52 Ways to Well: #2 Walking into wellness
How walking helped me come back to myself. Plus five ways to walk when the world feels heavy.
It was only during the pandemic that I experienced first-hand (and not entirely by choice) the benefits of walking: like many locked in my home my daily walks became like milk on Frosties, essential.
After waking to another day that felt once more the same, I’d head out on the hill where I lived. The morning air still carried the hush of sleep, the faint scent of eucalyptus from someone’s yard. I pushed in my earbuds, the familiar click almost reassuring.
Sometimes I’d choose the path upwards, deciding that the view of San Francisco Bay and Mount Diablo would be worth the breathlessness. Other times, I’d head down the trail where I knew I’d bump into strangers and neigbours who had become newly made friends.
In the pandemic, these walks started to sustain me. They would bring me back to myself when nothing else felt like it would. They allowed me to breathe before I returned to homeschooling two restless kids and devices that now meant that all our worlds — professional and personal — were reduced to screens and putting ourselves on mute.
In the UK, where I spent Round Three of lockdown life, the government ring-fenced the daily walk as an essential up there with keeping open grocery stores and petrol stations; public health experts touted their immediate benefits for the nation’s mental health. For many of us, our experiences during the pandemic, restored, or maybe even brought in for the first time, this connection between mental health and exercise.
According to research by the Mental Health Foundation, among UK adults who experienced stress during the pandemic, 59% said that going for a walk helped them cope. This made walking the most commonly cited coping strategy — more than visiting green spaces (50%) or contacting family and friends (47%).
I’ve since continued this habit of daily walks: I take a walk before picking up my daughter from school, a mental break I need from coaching, writing and running a business that helps me adjust to being with a preteen who needs a different kind of emotional support and multitasking capabilities.
I walk in the evenings after dinner on summer evenings. The light stretching out lazily, softening the edges of buildings. I pull a cardigan around me, still warm from the kitchen, and listen to the background hum of someone else’s evening routines.
I park too far away from where I need to be, forcing myself to walk into Bath when I have a meeting there, wondering whether someone would judge me if they knew where I’d left my car.
When I create my day over coffee in the morning, I add in a walk the same way I make time for eating lunch.
Walking has became a habit that gives me the time to myself that I can’t find otherwise, clearing my mind when it’s frazzled, helping me get into my body when I become too heady, giving me a way to be in the moment when the future can feel cloudy.
It helps give me a sense of not just being the person who just sits here with my laptop and writes, but also a person who also inhabits space and the parameters of my body in a very different way.
The dog walkers I now pass suggest I also get a dog, befuddled by earpods as chosen company and confused that I walk for no reason but to walk.
But maybe what they don’t know is that walking for me is everything, its own creative act and there are a hundred reasons to walk.
So today, I wanted to share with you just five different ways that might inspire your own walks this week. These have helped me keep the practice when I feel unmotivated, too busy, or like it’s not proper exercise.
1. Take a colour walk
This morning I followed the colour pink through my village. I could have chosen the yellow of the road markings or the greens of nature, but I went with something I thought would be harder to spot. That would make me notice. And it did: I saw an abundance of flowers in shades from brash fuschia to dusty pinks. Foxgloves leaned towards the road in their quiet bloom, their velvet petals brushed by the buzz of a bee. I found a cottage door that I’d walked past a hundred times, overlooking its pink blush that was almost white.
I thought about photographing the pink penguin pajamas hanging on a washing line. I noticed how sometimes leaves are almost pink rather than green. How pink flowers sit well next to yellow. It’s many hues and shades from soft to loud.
There were words written in pink on village signs: ‘inflatables’ for a summer fete, ‘live music’ for a local pub night. When I arrived at the coworking space, the unnatural pink of the sofa stood out in ways it hadn’t before.
Here’s how to do it, play with it and make it yours:
Follow the colours through your neighborhood: Which colours can you see in your immediate environment? How often do they occur? Can you figure out the colour palette of your street or whatever your world geographically consists of?
