The Shocking Science and Benefits of Taking a Simple Walk: Research From Oxford-Trained Neuroscientist Dr. Shane O’Mara
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Hey, it's rand mall, and welcome to the mill Robin's broadcast. When I started the male Robin podcast several months ago, I had this very clear idea in my mind that our conversations twice a week would feel like a walk with a good friend. You know, when you go for a walk with a good friend, you are always in a Better mood.

You learn something interesting, you laugh, maybe you cry, you always get a recommendation about something, and you leave the experience, feeling were connected and more energized and as if you're not the only person going through whatever you're going through. And so today, i'm really curious to hear what you think of our topic, because you and I, on this metaphorical walk, are gonna dig into the science of walking. Yep, we're going to talk about the extraordinary benefit to your mind, body and spirit, to creativity, to longevity that comes from simply taking a walk every day.

I've called in an expert. Yep, there is an expert. This guy is a neuroscientist. He's over in ireland, name doctor shane omara.

He's not just an expert on walking, is the professor of experimental brain research at trinity college. And double in. That's not all. He's the director of the trinity college institute of neuroscience and a member of the academic staff of the schools of psychology.

And he wrote the best selling book in praise of walking, where he digs into the extraordinary number of studies that have been done on the act of walking the benefits IT has in your life and why you need to get up off the couch, get your butt out the door and start taking more walks. In fact, i'd like you to do IT every single day of your life. I can't wait for you to meet him.

I can't wait for you to learn from he's so delightful. Maybe it's as irish sh accent. Maybe it's because he takes a walk day.

I don't know. But why do we welcome doctor shain omara to the malroy in's podcast? dr. Shane mara, how are you?

I'm very good. Thank you.

Delighted to be here. H, i'm delighted that you're here. So shame I was leaving home yesterday and my husband says, so who you interviewing tomorrow on the podcast and I said, oh, i'm interviewing doctor shane omara about the science of walking. Why did you write a book about walking? Like what made you want to do this?

Well, as the first first question is why not my literary agent contract, uh, suggested to me, and I realized that I know and delicious on walking and IT will be very easy and enjoy. You will book to rise. And so I turned off.

I think you just undersold yourself, and I think you just undersold the topic, because, first of all, your literary agent is a genius, but secondly, nobody understands what's happening in the brain and the benefit to the body and mood and to you psychologically to simply take a walk. I don't think it's an obvious idea at all. I think it's a really important one.

And so I get IT, you wrote the book because your literary agent said, dude, you've got to get back out in the public. How about a book about walking that sounds really sexy, and I bet we can sell the movie right to that puppy. And so you decided, as a neuroscientist, to look into jaw dropping science about a simple walk before we dig into all of the dog shine. Can you share the top reasons why walking is so good for you?

So why is working good for you? I, what I want to do is just tell you a few things that I hope that you take away with you and learn from. So walking is good here for all search of reasons. One of the first reasons is simply this IT helps build resilience. We can call this resilient walking.

Why do I say this? We, we know the people who are regularly active, those who move around lots, who who take the idea movement is medicine seriously, are much less likely to come to illness of all types compared to people who are secondary. So walking can help build your body and brain to cope with this kind of sling and arrows of every daylife.

We humans are big brains and IT turns out that one of details of walking is actually very good for is facilitating creative thinking. So we've got resilient walking and now we've got creative of walking. When you get moving, IT acts as a kind of a spr to thinking that uh might not otherwise uh, happen because your, uh, second ideas that would otherwise be creative bubbled into your consciousness and make themselves felt in ways that otherwise wouldn't happen.

Walking is good for something else. Uh, and that is building a map of the world that you're in. So we we we refer to the brains map of the world as as the cognitive map, and we know that the best way to create a cognitive map is to actually get out and walk around.

We learn about our environment most effectively at the speed that we actually walk through that environment. And a particular rhythm happens in the brain cult rythm a, which facilitate learning and memory about the world that we happen to be in. Walking those other things for us as well, uh, IT allows us to defeat, are at least slow down.

Some of the problems that come with aging people have a tendency to walk less, to move less as they get older. And we now know that for many, many experiments the crazy and a loss of, uh, muslim mass happens uh, with aging. Whether if you get up and you keep moving during the course of life, these problems are diminished.

Uh, very, very dramatic. So if you want to have a healthy older age, one of the very best things that you can do is get up and keep moving and get out for a walk, preferably with others. Which brings me kind of to my last point, which is that walking is an intensity social activity.

We humans like walking together. And when we're walking together, our body, synchronised in all sorts of ways, are breeding our footsteps. All sorts of other things fall into think in a way that wouldn't happen where we walking simply by ourselves.

So walking with somebody else is one of life's great pleasure and is an aspect of walking. That, to my mind, is terribly underestimated in terms of how good IT would make you feel. But importantly, how the other person will feel to most of us.

underestimate which actually happening in our bodies and in our minds when we're walking. And so let's break IT down what happens in the brain when you go for a walk.

yeah. So I think there's A A couple of things to think about here. Let's make a kind of very simple.

