Episode: 88
The Shocking Science and Benefits of Taking a Simple Walk
with Dr. Shane O'Mara, PhD
In this episode, a renowned Oxford-trained neuroscientist teaches you the power of taking a walk, even just for 10 minutes.
Professor O’Mara explains 3 different types of walking to:
- Boost your creativity
- Make you more productive
- Make you a rockstar problem solver
You’ll be shocked to learn how the right kind of walking can lower depression and anxiety without medication.
The research and neuroscience will empower you to use walking to help you live a better, more creative, more productive life.
Listen on:
Movement is medicine, and walking is one of the simplest, most powerful ways to heal your mind and body.
Dr. Shane O'Mara, PhD
Featured Clips
Transcript
Mel Robbins (00:00:03):
I am really curious to hear what you think of our topic because you and I are going to dig into the science of walking. Yep. You heard it. 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. Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. When I started the Mel Robbins 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. 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 more connected and more energized and as if you're not the only person going through whatever you're going through.
(00:01:05):
And so today I'm really curious to hear what you think of our topic because you and I on this metaphorical walk are going to dig into the science of walking. Yep. You heard it. 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. And we're not going to do this at a common sense level. I've called in an expert. Yep. There is an expert, he's over in Ireland. His name is Dr. Shane O'Mara. He's not just an expert on walking. This guy is a neuroscientist. He's the professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College in Dublin. That's not all. He's the director of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience and a member of the academic staff of the School of Psychology. And he wrote the bestselling 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 him. He's so delightful. Maybe it's his Irish accent. Maybe it's because he takes a walk every day. I don't know. But why don't we welcome Dr. Shane O'Mara to the Mel Robbins podcast, Dr. Shane O'Mara. How are you?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:02:41):
I'm very good. Thank you. Delighted to be here.
Mel Robbins (00:02:44):
Oh, I'm delighted that you're here. So Shane, I was leaving home yesterday and to come down to do a bunch of stuff and interview and my husband says, so who are you interviewing tomorrow on the podcast? And I said, oh, I'm interviewing Dr. Shane O'Mara. He is a neuroscientist. He has written all these books. And one of his books is about the science of walking. And my husband looks at me and he goes, there is somebody that has studied the science of walking. Are you serious? And I said, yes, I know. So I have to ask you, why did you write a book about walking? What made you want to do this?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:03:24):
Well, I suppose the first question is why not? Why do we find mountains? Because they're there. And in fact, the idea for this book is not mine. And I make that clear in the acknowledgements to the book. It was such an obvious idea that I didn't think of it. It was my literary agent in fact suggested it to me on foot of a conversation that I'd had with them. And I realized that I know and the literature on walking and it would be a very easy and enjoyable book to write. And so it turned out,
Mel Robbins (00:03:58):
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 actually happening in the brain and the benefit to the body and mood and to you psychologically to simply take a walk. And so 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 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 rights to that puppy. And so you decided as a neuroscientist to look into walking. And what I want to know is what's been your most shocking discovery about walking?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:04:44):
I think it's the last chapter of the book. Thus we underestimate the extent to which walking is a profoundly social activity. We think of walking as just a simple means from getting from A to B, and we underestimate dramatically how exquisitely attuned we are to each other when we walk. And we underestimate terribly how enjoyable walking together is. And if you think about it, humans made our journey out of Africa 80 to 130,000 years ago, and we did it on foot. We didn't do it using mechanized transport because we hadn't invented it. That's only something we really invented in the last 50 or a hundred years or whatever. So it's something we have to do together. We did it in groups, we did it in families, we did it in tribes, we did it in communities. And to do that successfully means that everybody has to be paying attention to everybody else. People have to keep an eye out for danger. If you're walking at the edge of the group and you see a sudden movement in a bush, you're going to have to quickly tell everybody that there's a tiger over there or
Mel Robbins (00:05:56):
Either that, either that Shane or I'm going to shove you in the direction of the tiger and run.
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:06:00):
Exactly. Because to survive a tiger, all you have to do is run a little bit faster than the slowest person. As the old joke goes.
