The psychological benefits of walking

Did you know that a brisk walk activates your brain and puts it to work?

Physical exercise has always been associated with Muscle toning, calorie burning and disease prevention, but the truth is that its positive effects even have an impact on our psychological side.

In fact, many of the benefits of moving and stretching our muscles have to do with improvements not only in how we feel, but also in the way we think. And, strange as it may seem, this is noticeable even in exercise modalities as simple as the routine of walking every day..

Some researchers believe that walking can be a good resource to help us think more creatively. Let's see why this conclusion has been reached.

Walking to free the mind

There are people who, when they try to concentrate, instead of remaining motionless in the style of the sculpture of The Thinker they start pacing back and forth, even if they are in a relatively small room..

This fact can be interpreted as a clue to one of the effects of going for a walk: it allows us to think more clearly. This is something that may be surprising, since it would be easy to imagine the opposite effect, i.e., to believe that thinking and walking at the same time costs more because they are two tasks that we have to attend to separately. However, this is not the case, because the action of walking acts as a kind of meditation. There are several reasons for this.

The vicious circle that traps our attention

The first reason is that walking serves to release tension. In addition to being useful for exercising many of the largest muscle groups in the human body, walking is a simple way to reduce stress levels, which in itself is a good thing, since it is a good thing in itself. prolonged periods of exposure to stress have a negative effect on our immune system.. But there is also another advantage related to the way walking makes us manage our attention. Specifically, this activity stops us from constantly thinking about things that cause anxiety.

Many times, when there is something in our daily life that causes us some anxiety or sadness, we produce in us something that in psychology is known as rumination, that is, a tendency to take our thoughts to the source of that discomfort constantly, which sometimes makes us enter into a vicious circle and we feel worse and worse. Rumination is a kind of train track that constantly guides our thoughts towards what causes us discomfort, and that is why it feeds on routine.

The more we expose ourselves to stimuli that we have experienced before, the more likely it is that the focus of our attention will return to those stress-producing ideas or memories, because we will have become accustomed to associating everything we do with the negative feelings associated with the routine. We will have become accustomed to associating everything we do with the negative feelings associated with routine..

Breaking away from pre-established paths

Walking is an experience that allows us to "disengage" our attention from those paths along which our thoughts usually run because, in addition to reducing stress through a light physical exercise, it makes our thinking more spontaneous and improvised by exposing us to changing, novel environments. And, with the perception of novel situations, comes the ability to think more creatively.

In addition, since walking is a very simple task that is usually not difficult to perform, it is not necessary for our attention to be very focused on this sequence of movements..

Walking is relevant enough to make us forget the thought circuits we are used to, but at the same time it is simple enough to let our attention find distractions spontaneously.

The process, summarized in its fundamental points, is as follows:

• Sedentary lifestyles and monotony cause our thinking to always come up against the same stimuli and the same references. and the same references, which always lead us to the same ideas and sensations, trapping us in a vicious circle.

• Moderate physical exercise related to the action of walking makes us feel better, which makes it less likely that we will feel better.This makes it less likely that our attention will always remain focused on our worries, as it changes the way we see the world.

• At the same time, the world we look at is also literally changingbecause we are always on the move. As a result, we think in a spontaneous and different way, we find relationships between ideas and sensations that we had not thought to relate before, and we begin to create experiences closely linked to this creative impulse.

A creative path through the trees

We have already seen that walking has psychological benefits that are easy to find in almost any context, but there is one type of environment that combines very well with this activity: natural environments with vegetation.

The air quality of these spaces, the charm of these types of areas and the absence of elements that refer to our routine make natural areas a very good place to go to disconnect from everything and get our creativity and imaginative spontaneity to work.

Since in such a place it is difficult for the human body to encounter the discomfort of city noise and pollution, it is much easier for the stress level to drop significantly, leaving the brain with its hands free to experiment with thought and the wealth of stimuli that come from the environment.. Nature is almost always the best canvas..