So i'm sitting you at home and I I want to go to the shop so that the first thing that you have to do is from the intention that you're going to go and get up and that could be because somebody bleep you or phone you or whatever to say to come and meet them at the shop, you realized you need to go pick up a paint of midd care, whatever IT happens to be. So what does that do? The first thing is you have to stand up.

If to get up, you have to engage in proper movement in order to walk. That's a chAllenge for your brain. Sitting or lying down on a chairs are being recommended.

A chairs is not a chAllenge. Standing up, maintaining baLance and then having directed coherent motion in the direction to on to go. Is that also a chAllenge to your brain? So the the key point here is the movement.

And the movement, in this case for talking about, of course, is walking and access of a positive spar to the brain and rythm that her would be quiescent in the brain are suddenly alive. So in order to get to the shop, you have to orient your body in the correct direction. You have to create a cognitive map of the environment that you're in.

These are all subtle, small chAllenges, but the brain benefits from these. And then let's say you are actually going to to the shop and happens, be up the hill. Then the other chAllenge is, is happening as well.

So you have to calibrate your walking speed so that you are a speed that's comfortable for you. That means you have to step up your heart rate a little. You have to increase your breathing a little.

Your muscular ure has to respond to all of those things. So you've got a hollow, a top down signals from the brain acting as a chAllenge to the body to get IT moving. And then you get to the shop.

You do IT, you got ta do IT, and you walk home again. You might have to Carry something. So that's actually a good chAllenge for you as well. So even at those kinds of simple levels, you can see changes across a whole range of things from the the kind of top down commands that are coming from the brain all the way down to your foot, hitting the ground and you levering yourself off and moving off.

Well, I certainly don't think about any of those things when I need to get well, you said that the act of pushing yourself off the couch, standing up, trigger ing your mind to activate from the top down, the mechanical patterns that allow you to walk the cognitive patterns to a certain place, that all these things benefit the brain. How do they benefit the brain?

Probably the best way to think about this is that movement is medicine is is the lovely phrase that's going round at the moment. Let's imagine you get this lovely new bike from the shop and you put IT in your garage. You leave IT there free year and you don't do anything with this.

What condition is are going to be in the h chain, is going to be all salted up the tires of probably deflector. The brakes aren't going to be especially responsive. All of those kinds of teams will have gone wrong with that.

And the same is true for your body. Your body needs to work optimates repeat a chAllenge. Your brain needs this as well.

This is why even you, you know, for example, if you're walking for sake of your heart, you need to step IT up so that speaking is hard for you, so that there's a sufficient chAllenge being presented to you. Your body is designed to do two things. One is to conserve energy, but the others to source energy.

We always have this try going on within us. And I gone to get up. If i'm onna, get up and I gona take the car. Are, you know, those kinds of choices we make. And when you think about the conditions the humans lived under for thousands of years, we didn't have easy availability of calories that we have now. Uh, we didn't have chairs with bags, you know, we SAT on tree stones.

We sacked down on our honkers, but we didn't have all of these wonderful comforts that are big brains have allowed us to to invent over the past one hundred years and to spread around and among us all. Even as you know of fantastic conversation where we're able to have reaching across the oceans, I said, you know, you don't need to be thinking about these things that this is the the the joy and the wonderful of the the body that we have. You don't need to be thinking, well, I have to maintain a certain line of baLance.

I have to put one foot in in front of the other. All of these things are done at a level below consciousness. And you should only be thinking about them if something goes wrong, like for example, you slip because as a patch of ice or the shop is closed and you have to think about another shop, you have to go to.

One of the the pots that I make repeatedly in the book is that we've designed movement out of our environment. But if we want to get people moving again, what we really need to do is design the environment. So that is easy for people to walk.

So, you know, I give you a simple example in the building I work in, if you want to come and visit me in my office, i'm up on the third floor. How do you get to me? You anna, walk to me.

You have to walk through four, five doors to get to the stairs. But if you want to take the lift, or are the elevators you call IT, ah it's just there. So my building has a walking designed out of us and that building would be I get there for a hundred years.

So people will be not using the stair in that building for a hundred years. Generally, we've created environments where the default is uh to conserve energy and not move. We've got a food surplus, a coLori s surplus. So actually what we ouldn't be doing is creating environments that make IT easy for people to move around under their own steam.

Dr, shame, let's take a quick pause here. We're more sponsors and we come back. We're going to keep on walking.

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Well, come back. I melt Robins. And today you and I are going on a walk with doctor shame omara, who is writing the book on the science walking, you know, one of my missions and wanting to talk to you is to have the person listening to us right now, having epiphany about the profound power and impact that incorporating a simple walk into your daily routine can have on you.

And IT wasn't until we started digin into your research that honestly had no idea that a simple walk could have the chemical and structural and creative impact. And IT made me wonder, why doesn't everybody take a walk every day if it's free and IT does all this. And so I would really love to have you explain to everybody listening what happens from a mood benefit when you walk? And why does that happen?

Yeah, one of the things that we know what an absolute high degree is, certainty as as well as we know anything in science, is that walking boosts mood. And I do so in an enduring kind of way. You can demonstrate this in all sorts of ways, but the the interest way of doing is to show that the short term boost to mood is by bringing people to the laboratory sensibly.