Mel Robbins (00:06:08):
It's true. And nobody that's listening to the podcast, but everybody on YouTube could see that I wore a orange and black striped sweater today. I look like a tiger.
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:06:18):
Maybe that's what primed me to give that example.
Mel Robbins (00:06:20):
It could be, but you're right. And I also think in modern life, the fact that so many people are stuck at home working hybrid roles and you feel a sense of deep isolation that you underestimate the difference that simply getting out even alone and walking in your neighborhood can have and you feeling connected.
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:06:47):
Yeah, no, that's for sure. And I think if you take those two different examples, you going for a walk by yourself, are you going for a walk with others? There are clearly benefits to you from the very fact of you going for a walk for yourself. It brings clarity of mind. It's certainly good for your health and all of those things. You may also happen to accidentally meet people when you're walking and you can talk to them, which is an easy thing to do. It's not so easy when you're driving or cycling on a bike or whatever to do that. But the benefit from walking with others, of course arises from the fact that humans are intensely and immensely social animals. And we get...
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:07:28):
this feeling that it's been given a variety of different names. But the one that I like is effervescent assembly, which is the feeling of the dissolution between self and other when people are walking together in a common cause.
(00:07:43):
And we humans are the only species that do this. No chimpanzee has ever got up and gone on a protest march against the alpha because they're unhappy with the edict that the alpha has handed down. But you see right throughout, look at the history of the US over the last 50 or a hundred years, you've got those amazing marches that happened in Washington. You've had the astonishing civil rights marches in the country next door, the uk. You had those huge marches against Brexit, which sadly were in effectual. But nonetheless, a million people who gathered who didn't know each other gathered together and walked the streets of London to protest a policy that they disagreed with. And we've had similar marches here for all sorts of reasons. And humans are unique because we will do this together. As I said, chimpanzees won't do it. Tigers and we've spoken a moment ago, won't do it. Fire rans won't do it. This is something unique to us as humans.
Mel Robbins (00:08:48):
If you even take that point that you just made and you distill 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 solidarity 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 the many reasons why I wanted to talk to you, is when I moved to this new area just a year or so ago, it was forming a walking group with other women that had moved to the area that made me feel suddenly more connected. It made me feel more optimistic. It made me feel a little bit more excited about being in someplace 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. It's something that we do to form friendships. And that is one of the many, many profound reasons why it's an important part of everybody's life. But your book has also dug into what I think is jaw dropping science about a simple walk. So before we kind of dig into all of it, can you talk a little bit about that 2018 study that tracked participants activity levels and personality traits over 20 years and how walking had impacted people over time?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:10:24):
One is one that looked at inactivity over time, and this was a US study, a so-called panel study, tracking changes in personality and correlating those with activity or inactivity. And the bottom line is very, very simple that people who spend increasing periods of time being sedentary as they move along in life, it's not a question of getting older. This can be a midlife. They tend to show changes in their personality, which are for want of a better phrase, tending them towards being more asocial, being less open to experience, and probably experiencing more by way of negative emotion compared to people who get up and get out and get moving. The other study that I'm thinking of is one that was conducted just a couple of years ago in older people, people in their late sixties and early seventies. And that study, again, a beautiful US study conducted in the Chicago area, showed very clearly that if you are inactive, there are negative changes in the brain compared to people who are active.
(00:11:39):
And the changes that are positive in the brain from activity arise from getting up and moving and getting out and going for a good walk. So the intervention is a very simple intervention. It's to go for a walk three times a week for a couple of miles along with a walking partner and a physiotherapist. And what you see in the group that are active is brain changes that are really remarkable. You get an increase in the volume of certain brain regions that are concerned with memory, and you also get changes in the effectiveness for want of a better phrase of the memory that's supported by those brain regions. Whereas the people who are sitting at home not active, they're showing a greater decline then they need to do or if they had been active over that period of time. So the key point here to really to drag out is that being active positively supports good things about your personality, but it also reaches across to 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 on your couch doing the Homer Simpson eating a bag of potato chips and watching Kelly.
