The part of your brain that's like "you should be fixing the leaky faucet right now" will be quelled when you're in the shower because, I guess aside from consuming audio media, there really isn't much else you can do.
Same thing happens for me, and that’s my working theory.
Pressure comes from duration as well as frequency of encounter. A feature encountered infrequently but consistently across many millions of years can exert a pressure equivalent to a feature encountered more consistently for a shorter period.
Also note that the effect size to be explained here is not that large - just a nudge towards relaxation in what seems to be a subpopulation of humans.
What do you think about that?
A false framework producing false explanations does not falsify frameworks in general.
The theory of evolution was conceived way after the middle ages, so that seems beside the point.
- Best: walks, running, walking in circles, walking in circles talking over the phone (1:1 planning), walking in circles talking out loud to myself
- Good: showers, daydreaming in place, daydreaming on trips where I'm not driving, "pair program" white boarding with one other (exceptional) person
- Okay: white boarding by myself, trying to put ideas to pen and paper by myself, meetings with the right people in a physical space
- Bad: at the computer, on the phone, walking or running to podcasts, walking or running to the wrong type of music, video conference meetings, and generally all other meetings
- What are you even doing: YouTube, Netflix, or podcasts on in the background at any level
Podcasts kill this mode for me, so you can't have the brain thinking about other people's thoughts or words.
Playing a video game doesn't work, so I think your spatial thinking has to be free too.
It's as if distracting the brain's non-verbal/spatial modes or burning some amount of calories from those centers gives the "thinking" parts of the brain some "alone time". That's an incredibly non-scientific and unserious hypothesis though.
Walking in some easy nature is great too, somehow relaxes subconsciousness so I end up with few todos marked in my phone after each such walk. When I occasionally smoke weed at such walks somehow this feed becomes a firehose and sometimes struggle to note it all. Nature is amazing in any form, recharging, healing and somehow at lowest level that connection just feels right.
Also showers are very good for the right state of mind.