They're to judge the beauty of the buildings that I might be on a college campus, in a in a city center or something like that. And if two simple conditions, one is they look at pictures on screen, are pictures that have been printed out for them, or the other is they go for a walk and look at these buildings and the give ratings for each of these buildings. And before and after, you just get people to fill in a bunch of an accused questioners, including one rating how they're feeling.

And what you find consistently is that bringing people out for a short walk at ten, twelve, fifteen minutes walk gives a short term boost to how well they feel, even if there are people who hate walking, and there are such people, I am find them somewhat mysterious myself, but there are people who dislike walking, but they still get a benefit from walking. And there are lots of other variations on on these kinds of studies. There is some wonderful studies that have been conducted in canada where lots of of towns have tunnels because of the the severe winter conditions, getting people to walk outside so that the review of nature is opposed to walking in a turtle.

That gives a boost to how well you feel over above the boost that you get from just going for a walk. So walking in nature is a very, very good thing for you. So those are kind of short term boost, but you can look as much Better quality studies in terms of tracking people over time, in particular, a very large scale australian study is that people who move the least in the population are the ones who are most likely to come to major depressive disorder.

So this is a tracking through time study. They are not depressed at the time that you're starting the study, you're tracking them over seven, eight years. You're asking the question how likely is that they are going to have major depressive disorder? And the likely falls the more you move. The key point here is that if we design societies for people are minimized their own physical activity where also designing societies where people are going to be home to these really unpleasant psychiatric disorders that can take, in some cases, years of therapy and work to remit.

So if I go for a ten minute walk, why does that boost my mood?

There are lots of potential reasons. We don't know the deep reason is the honest truth, but what we can say is that depending on prayer, your walking, and this is also an important thing. If you're walking in nature, things like your stress hormones start to fall. You can engage and creative thinking, which you might not have been able to engage you if you're just sitting in at home ruminating, offer something unpleasant. You can escape yourself for a while, who is also, I think, a good thing to be able to do.

Sometimes we get annoying being in our own heads and being mindless is, to my mind, actually a great benefit so that you're not excessively focused on yourself and walking in nature brings with at a particular benefit that I think people again, kind of underestimate when you're walking in a nice suburban environment where there's lots of trees. Humans enjoy a connection to nature. You get the benefit of your stress.

Romans, as as I said, falling. You get this chance to engage in, in creative edition that you wouldn't otherwise be able to to engage in. Those kinds of tears happen pretty quickly, and and they happen because we have bodies that are designed and brains that are designed to allow us to to engage in movement.

No, I did say to start, the environment matters. If you imagine walking along the issue, a freeway, or emotional, as we would call of our cars, are wizzen pass ted speeds of seventy miles an hour. That will be in a very stressful and unpleasant experience.

Okay, hold on, let's you say its ideal settings. Its a beautiful day. We're going for a walk in a beautiful city park or in a suburban neighborhood or out on some trail. The birds are carping, the sun is shining and you're going to go for a walk for like just ten minutes, you're going to take a brisk walk doping kick in like what is happening in your body.

Just about every study that says that they don't measure dope because is not possible to measure open, are not allowed for good reason to drill holes in people's heads. And what level of those for me is present? We can measure courts so much more easily, because you can take blood samples.

We can take samples from saliva on the other ways of getting access. So h, again, what we have, our correlations, we we can do the kinds of studies that you might like to do that would be called. But I think the correlation is, is, is itself good enough when people are walking under their own steam, are moving under their own steam through nature, people report changes and well being that are very positive. When you compare the to sentry controls.

that's pretty cool. You know, we've all had the experience where we've gone for a walk and you immediately feel Better. And going for a walk outside can solve like ninety percent of the problems that you have IT boost your mood IT makes you feel little bit more energized.

I noticed that IT clears my head, but I don't know why. And I think when people understand the why in terms of even if it's just a correlation, they might become more motivated to get their ass off the couch and take that walk and make a part of their lives. And what I just heard you say is that there's a clustering effect of being outside, of moving your body, of having your brain stimulated in a certain way, that has a chemical benefit, that my mood gets boosted .

and experience ing movement got flow. You ve got lots of things. So is the sensation of things moving on either side of you as you move.

Imagine walking down a, you can feel the walls receding behind you. Overflow generates the stencil of movement. IT prepares the body.

Movement itself is the good thing for you, because IT in trains simultaneously, lots of activity at lots of different levels of your body, from a variety different changes in the brain, all the way down to the contact your feet make with the substrate. And why does that feel good? Well, the simply answer is this.

Those of us in our ancel past who didn't move got eaten, and those of us who enjoyed moving didn't get in. And evolution has given us these positive feelings that come as a an end consequence of doing things that are good for us in evolutionary terms, that has to be true populations that don't move the subject, predation, the subject to all sorts of things. So you have this positive feedback thing going on all the time. 但是 we're kind of restless， and we kind of enjoy that restless ness when we test us by action, getting out there and moving.

How does taking a walk improve your creativity or .

damned with this one wars? But this is activity that does so many things.

Wait, are you saying there's a different types of walking?