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:12:22):
Brain regions that are concerned with memory, and you also get changes in the effectiveness for want of a better phrase of the memory that's supported by those brain regions. Whereas the people who are sitting at home not active, they're showing a greater decline then they need to do or if they had been active over that period of time. So the key point here to really to drag out is that being active positively supports good things about your personality, but it also reaches across to 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 on your couch doing the Homer Simpson eating a bag of potato chips and watching Kelly.
Mel Robbins (00:13:03):
I think that 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?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:13:14):
Yeah, so I think there's a couple of things to think about here, and it really depends on the level of analysis that you want to start at. So let's make it kind of very simple's. So I'm sitting here at home and I want to go to the shop. So the first thing that you have to do is form the intention that you're going to go and get up and do something. That could be because somebody has bleeped you or phoned you or whatever to say to come and meet them at the shop, or you realize you need to go and pick up a pint of milk or whatever it happens to be. So what does that do? Well, the first thing is you have to stand up. You have to get up. You have to engage in proprietary movement in order to walk. That's a challenge for your brain. Sitting or lying down in a chair or being recumbent in a chair is not a challenge. Standing up, maintaining balance and then having directed coherent motion in the direction that you want to go is also a challenge to your brain. So the key point here is that movement and the movement in this case we're talking about of course, is walking acts as a positive spur to the brain. And rhythms that would be quiescent in the brain are suddenly alive.
(00:14:25):
They become very apparent. 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 the shop and it happens to be up a hill for the sake of this point.
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:14:51):
Well then there are other challenges happening as well. So you have to calibrate your walking speed so that you're at 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 musculature has to respond to all of those things. So you've got a whole lot of 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 what you got to do, and then 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, as I said, from 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.
Mel Robbins (00:15:41):
Well, I certainly don't think about any of those things when I, or should you need to get well, but what is, you said that the act of pushing yourself off the couch, standing up, triggering your mind to activate from the top down, the mechanical patterns that allow you to walk the cognitive patterns of surveying where you are and how you're going to get to a certain place, that all these things benefit the brain. How do they benefit the brain?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:16:12):
They benefit the brain because probably the best way to think about this is that movement is medicine is the lovely phrase that's going round at the moment. So think of an example. Let's imagine you own a bicycle and you get this lovely new bike from the shop and you put it in your garage and you leave it there for a year and you don't do anything with it. What condition is it going to be in? The chain is going to be all silted up. The tires have probably deflated, the brakes aren't going to be especially responsive. All of those kinds of things will have gone wrong with it. And the same is true for your body. Your body needs to work optimally repeated challenge. Your brain needs this as well. This is why, for example, if you're walking for the 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.
(00:17:09):
Your body is obviously designed to do two things. One is to conserve energy, but the other is to source energy. And we always have this fight going on within us. Am I going to get up? If I'm going to get up, am I going to take the car? Or those kinds of choices we make and they makes sense. Again, when you think about the conditions that humans lived under for thousands of years, we didn't have the easy availability of calories that we have now. We didn't have chairs with backs. We sat on tree stumps, we sat down on our hunker, but we didn't have all of these wonderful comforts that our big brains have allowed us to invent over the past 100 years and to spread around among us all, even this fantastic conversation we're able to have when I said, you don't need to be thinking about these things.
(00:18:03):
This is the joy and the wonder of 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 invoke my cognitive map, I have to put one foot 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. For example, you slip because there's 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 points that I make repeatedly in the book is that we've designed movement out of our environment. And again, this is perfectly understandable. We're trying to consider energy, but if we want to get people moving again, what we really need to do is design the environment so that it's easy for people to walk.
(00:18:52):
So I give you a simple example. My local suburban town, which I live very close to, had quite narrow footpaths. It's a very old town. It's there since the, I guess the 11 hundreds or something. And the footpaths are all kind of three foot wide. And priority was given foolishly to traffic. Even though it's an old medieval town, the pandemic came and people were eating outside. That meant the traffic had to lose its position of primacy. The restaurants were allowed to put tables outside. That meant the footpaths had to be expanded. And suddenly the default is people are walking rather than driving. And that's a really, really nice thing. But to give you a contrary example, in my office, sorry, in the building I work in, if you want to come and visit me in my office, you come in the door and I'm up on the third floor, how do you get to me? If you want to walk to me, you have to walk through four fire doors to...
