To combat afternoon slumps¹ in enthusiasm and focus, take a walk during the lunch hour.

为了避免一到下午热情和注意力出现骤减，你可以在午餐时间散散步。

A new study finds that even gentle lunchtime strolls can perceptibly — and immediately — buoy³ people’s moods and ability to handle stress at work.

一项新研究发现，甚至连最温和的午餐时段漫步也能马上明显振奋情绪，提高工作中的抗压能力。

It is not news, of course, that walking is healthy and that people who walk or otherwise exercise regularly tend to be more calm, alert and happy than people who are inactive.

当然，这些都不是新闻：散步有益健康，经常散步或进行其他运动的人通常比不运动的人更平静、更敏锐、更快乐。

But many past studies of the effects of walking and other exercise on mood have focused on somewhat long-term, gradual outcomes, looking at how weeks or months of exercise change people emotionally.

但是，过去的很多关于散步和其他锻炼对心情影响的研究都重点关注长期、渐变的结果，观察的是几周或几个月的锻炼对人们情绪的影响。

Fewer studies have examined more-abrupt, day-to-day and even hour-by-hour changes in people’s moods, depending on whether they exercise, and even fewer have focused on these effects while people are at work, even though most of us spend a majority of our waking hours in an office.

很少有研究调查锻炼对心情更突然的影响，比如按天或按小时记录的变化，更少有研究关注它对工作的影响，尽管我们大多数人醒着时的大部分时间是在办公室里。

So, for the new study, which was published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports this month, researchers at the University of Birmingham and other universities began by recruiting sedentary office workers at the university.

所以，在本月《斯堪的纳维亚医学科学杂志》(Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science)发表的一项新研究中，伯明翰大学和其他几所大学的研究员们开始招募大学办公室里久坐的工作人员。

Potential volunteers were told that they would need to be available to walk for 30 minutes during their usual lunch hour three times a week.

他们告诉可能参与的志愿者，需要在午餐时间散步30分钟，每周至少三次。

Most of the resulting 56 volunteers were middle-aged⁴ women. It can be difficult to attract men to join walking programs, said Cecilie Thogersen-Ntoumani, the study’s lead author and now a professor of exercise science at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. Walking may not strike some men as strenuous⁵ enough to bother with, she said. But she and her colleagues did attract four sedentary middle-aged men to the experiment.

最终参与的56名志愿者大多是中年女性。这项研究的主要作者、现澳大利亚珀斯柯廷大学锻炼科学教授塞西莉·瑟格森-图玛尼(Cecilie Thogersen-Ntoumani)说，吸引男士参加散步项目比较难以实现。她说，有些男士可能觉得散步的运动强度不够，不值得参与。不过她和同事们还是吸引了四名久坐的中年男士参与实验。

The volunteers completed a series of baseline health and fitness and mood tests at the outset of the experiment, revealing that they all were out of shape but otherwise generally healthy physically⁶ and emotionally.

实验开始时，志愿者们完成了一系列基础健康和情绪测试，发现他们身材走形，但是身体和情绪基本健康。

Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani and her colleagues then randomly⁷ divided the volunteers into two groups, one of which was to begin a simple, 10-week walking program right away, while the other group would wait and start their walking program 10 weeks later, serving, in the meantime, as a control group.

然后，瑟格森-图玛尼博士和同事们随机把志愿者分成两组，其中一组马上开始一个简单的为期十周的散步活动，另一组等十周后再开始散步活动，在等待期间充当对照组。

To allow them to assess people’s moods, the scientists helped their volunteers to set up a specialized⁸ app on their phones that included a list of questions about their emotions. The questions were designed to measure the volunteers’ feelings, at that moment, about stress, tension, enthusiasm, workload⁹, motivation, physical fatigue¹⁰ and other issues related to how they were feeling about life and work at that immediate² time.

研究者们为了评估志愿者们的心情，帮他们在手机上安装了一个特殊的应用程序，包括一系列关于情绪的问题。这些问题意在评估志愿者当时的感受，包括压力、紧张、热情、工作量、积极性、体力以及对生活和工作的即时感受。

A common problem with studies of the effect of exercise on mood, Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani said, is that they rely on recall. People are asked to remember hours or days after the fact how exercise made them feel. Given how fleeting¹¹ and mysterious our emotions can be, recalled responses are notoriously unreliable, Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani said.