Of course.

wrought A D S. What i'm talking about, of course he says, like i'm some sort of idiot, I don't get result but but i'm sick but i'm saying I don't think I think you written the book on IT and none of us think about this. Like I wouldn't think, for example, if I had a hard problem, I got a walk faster, I would think I got to take IT easy, or else someone have a frequent heart attack.

I wouldn't think that there is a different walk that you take when you want to be creative vers a walk that you take when you want to feel something else. So this right here is an epiphany y to most people. So what are the like? Where do you want to start? Because IT sounds like there's different types of walking for different benefits are purposes.

The general idea here is that we've got one word for an activity which is walking, but we walk for all start to different purposes. So I my my kind of key point that I want to to get a crosses that were cursed because we have this one word, which is abled for something that ends up being lots and lots of different things. So i've mentioned social walking already.

Yes, we walk together. We've mentioned walking for health. So what do we call that health walking? I do not healthy walking for sure. We can come up with the phrase um and then there's walking for creative atis.

So i'm in the middle of writing my next book yeah and i'm at a bit of of a less to say I have hit a wall and i've got writers block. I can't figure out the order of the table of contents. How do you go for a walk to have the maximum benefit if you want to have creative ideation?

yes. So there's a couple of ways of approaching this. One of the things that I think very clear is that constantly focusing on a problem that you're finding difficult to solve is the worst way to go about solving that problem.

What you need is time away from the task as well as time on the task. Now we're walking and creativity is concerned there. Lots of ways of demonstrating walking and creativity have been recognized by philosophy and mathematic and lots of other people for uh, probably centuries as being intimately relate.

And psychology has only caught up on this. And in the last ten or twenty years, we're really only at the early stage is of trying to figure this one out. So in my own case, I dictated a lot of the book to get the first draft. I would write down bullet points on a on a page and take a uh a dict phone with me, not a telephone. Because that thing is just too distracting.

What happens when you have a phone on you or in your hand when you're walking? How does that rob some of the benefit?

If you have a problem that you're trying to solve, what you really need is to spend time with your own thought, not with the phone. You shouldn't have the thing in your hand. When I dict, I will never dictate into the phone because I don't want to see alerts coming in.

I don't want to have the temptation or checking emails or or anything like that. The key part of creative thinking is the the preparation and intubation kind of stage. This is the research stage, then you just need to let the idea is calculate around, come together in a variety of different ways. Go for a walk where you just decided not to think of the problems that you're working on, that you're going to go out for twenty minutes or a half an hour and not think about them at all.

The other thing you can do is to walk and think loosely about the problem that you've got, what you're trying to do is discover associations and connections that weren't obvious to you when you are sitting there, are breaking your fingers on the keyboard and banging your head all for your desk because you you weren't able to solve the problem. So I think we're still at a sufficiently early stage and trying to understand the relationship between creativity and and walking that we don't have a definitive recipe. But we can say though is that if people undertake walks before they have to engage in problem solving, the numbers of creative ideas that they come up with go up substantially compared to people up and sitting. I'm not moving for the same period.

but I read your book is that IT can increase creativity two times. IT really boost the creative flow in your brain. Why is that one of .

the major discoveries in your science over the last kind of twenty or twenty five years is this idea of default activity in the brain. Default t activity is what we revert to and were instructed not to think of anything at all. What do we think about? We think about problems that are important to us.

We are not engaged in focal talk. We were moving backwards and forwards on a mental time line. What we did in the past, what we did yesterday, what we're planning to do tomorrow, and we're thinking about our social relations, 嗯嗯， and what we now know from brain imaging literature is that when people are engaged in creative problem solving, they're doing two things simultaneously.

You focused on this big picture, and I at the same time, you're focused on the detail. This is a hard thing to do. You're trying to see the forest and the trees at the same time. You're sickening between these two states where you're zoom back from something and then you're focused in on the detail.

And the wonderful thing about walking is IT freeze you for thinking that you wouldn't be able to engage in if you're just sitting there at your computer because you're not trapped by this little small screen and lots in front of you. You've got a chance to graduate lots and lots of other things. You end up with talks and ideas that you wouldn't otherwise you've had. And again, the key point is that you're not engaging in distracted walking in the sense that you're walking around with this thing in your hand.

right? Your phone. yeah. Well, this feels like a great place to pause. So let's take a quit break. And here were from our sponsors.

And when we return more about the science of walking and creativity, we will be right back. You know, others. One thing that I know about you because you listen to this podcast that you have big ambitions.

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Welcome back, I melt Robins. I'm so glad you're here and we are talking to another than doctor shanon mara, who is a neuroscientist and professor at the trinity college and double in. And he's written a best selling book about the science of walking. So doctor mirror, i'm sitting or wondering if one of the reasons why walking helps you have more creative ideas is because IT has this ability to suppress the defauts mode network and that chattering that is going on in the subconscious on default, when you're sitting still and staring at a computer, that there's something about the brain moving your body, the feet on the ground, the optic flow of your eyes moving back and forth, and the sense of movement, and how all of that must quit a part of your brain that you're not able to tap into when you're sedentary.