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:19:55):
Get to the stairs. But if you want to take the lift or the elevator as you call it, it's just there. So my building has a walking designed out of it, and that building would be I guess there for a hundred years. So people will be not using the stairs in that building for a hundred years. And this is an issue that generally we've, we've created environments where the default is to conserve energy and not move, but we've got a food surplus, a caloric surplus. So actually what we should be doing is creating environments that make it easy for people to move around under their own steam.
Mel Robbins (00:20:34):
One of my missions in wanting to talk to you is to have the person listening to us right now have an epiphany about the profound power and impact that a simple walk into your daily routine can have on you. And I know it wasn't until we started digging into your research that I 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?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:21:28):
Yeah. So I have a chapter in the book I think called A Bam for body and brain. And one of the things that we know with an absolute high degree of certainty as well as we know anything in science is that walking boosts mood. And it does so in an enduring kind of way. So you can demonstrate this in all sorts of ways, but the simplest way of doing it to show that the short term boost to mood is by bringing people to the laboratory. And there's lots of studies have variations on this kind of study where ...
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:22:06):
Ostensibly they're there to judge the beauty of the buildings that might be on a college campus or in a city center or something like that. You have two simple conditions. One is they look at pictures on screens or pictures that have been printed out for them, or the other is they go for a walk and look at these buildings and they give ratings for each of these buildings.
(00:22:24):
And before and after, you just get people to fill in a bunch of innocuous questionnaires including one rating, how they're feeling. And what you find consistently is that bringing people out for a short walk, a 10, 12, 15 minute walk gives a short-term boost to how well they feel, even if they're people who hate walking. And there are such people, I 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 these kinds of studies. There's some wonderful studies that have been conducted in Canada where lots of towns have tunnels because of the severe winter conditions and getting people to walk outside so that they've a view of nature as opposed to walking in a tunnel that gives a boost to how well you feel over and 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 boosts, but you can look at much better quality studies in terms of tracking people over time
(00:23:36):
And looking at the amount of movement that they engage in. And then asking the question, what is the likelihood that they're going to have depression or suffer from anxiety disorders or these kinds of conditions? And what you see, so I discussed in particular a very large scale Australian study, is that people who are not moving or who move the least in the population are the ones who are most likely to succumb to major depressive disorder. So this is a tracking through time study. They're not depressed at the time that you're starting the study. You're tracking them over seven or eight years and you're asking the question,
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:22:06):
How likely is it that they are going to have major depressive disorder and the likelihood falls the more you move. Now obviously that tops out because at some point there are no more benefits. But the key point here is that if we design societies where people minimize their own physical activity, we're also designing societies where people are going to be prone to these really unpleasant psychiatric disorders that can take in some cases years of therapy and work to remit. Whereas if we had designed our society in the first place so that people were moving more, this problem would not arise.
Mel Robbins (00:25:01):
So if I go for a 10 minute walk, why does that boost my mood?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:25:08):
So 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 where you're 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 in creative thinking, which you might not have been able to engage in. If you're just sitting at home ruminating over something unpleasant, you can escape yourself for a while, which is also I think a good thing to be able to do. Sometimes we get annoyed at being in our own heads and not being in our own heads. 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 it a particular benefit that I think people again underestimate When you're walking in a nice suburban environment where there's lots of trees like where for example, I'm lucky enough to live, that's actually an inherently interesting and pleasant experience because humans enjoy a connection to nature.
(00:26:16):
You get the benefit of your stress hormones, as I've said, falling. You get this chance to engage in creative ideation that you wouldn't otherwise be able to engage in. So those kinds of things happen pretty quickly and they happen because we have bodies that are designed and brains that are designed to allow us to engage in movement. Now, I did say at the start, the environment matters. If you imagine walking along the edge of a freeway or a motorway as we would call it, where cars are whizzing past at unpredictable speeds of 70 miles an hour or whatever it happens to be, and you've also got loud noises and you've just got concrete around you, that will be a very stressful and unpleasant experience. And we've got lots and lots of data, which I don't discuss in this book, which from a variety of sources showing that people who are trapped in those kinds of urban environments are much more prone to psychiatric disorder than people who can escape from those. So this is why building accessible city parks, for example, is in my mind, an un allied good. It's something that we should be doing.