Photograph the different shades, sketch them, paint them out, and even arrange them in a print. I’m always inspired by the artist Leah Rosenberg, one of the founding artists of the Color Factory and an eternal explorer of color.
Above all discover how color makes you feel.
2. Take a walk without an agenda
When asked during her Bath Tedx Salon talk what she’d advise to help people think more like an artist when the world feels like its spiraling, Margaret Heffernan, author of Embracing Uncertainty said this:
“Take a walk without an agenda.”
Without a phone
Notice what’s changed on your street? What flowers are out? Can you hear the sound? Do things feel different after the rain? When the sun is shining? See what you can spot.
The only cost is your attention. And time.
There’s so much texture in life. Listen and look.
Often we are nowhere. Be where you are.
3. Try an Awe walk
Today I chose an awe walk — deliberately orientating myself to discover something vast, that gives an experience of smallness (but in a good way), of something unfathomable or wondrous to us.
Awe walks are an invitation to pay attention to the details and look at the world with child-like eyes. Awe can be found in huge vistas, the peaks in the distance, or the tiniest flicker of light on a leaf: whatever the marvelous means, however wonder captures your attention.
Though the invitation is to go somewhere new if possible, as novelty helps cultivate awe, this week I couldn’t quite manage that, so I just chose to vary my route. I noticed the blue of the sky contrasting the yellow castle in our village (it’s own kind of wonder), a pile of rocks painted by children on top of a medieval gravestone (something about life and mortality there), and even the summer wildflowers pushing up against the hot asphalt, a tiny suggestion of resilience. These were no breathtaking sunsets or gushing waterfalls, but there was enough to spark wonder of a different kind.
A study from 2020 of healthy older adults who participated in weekly 15 minutes awe walks over an 8 week period, when compared with a control group not oriented to awe, reported more joy, prosocial positive emotions and even increased smile intensity during the walk. And maybe more importantly, they reported a greater increase of prosocial positive emotions and decrease in daily destress outside the walking context. Even in these tiny walking doses, they had learned how to discover and amplify awe, a prosocial emotion that has been found to have many benefits to our mental, physical, emotional and spiritual health.
I love this fact the most from the study: participants were invited to take photographs of themselves during each walk, and researchers found that increasingly they got smaller, they took up less space in the picture. To them this was evidence of developing a sense of a “small self”, reducing self-focus. A much-needed perspective-refresher right now, that can help us see that we are part of something larger than ourselves.
4. Take a 12-minute walk
In the wonderful book 52 ways to walk: The Surprising Science of Walking for Wellness and Joy, One Week at a Time, Annabel Streets decides to ‘upmove her life’ after realizing how reliant on her car, sofa and desk she has become. After hearing from colleagues who she invited to walk with her that it was “too hot/ windy/ cold/ early/ late” or from friends and family that it as “too far/too steep/too muddy/heavy/boring”, she wanted to give herself and other people “good reasons to walk.” Not least because the health benefits of walking range from lowering blood pressure to countering depression and anxiety.
“Think of it as a means of unravelling towns and cities, of connecting with nature, of bonding with our dogs, of fostering friendships, of finding faith and freedom, of giving two fingers to air-polluting traffic, of nurturing our sense of smell, of satisfying our cravings for starlight and darkness, of helping us appreciate the exquisitely complicated and beautiful world we inhabit.” — Annabel Streets
As time is the thing that often gets in the way of walking, Streets suggests taking a 12-minute brisk walk. This has been found to alter “52 metabolites in our blood — molecules that affect the beating of our heat, the breath in our lungs, the neurons in our brain. When we walk, oxygen rushes through us, affecting our vital organs, our memory, creativity, mood, our capacity to think.”
This one is less dawdling, more intense acceleration. Streets says the aim is “for 100+ steps in a minute. Set the timer on your phone for sixty seconds and count each step until you get to one hundred. If the timer goes before you’ve done a hundred steps, try picking up your pace.”