Does this concept of mindlessness with mindful ness, you're paying attention to the flow of tolls through your head. When you're being mindless, uh, you're not pay attention to anything. In particular, there's an important biological distinction between those two things.

One where you're actively attending to the flow of talks and the other where you're getting out of your own head and freeing yourself from that flow of thoughts. But I think there's also something else which is going on as well at the moment. I'm seized now.

I'm not using the the back of the chair, so i'm, i'm, i'm seased forward. So this is a little bit more strain on my body, which is a good thing for the the purposes of this conversation. Parts of my brain that would be quiet, our active because they are, they are trying to maintain my baLance.

You can see i'm gesturing widely what I am talking to you as well, ideas that are just below the level of consciousness ness particular a bit because your brain is a bit more active and they bubble up into consciousness. And then you can consider them where's if you're hunchback and is not a lot going on, you end up somewhat blank. There's nothing coming to mind.

Well, I love that visual because what I just got when use the word tickle is that when you're outside in nature and you're moving your body and you've got that state of flow happening, I kind of picture almost like the energy of your body is creating, like the effect of turning the knob on a stove. And so things start to bubble in your mind due to the energy and the activity in your great. Can you talk a little bit about that study that tracked participants activity levels and personality traits over twenty years and how walking had impacted people over time?

One is one that looked as in activity over time. And this was A A U. S. Study, uh, so called panel study, tracking changes in personality and correcting those with activity or inactivity. And the bottom line is very, very simple.

The people who spend increasing periods of time being saddled as they move along in life. It's not a question of getting over. This can be a midlife. They tend to show changes in their personality, which are, for one of a Better phrase, are attending towards being more a social, being less open to experience and probably experiencing more negative emotion compared to people who get up and get, I always get moving.

The other study that thinking of us is one that was conducted to just a couple years ago in older people, people in the late sixties and early seventies. Again, a beautiful U. S.

City conducted, the chicago area showed, if you are inactive, there are negative changes in the brain. Compared to people who are active, the changes that are positive in the brain from activity are rise from getting up and moving and getting out and going for a good work. So that the intervention is a very simple intervention, is to go for a walk three times a week for a couple of miles, along with A A walking partner.

And what you see in the group that are active is brain changes that are really remarkably. You get an increasing the volume of certain brain regions that are concerned with memory, and you also get changes in the effectively of the memory that supported by those rain regions. Where's the people who are sitting at home not active? They're showing A A greater decline that they need to do if they had to been active over that period of time. So the key point here countee, to drag out is, yes, being active positively supports good things about your personality, but IT also reaches across the cognitive function. IT supports positive things about memory function, and IT helps you resist the trajectory of decline that you would have if you just are sitting in your couch doing home or simpson, eating bag of chips and watching telly.

How short of a walk makes a difference? Like if somebody were to simply just start doing a ten minute walk every day outside in a wooded area or a quiet area without their headphones on over time, time, would that make a big difference? What they likely feel a boost in their mood. I'm sitting here thinking a lot of people are too sedentary because they think it's gona take thirty minutes. They think it's going to take an hour.

They think it's to be hard. Good news and bad news here OK. So the good news is that you don't have to do a half or you don't have to do forty minutes in one burst. In fact, lots of small burst distributed right throughout the day is actually probably the best thing for you.

If you look at humans that live in non mechanized groups, they are not engaging in a sudden burst of activity and then doing nothing but they're engaging is in is a lots of low level activity distribution right throughout the day with rest periods. So the advice to get up and walk for two minutes every half hour or whatever is really good advice. Rather than sitting at your computer for that time.

you can get a benefit from a two minute walk.

even from a little bit of activity. You don't need to do a lot, but you do need to do. Now here's the bad news.

Most humans in western societies are not moving very much. We know this from smart phone data, a of which you can grab the levels of activity, the people engaging. Sadly, people don't walk very much.

The average adult in uh the U. S, for example, walks about four thousand steps today. Now, a child learning to walk is about twelve hundred steps or hour. Wow, there's a huge difference.

The the country that walks the most, japan, they have cities that are car hostile despite them being one of the major car producers on the planet because it's a very small country and there's lots of people. H, yeah, walk and off a lot. yeah.

As I said, most people don't walk very much. So my my advice is always walk about five thousand steps per day more than you're doing. And that gets you from most people very close to the magic ten thousand steps, which, uh.

where did that come from?

H, it's made up. There are all sorts of apology tales about where they came from.

Um which one is your favorite?

I I think the one that I like the best is that it's a misprint lation from japanese activity company in the sixties. I I don't know it's true or not. However, what we do know is that if you look at what's called all calls mortality, you're likelihood of dying of anything rises the more and active that you are, and IT falls the more active you are. So at somewhere between about four and half thousand and seven and a half thousand steps per day, people's all calls mortality falls and falls quite substantially, something like thirty or forty percent.

okay? So I want to make sure ever to hear that. So shame is saying, if you were to simply on average walk forty five hundred or between four thousand and what seven thousand steps today .

get out of study that you're looking at some studies.

I would know your recommended .

my recommendation.