Mel Robbins (00:27:35):
So I agree with you and I would still love to know, let's just say it's ideal settings. It's 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 chirping, the sun is shining, and you're going to go for a walk for just 10 minutes. You're going to take a brisk walk. You said stress harm. Does that mean that the cortisol drops? Does dopamine kick in? What is happening in your body?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:28:11):
This is what I say to you. We have to be careful about what we can say. Stay with certainty. So
(00:28:16):
Just about every study that says dopamine, they don't measure dopamine because it's not possible to measure dopamine. We're not allowed for good reason to drill holes in people's heads and sample what level of dopamine is present. We can measure cortisol much more easily because you can take blood samples, we can take samples from saliva, and there are other ways of getting at it. So again, what we have are correlations. We can't do the kinds of studies that you might like to do. That would be causal. But I think that the correlation is itself good enough when you expose people to nature and when people are walking under their own steam or moving under their own steam through nature, people report changes in wellbeing that are very positive as opposed to, for example, just being sedentary. So when you compare them to sedentary controls, and similarly when you ask people to do slightly unpleasant things, like I said, to walk along the edge of a very busy road where the noises and all of those things are unpredictable and the environment is a little bit threatening. So it's a constellation of several things coming together at once. It's not just one thing
Mel Robbins (00:29:42):
That's pretty cool. What are those things? Because I guess what I'm trying to understand is this, I think it's common sense. 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 90% of the problems that you have. It boosts your mood, it makes you feel a little bit more energized. I notice 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 it part of their lives. And so that's just what I'm curious about because I've felt all those things, but I've always wondered, well, what's actually happening that my mood gets boosted? And what I just heard you say is that first of all, it's a correlation. They're not drilling holes in our heads and saying, oh, the dopamine spiked. But 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. I'm
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:30:54):
Experiencing movement. You've got optic flow, you've got lots of other things going on.
Mel Robbins (00:31:00):
What is optic flow?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:31:01):
So this is the sensation of things moving on either side of you as you're moving. Imagine walking down a corridor, you can feel the walls receding behind you so you get lots of activity occurring that wouldn't be there when you're sedentary. And I guess the key point, why
Mel Robbins (00:31:18):
Does that matter? What does flow do?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:31:23):
I keep coming back to this key point. Our bodies are built for movement.
(00:31:27):
So when you're moving, you're being prepared for action. Lots of brain systems and body systems are ready to do things. They're not if you're just sitting down. So optic flow in and of itself is neither here nor there, but it generates the sensation of movement, it prepares the body well, you're actually moving, but you can do optic flow studies where you can simulate movement quite easily. And people hate that because you get this dizzy kind of feeling. You get this when you're on an escalator, for example, when you go to walk in an escalator that isn't moving, you've had that sway. I'm sure
Mel Robbins (00:32:03):
It's very destabilizing.
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:32:05):
Yeah, it's very destabilizing. But the key point that I keep coming back to is that movement itself is the good thing for you because it entrains simultaneously lots of activity at lots of different levels of your body from a variety of different changes in the brain all the way down to the tactic that your feet make with a substrate. And why does that feel good? Well, we can hand wave about this, but I think the simplest answer is this. Those of us in our ancestral past who didn't move, got eaten, and those of us who enjoyed moving and actually got around and didn't hang around, didn't get eaten. And evolution has given us these kind of positive feelings that come as an end consequence of doing things that are good for us, and it rewards us by making us feel good. Can I prove that? I think in evolutionary terms, it has to be true. Where you see in populations that don't move, they're subject to predation, they're subject to all sorts of things, but humans, again, uniquely started this march and we've profited from it. So you have this kind of positive feedback thing going on all the time that we're kind of restless and we kind of enjoy that restlessness when we test it by actually getting out there and moving.
