There’s something quietly revolutionary in the proposition that maybe one of the most effective tools for mental health was actually one of the most ancient and most basic human activities. Even before the field of clinical psychology, before the discovery of drugs in mental treatment, before psychotherapy consultation rooms and waiting list systems came into existence, human beings engaged in the simple act of walking. People walked to think, to grieve, to recover, to find clarity after confusion and calm after distress. With modern neuroscience, it is now the case that our brains have learned that walking is, in fact, not only physical exercise with some mental health collateral effects, but that it is, by far the most meaningful, also a kind of therapy. In the span of a very limited amount of time, simply getting up and moving will cause a change in the workings of your brain.
The levels of the body’s main stress hormone cortisol start to decrease. The amount of serotonin, an important brain chemical that helps regulate mood, goes up. Levels of dopamine and norepinephrine that are involved in our capacity for motivation also increase, which leads to both increased energy and emotional resilience. One also gets the runner’s high effect after taking a stroll; it is caused by endophas – substances that are released by the body during walking even at a casual pace and which contribute to one’s feeling of relaxed well-being. These changes are not just due to placebo or an individual’s subjective feeling, but they are scientifically documented brain chemical reactions that explain why walking regularly leads to much lower levels of anxiety and depression, against people who sit around.
Patient outcomes and studies in psychotherapy are also in line with these results. There is a mounting number of research studies that show that daily walking in a brisk pace is as efficient as antidepressants in treating mild to moderate depression for some categories of people, a discovery that has been confirmed through various investigations and in different populations. It’s like a free therapy where walking stimulates the same areas of the brains which medications do, but with no adverse reactions and a quick effect after taking the treatment. While using an exercise machine will still bring about real physical and brain chemical effects, Arguably taking a walk outside, and mostly, a walk into nature, can bring more mental health benefits that an exercise session indoors will be able to produce. A study by Stanford University found, for instance, that a 90-minute walk in a natural or green setting reduced A lot the activity of the subgenual prefrontal cortex. Subgenual prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that causes persistent negative thoughts – the type of mental ruminations that are present in anxiety and depression. Then again, people who walked in urban settings did not report any such change.
It looks then that nature does a magic trick on a stressed mind that the city just cannot. That’s not to say that concrete and all urban landscapes make people stressed. What is really amazing is that nature somehow calms and pacifies the mind in a way no city could. If there’s one thing that the repetitive pattern of walking that is rhythmic is good for then it is definitely the meditative quality of the exercise. Walking around in the same direction, taking the same number of steps for about the same amount of time with intervals only to catch your breath, this is like one of those meditating mantras that are repetitive and can distract from the daily life and the problems.
So the quiet walking of one’s footsteps can be such a gentle and reliable kind of rhythm that it allows for the space to get some rest with our thoughts, those that lead to new ideas and a broader view. A lot of people say that while they can work out problems while sitting still, their mind will get stuck on a loop, they may not come up with anything. Walking, they will get their mind to move and their legs, get the problem moving as well! The solution does not come from physical exercise, walking generates, but walking dissolves the obstacles that were blocking us before such a solution could be thought of and because of this the solution presents itself in walking. This is the great magic of the act of walking.
Walking is a form of exercise that doesn’t require too much effort from you, yet in return it offers many benefits to your body and mind. Mental health services for professionals aren’t always available to most people so in such cases where it’s hard to get help from a professional the solution is not getting a walking as a treatment but for many walking has always been a form of self-care which can be obtained very easily with high level of reliability, it is, still one of the greatest things people could do for themselves which isn’t taken serious by most people.
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