M.

yeah, my recommendations is you must turn on your mobile phone and find out how many steps you're walking per day, because most people don't know OK. So that the the first thing you need to do.

okay, I want to make ld on a second. I want to make audience chain, is saying, everybody, five thousand steps a day, minimum.

And that thing five thousand more than you're doing.

Oh my god, how do I know what doing by turning on your more OK? Give me my phone. Let me see what I think we're about .

to outstep that you've done.

okay? I don't even know if I tracked this thing.

yeah. So that's the first thing you ve got to do is is is to know how many .

you're doing OK.

What you will find for most people most of the time is that they're not walking very much at all. It's probably around three or four thousand steps a day, and that increases your chances of dying Young. I love something unpleasant.

Okay, I got a lot to do. I got twenty eight hundred steps right now.

So yeah, so you you need to add five thousand steps.

okay? How big of the distance is that?

I guess is about five kilometers or four half kilometers.

That's a lot. So I I have to walk two miles a day, two and half miles a day, or sk.

yeah, to my mind is not much at all, but I can both because I did nine thousand, seven hundred and eighty five steps today.

Shame with the flex. everybody. He's holding up his phone. Well, you are the walking guy. I would hope you walk every day.

Oh yeah, yeah. okay.

So you got to track. You got to do .

five thousand years OK. Nobody knows how many steps they took last tuesday week. Do you do? I know.

Course I don't. I don't have a brain that's designed to remember the number of steps that I take every day. That's why we all load this to a pocket computer.

To look about at what we know about people and non mechanized society, because we can learn lots from them. There are tribal societies in africa, the heads zf, for example, who live traditional lifestyles. And they walk a lot, they walk everywhere.

And these people don't have met a olic diseases on average. They don't have debates. They don't have lots of lots dy fsh. They tend to have very, very healthy hearts.

And what you see is they are walking somewhere in the range, depending on how they are male or female, between ten and twenty thousand steps per day on average. So the benefits are there in terms of heart health than all of the other things. But you actually got to put in the miles.

Unfortunately, this is why I say doing a little often is really the key, rather than trying to get one single burst of activity and and hope that down to zero out all the bad things that you've been doing during the day. And this is why I don't want to blame individuals for a lack of movement or an environment around us determined to a very large extent whether or not we can walk or not. So as I said, I I live in a very pleasant part of double in we've good foot parts.

We have local parks and the rest of IT so easy for me, and I can take the train to work without any trouble. But if I was living in, and you know, some of the the more difficult parts of the of the city, there might be adequate footpath ths, there might be adequate, rising and nice. You know, people might be afraid because of crime or something else there.

There are lots of things that go on or as I said, where my building is concerned. It's designed so that you have to take the elevator yeah. So the policy decisions back in the kind of environment around us and that in turn determines what that is that we are able to do.

So if if you have very good public transport, if you've got very nice wide sidewalks, if you ve got lots of Green around you and everything is accessible and foot more easily than IT is in a car, well, then people will walk. They will just default to that without thinking about us. But if the reverse is true, but then you can't lain people forgetting in their car, that's just the way things are going.

that's true. But I think you would agree that even if somebody lives in an area where the only good footpath or sidewalks are the ones on the block they live in, still getting outside and taking a walk around your block several times a day still has a really positive impact on your life.

all other things being equal. Yes, as I keep saying, movement is good for you. Yeah, getting is good for you.

What are five easy ways you can start getting more steps in right now?

So five easy steps. Uh, the first one is if you're commuting to work, get off your train or your boss stop or too early, do the same in the way home. And this will add extra two or three thousand steps today without you noticing.

And if you drive to work, park as far as you reasonable, come from your office and walk from there. So that's a really easy thing to do. And rather than trying to park right up against the office store cake, the extra couple of hundred steps you might otherwise have to take walking before you eat is a really good thing to do.

IT takes the edge off your appetite. If you work in the city like I do, and you go to a cafe for your lunch, go for, uh to a cafe is an extra ten or fifteen minutes walk away, you'll give extra couple thousand steps in and you won't notice and all always keep a comfortable pair of walking shoes under your desk. If you don't do that, setting an alarm on your computer or your phone, or putting a poster on something to tell you to get up and walk about every twenty five or thirty minutes is a really simple and easy thing to do.

If you can get a walking desk, they're quite expensive. Post their very effective trying and and use one of those. If you take phone calls, always take them standing up and walking.

If you take up a long phone call, you get four thousand steps in in the course of an hour and you won't notice at all. And he has the added benefits because you're walking, you're gonna guess, perhaps a little bit of creative problem solving going as well. Another simple tip is to find a partner in crime, joining a facebook walking group, or findings a colleague, what's group or whatever. We evolve the social workers and h having somebody to walk IT is A A way of making walking much more enjoyable than going out by yourself. Although walking by yourself can be very enjoyable to, especially if you have had a busy, stressful day and had lots of chAllenges from other people, getting away from other people's voices might actually be A A benefit of walking by yourself. And then the the final thing I would say is that if you've got a difficult creative of piece of what to do, a very simply way to deal with that, to prime yourself, is to write down a few questions about what you worried about, school them on a piece of paper, stick the no piece and no paper in your pocket, and bring pen and head off a walk and bring a voice record or an old book, and you'll come up with many more ideas than you would have to othe wise, very, very easy and straight forward thing to do. So the next time your boss is annoying you, you not being at your desk, you can correctly say that you're solving problems more effectively by going for a walk .

based on your research. Is there any connection between the time a day that you walk and the benefits that you receive?