5. Take company with you
This is my go-to when I need to make myself walk, if fatigue is setting in and putting one step in front of the other feels like something beyond me.
Either I take a podcast for a walk, choosing a theme for the week. Right now I’m spending time with Overwhelm, anything that makes me better understand this emotional state, as I research a new piece. My shoulders drop, my pace slows down, my mind switches on, as I learn something new.
Each podcast is like a stepping stone. Most days I find myself still walking beyond my allotted route to keep listening and learning (that’s the ultimate testament to a good podcast).
Or I take a friend. Often impromptu. When it feels impossible to meet someone in 3 weeks on a Tuesday, it feels easier to say, “do you want to go for a walk before pick-up?” Or if there are other women in the village working from home, a quick text to say “fancy a lunchtime walk?” can be enough to break the monotony of home alone.
How to make the most of your walks
Rate your emotional experience before and after each walk. Something shifts, always.
Be ok with spending time being “unproductive” — it can feel like you’re not really doing anything but things are happening, mentally, physically and emotionally for you.
You can make it about step goals… but what else could be a measure of walking for you? Lighter mood, more time in nature, noticing the birds again?
Use these ways to digitally disconnect, to leave your phone at home, to cultivate your attention again.
And you can also use them to deepen an interest because of your phone like listening to an audiobook you love.
Get creative: could you walk as a pilgrimage to all the independent places in your neighborhood this summer, or discover the history of your streets. Walking can feed our curiosity too.
Researching this piece and over the years I’ve also experimented with
a Bird Walk: listening to, spotting, becoming aware of the birds I’ve spent a life time overlooking
a Journal walk: taking a question for a walk, or making voice notes from that day’s journal questions (or you could just walk to a spot you love and journal under the trees).
a Cloud walk (inspired by the Cloud Appreciation Society): exactly as it says notice the clouds and learn their names too.
an Empathy Walk: this is about embodying how other people move, not in a creepy way, but as an act of understanding
taking an old school camera or sketchbook
Maybe you’re already walking, and this piece is just a reminder of why you keep going. Or maybe you’ve forgotten how good it feels to move without rushing. This week, walk how you most need to. And if you notice something — a feeling, a colour, a memory — let it stay with you a while.
Is there a walk that’s saved you, even just a little? I’d love to hear what walking has brought you
x Claire
If you’re new here, hi and welcome.
I’m at the beginning of A Year of Living Wellishly, where each week (hopefully) I try to explore one aspect of wellbeing and live it out in an actual, real, messy life. There’s the science and then there’s being human. This sits in the gap between the two.
You can learn about this project more here:
Week 1, I went dancing. Next week, I’m still staying with the mind-body theme, but not really moving at all.
Join me? You can just read along or create your own way to wellness with me. This month it’s all about our mind-body connection. Next month, I’m thinking about either creativity or connection. If you have a preference let me know.
i seem to have walked all my life, out of necessity and/or for the sheer joy of it. in the northern alberta bush where i live now, it has its own challenges - we have all the big predators of the north. yet i do walk, mostly in the winter. i would, however, never use earbuds while walking. that would deprive me of one of the great sensory pleasures of walking: listening to the sounds of the animals around me, listening to the sound of the leaves, or the snow crunching under my feet, my dog’s happy sprints, tongue hanging out and breathing heavily. also, other voices or sounds (i would not take music, much less a podcast out with me) distract me from grounding myself in that nature i am walking to experience with all my senses. so yay for walks, focusing on my natural environment and myself and nothing else.
I LOVE walking too! I always have, when working from home I would often take myself for a walk to the woods before work or during my lunch break, when I worked in central London I would try to walk in at least once or twice a week. Then walking for me also took on a new significance during the lockdowns and with a newborn baby. Thank you for these beautiful walk ideas and for reminding me of the proven benefits that absolutely match the way that it feels and always shifts things xx