瑟格森-图玛尼博士说，关于锻炼对心情影响的研究存在一个普遍问题——这些研究都是依靠回忆，通常是在几小时或几天后让人们回忆锻炼带来的感受。瑟格森-图玛尼博士说，众所周知，情绪易变而神秘，回忆起来的情绪反应不可靠。

Instead, she and her colleagues wanted in-the-moment assessments¹² from people of how they felt before and after exercise. The phone app questions provided that experience, she said, in a relatively¹³ convenient form.

而她和同事们想要的是人们在锻炼前后的即时感受。她说，手机应用程序中的问题能相对便捷地记录这些感受。

Then the first group began walking. Each volunteer was allowed to walk during one of several lunchtime sessions, all of them organized by a group leader and self-paced. Slower walkers could go together, with faster ones striding ahead. There was no formal prescribed distance or intensity¹⁴ for the walks. The only parameter¹⁵ was that they last for 30 minutes, which the volunteers had said would still allow them time to eat lunch.

然后，第一组开始散步。志愿者可以在几个午餐散步时段中任选一个。所有人都由一个小组领导组织，速度自定。走得慢的人可以一起走，走得快的人可以在前面大步走。没有规定散步的距离或强度。唯一的要求是走够30分钟，志愿者们之前说过，这样他们仍有时间吃午餐。

The groups met and walked three times a week.

这些小组每周相聚散步三次。

Each workday morning and afternoon during the first 10 weeks, the volunteers in both groups answered questions on their phones about their moods at that particular moment.

前十周，每个工作日的上午和下午，两组志愿者都回答手机应用程序中关于某个特定时刻心情的问题。

After 10 weeks, the second group began their walking program. The first group was allowed to continue walking or not as they chose. (Many did keep up their lunchtime walks.)

十周后，第二组开始进行散步活动。第一组的人可以自行决定是否继续（很多人的确继续进行午餐散步）。

Then the scientists compared all of the responses, both between groups and within each individual person. In other words, they checked to see whether the group that had walked answered questions differently in the afternoon than the group that had not, and also whether individual volunteers answered questions differently on the afternoons when they had walked compared with when they had not.

然后，研究者们比较了所有的回答，不仅是两组之间的对比，还有个人自身的对比。换句话说，他们想知道，散步组和对照组下午对问题的回答是否相同，单个志愿者午餐散步后的下午对问题的回答是否与没有散步后的下午相同。

The responses, as it turned out, were substantially different when people had walked. On the afternoons after a lunchtime stroll, walkers said they felt considerably¹⁶ more enthusiastic, less tense, and generally more relaxed and able to cope than on afternoons when they hadn’t walked and even compared with their own moods from a morning before a walk.

结果发现，散步之后，人们的回答明显不同。志愿者们说，他们明显感觉，与午餐没散步的下午相比，甚至与散步前的上午相比，在散步后的下午，他们更有热情，不那么紧张，总体来说更放松，处理问题的能力更强。

Although the authors did not directly measure workplace productivity in their study, “there is now quite strong research evidence that feeling more positive and enthusiastic at work is very important to productivity,” Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani said. “So we would expect that people who walked at lunchtime would be more productive.”

虽然，这项研究的作者们没有直接评估工作效率，但是瑟格森-图玛尼博士说，“现在有强有力的研究证据表明，在工作中感觉更积极、热情，对提高效率十分重要，所以我们可以想见，午餐时散步的人效率更高。”

As a pleasant, additional outcome, all of the volunteers showed gains in their aerobic¹⁷ fitness and other measures of health at the completion of their 10 weeks of walking.

还有一个令人愉快的附带结果，所有志愿者在完成十周散步活动后，有氧适能等健康水平都提高了。

But, tellingly, many said that they anticipated being unable to continue walking after the experiment ended and a few (not counted in the final tally¹⁸ of volunteers) had had to drop out midway through the program. The primary impediment to their walking, Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani said, had been “that they were expected by management to work through lunch,” suggesting that management might wish to acquaint themselves with the latest science.

但是，很显然，很多志愿者说，他们预计在实验结束后无法继续散步，有几个人不得不中途退出（他们没有被计入最终志愿者人数中）。瑟格森-图玛尼博士说，主要障碍是“管理层期望他们午餐时间继续工作”，这表明管理层也许应该了解一下最新科学发现。