Yeah, I can talk about this. So I I don't know that I can give you lots of of hard scientific evidence on. So I give you my prejudice more than anything else. The first thing to say is the regular walking right throughout the course of the day is a good thing for you.

Walking early in the morning when the sun lights up is, uh, a good thing from the point of view of setting your sari in rythm and getting you awake, in addition, obviously, to having a year cup of morning coffee or whatever little cities that you have. I also have a theory which you haven't been able to test, but I think it's probably correct that working at night now you have to be able to do this safely, and I emphasize, safely, will help you sleep from the point of view that is cool or regnie. And one of the things that you need to do when and that your body starts to do as as you're getting ready to sleep is you need to lose heat.

It's very hard to sleep if your body temperature is high. But also walking in the evening is actually a good thing in terms of helping you get to sleep. Light levels, ambient light levels are reduced dramatically.

So you you have kick yourself awake with high light levels in the morning and activity in the morning. And the reverse is also true, where not eternal creatures, where creatures that are designed by and large to walk around and live during the course of the day. And we use light to and train our daily risk. So walking in the evening, just a stroll, just have to be much under conditions of reduce lighting, to my mind, is a very good way of of helping you get to sleep.

And of course, if you have in soma, again, I don't offer this by way of scientific data, anything, but if you find a difficult t to get to sleep, many and some, many x am not saying all say that going for a good long walk is A A very good way of helping them to get to sleep. Now, the gold standard for insomnia is actually cognitive behavior therapy. We know that that works Better than drugs, Better than anything.

But accessing cvt for problems of sleep is the difficult to in most countries. But Charles dickens, for example, just to pick up on the inside uh team for moment, was a famous and uh he walked at night for hours through the the back streets of london, would come home, go to sleep at four or five in the morning and then right furiously and is at the course of the day so maybe there's something to to that that IT IT helps come back in some year. But again, I say that without too much data.

a lot of what we've talked about is how being secondary impacts you negatively. Therefore, movement is medicine, and any movement is Better than no movement. But if you had to frame IT in the positive, what are the benefits of having a daily walking practice where you are getting outside and you are taking a walk outside everyday? What are all the benefits to doing IT?

There are lots. The obvious one is to start with, this is how you feel. You will feel Better slowly over the days if you have been secondary and you haven't been moving before. You're gonna IT a bit of a struggle perhaps at first when you get walking. But over the course of a few days, you will discover actually you feel pretty good.

Uh, you miss us when a you stop working and you you will adapt very, very quickly on the example that I give is we can adapt easily to walking twenty years twenty five miles a day if we have to IT only takes uh uh a week or two to do that. But we won't adapt that quickly to running twenty years, twenty five miles a day, you know, the equivalent of marathon the day we can walk, the equivalent of marathon 的 day， day and day. I would like too much trouble, but we can't run equivalent of american day in, day out because our bodies are designed for walking and walking together with others, Carrying children, Carrying food.

And we can break a woke up into three or four miles in the morning, another three or four miles in the early afternoon, another three or four miles in the evening. So we adapt very quickly and we we are mood uh adopts positively because of that. I think you also find in terms of cognition, a kind of a general benefit, which is that you will feel like clarity of thinking that you might find eludes you. Otherwise, I think you're find social benefits working with others are walking and happening to meet others because, you know, randomly intersecting with your neighbors are those familiar strangers. IT turns out to be a very good thing for you as well.

The fact that so many people are stuck at home working hybrid roles and you feel a sense of desolation that you underestimate, the difference is simply getting out even alone and walking in your neighborhood can have and you feeling connected.

Yeah no, that's for sure. And I think you know, if you take those two different examples, you going for a walk by yourself. Are you going for a walk with others? The very fact of you going for a walk for yourself brings charity of mind, certainly good for your health and all of those things.

The benefit from walking with others, of course, arises from the fact that humans are intensely and immensely social animals, uh, we get this feeling, that is, it's been given a variety of different names. But the one that I like is, uh, I profest assembly, which is the feeling of the distribution between self, another. And people are walking together in the common calls.

We humans are the only species to do this. No chimpanzees ever got open, gone on a protest march against the alpha, because they're unhappy with an edict that the alpha has handed down. Look at the history of the U.

S. Over the last fifty, one hundred years, you've got to those amazing marches that happened in washington. And we've had similar marches here, uh, for all sorts of reasons.

And humans are unique because we will do this together. As I said, chimpanzees won't do us. Fiance won't do us. This is something unique, uh, to ourselves, humans.

You know, if you even take that point that you just made and you to steal IT down to just something even more simple, that's important to people's lives. I'm thinking about the fact that even when you join up with a group of friends and you decide to go on a walk in the afternoon, you are joining in solidity in your friendship.

