or she is.