And one of the things that I know that has made a huge difference in my life, and it's one of many reasons why I wanted to talk to you, is when I moved to this new area just a year so ago, IT was forming a walking group with other women that had moved to the area that made me feel suddenly more connected, that made me feel more optimistic. That made me feel a little bit more excited about being in some place new. And so I hadn't thought that much about the fact that walking is something that we've done our whole lives. It's something we do in political protest, is something that we do to form friendships. And that that is one of the many, many profound reasons why it's an important part of everybody's life.

Yeah, so you you've got all of those kinds of benefits. So those are all kind of cold head centers ones, but the end there are lots of others for the other organ systems of the body。 We know, for example, this uh things like meta lic disorders, things like type two D B S or heart conditions.

And those kinds of conditions tend to drop off dramatically in people who are active compared to people who are inactive. So there's a kind of a positive feedback where that's concerned. Simple things like if you have a bad back because you're seat all day, rather than taking some pillars to try and damp the information down, go for a wall can generate some natural and and traumatic es which act against the information and loosen your backup. You'll feed and have a Better from that point of view as well. So you know there's a whole consolation of things that happen to uh, the under this one word, which is why I say were damned by this word because we've only got one word which covers all of these other things.

Are there times when you should walk fast versus walking slow? And what's the difference in terms of the benefit?

I guess, again, that depends on your intention where the walk is concerned. You know if you're walking to enhance heart health, walking fast and walking at a pace for its difficult to talk to another person is a really good way of doing that. That's Better than jogging slowly.

Uh, you're gonna placing more demands on your cardio system, your circulatory system, that you would have been otherwise. So IT really depends. I am trying to the view, and this is just based personal experience that if you're trying to think through a difficult problem, if you're trying to engage in creative edition does, it's hard to do that.

When you're walking very fast, walking at A A A slightly lower speed is is probably uh, the way to go. And then if you're walking with kids, well, then you're going to be walking at the rate at their walking. So IT really depends on on the purpose of your walk.

If you're walking to boost your overall physical health, walking at a good clip is is what you really need to do. But if you're walking to think something through, walking a bit more slowly is probably the thing to do. Imagine, for example, I ask you to, uh, engage in a complex edition problem. K, we add seventeen, seven, you get to nine hundred and ninety nine.

Oh my god, I used to like you, shane.

That's hard. Or take seventeen away from a thousand. You can do that when you're walking slowly. You can do IT sitting. But if you're walking fast, you'll find your ability to do a drops to zero.

I'm sitting here going, what is a thousand nine teen right now? Ninety three? Nine, eight? seven? No, that's on IT. Nine, eight, seven is met IT, but it's ninety three.

No, no, no. Eight hundred. And we should .

be working nine other .

nation dream. anyway. My my point is we can see that here. You know, when we're doing something that imposes my mental strain, while we were talking to another person under slightly and natural circumstances, our ability to do h simple arithmetical problem drops dramatically as well.

My point really is that if if you're thinking about something, probably walking a little little more slowly is fine. But if if you're walking for a physiological house, walking more quickly is the thing to do. IT depends on the purpose of the walk.

You know what? You're delightful. And if I ever come to double in, I hope you'll take a walk with me. Course you can even bring your dictator and do your little dictating as we walk. I'll let you do that.

Thank you. You're great. I learned .

a lot. I learned a lot.

and I had a lot of fun. Thank you.

And one of the things that i've always said about this podcasts, that I always envision that being a walk between friends, and when you take a good walk, as you know, you always feel Better, you feel little more motivated, you feel connected to the person that you talk to, you laugh little, you shared some stories, and you typically leave having a little nugget in terms of knowledge or something you want to try. And you left all of us with so much to think about and so many things to try when we take our next walk. So I just want to tell you how much I appreciate you taking the time to be with us shanin be liked to.

And like I say, just go for a good walk, everything will feel much Better.

Oh.

you're the best.

Thank you. What's really awesome. Can't you just picture him in your mind, walking around with this paper and his little dictaphone talking out loud to himself?

I wonder what his neighbors say about all there is, again, that guy that's always talking to himself, they don't even realize that he's a neuroscientist, professor and wrote this selling book about the science of IT. But we thank him. And you know what else?

I thank you. Thank you for going on this metaphor walk with me today. And I want to be sure to tell you, in case nobody else does, I love you and I believe in you, and I believe in your ability to create a Better life. And now, you know, that means get you us off the couch, get you butt out the door and go for a demo. All right, i'll see you in a few days.

Where's galloway? Y that's that's that's also in sam. But very bad with geographic.

Well, uh, shot is a chain or shot? Shame, shame. Shot or shame.

shame. Why must sing? shot? Jesus, okay, sorry. Shame is see. Didn't want me to call you doctor mara. What is a hacker? You said, sit down on your hawkers.

Hawkers hunker down.

H honker to.

sorry, that's my accent. A hunker is something else entirely.

We told you this would be a fun interview.

Oh, and one more thing I know, this is not a blue per. This is the legal language. You know what the lawyers right? And what I need to read you.

This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a license therapies, and this pocket is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist or other qualified professional. Got IT good. I'll see in .

the next episode .

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