Mel Robbins (00:33:38):
So I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions to see because our team dug into your book and into your work, and we had a bunch of questions. One is, how does taking a walk improve your creativity?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:33:54):
Yeah, so creative walking is kind of one of these things I think we're damned with this one word for this activity that does so many things.
Mel Robbins (00:34:05):
Wait, are you saying there's different types of walking?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:34:08):
Of course. The general idea here is that we've got one word for an activity, which is walking, but we walk for all sorts of different purposes. So my kind of key point that I want to get across is that we're cursed because we have this one word which allows us, which is a label for something that ends up being lots and lots of different things. So I've mentioned social walking already. You've mentioned we walk together, we've mentioned walking for health. So what do we call that? Health walking, I dunno, healthy walking. I'm sure we could come up with a phrase. And then there's walking for creative ideation.
Mel Robbins (00:34:48):
How do you do that?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:34:50):
Well, you do it by going and walking and thinking. It's that.
Mel Robbins (00:34:55):
Well, no, let me ask you. It doesn't sound that simple. So I'm in the middle of writing my next book and I'm at a bit of a, let's just say I have hit a wall and I've got writer's 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?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:35:25):
Yeah, so there's a couple of ways of approaching this. And I think first of all, we have to think about what it is we mean by creativity and how the brain can be creative. And one of the things that's 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. And there are lots of ways of showing this. One very simple way is to give people complicated logic, problems to solve...
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:36:01):
And just letting them read them and then letting them have a night's sleep and getting them to solve them in the morning. And what you'll find is that people are very, very good at solving those problems in the morning, even though they haven't been ostensibly thinking about them during the course of their sleep.
(00:36:19):
But of course, lots of things happen in sleep in terms of reorganization of knowledge and consolidation of memory and all of that kind of thing, which I think we're only really starting to appreciate. Now we're walking and creativity is concerned. There are lots of ways of demonstrating this, but I think the first thing to say is that walking and creativity have been recognized by philosophy and mathematicians and lots of other people for probably centuries as being intimately related. And psychology has only caught up on this in the last 10 or 20 years, which is we're really only at the early stages of trying to figure this one out. So in my own case, I dictated a lot of the book to get a first draft. And how did I do that? Well, what I would do is very simple. I would write down bullet points on a page and take a dictaphone with me, not a telephone because that thing is just too distracting.
Mel Robbins (00:37:22):
What happens when you have a phone on you or in your hand when you're walking? How does that rob you of some of the benefit?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:37:29):
I don't know that it robs you. What it does. I suppose there's an ambiguous literature on this. People who are good at texting while walking tend to have very good peripheral vision, and this seems to be trainable. So it is not necessarily the case that it's a bad thing, but if you have a problem that you're trying to solve, what you really need is to spend time with your own thoughts, not with a phone. So you shouldn't have the thing in your hand. And that's why, for example, when I dictate, 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 of checking emails or anything like that. And a key part of walk, sorry, of creative thinking is the preparation and incubation kind of stage. And then, so what do I mean by preparation?
(00:38:26):
This is the kind of research stage, and then you just need to let the ideas percolate around, come together in a variety of different ways. So you can go for a walk where you just decide not to think of the problems that you're working on, that you're going to go out for 20 minutes or a half an hour and not think about them at all. The other thing you can do, and this is up to you as an individual or your listeners as individuals, is to do the other thing, which is to walk and think loosely about the problem that you've got, not in very defined terms, but think in very loose terms so that what you're trying to do is discover associations and connections that weren't obvious to you when you were sitting there breaking your fingers on the keyboard and banging your head off your desk because 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 walking, that we don't have a definitive recipe. What 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 who've been sitting and not moving for the same period. So why is that? Well go on. Yeah,
Mel Robbins (00:39:55):
No, go ahead. Because what I read in your book is that it can increase creativity two times. It really boosts the creative flow in your brain. And then you were about to say, why is that?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:40:08):
Yeah, so there's a couple of potential reasons. So I think one of the major discoveries in neuroscience over the last 20 or 25 years is this idea of default activity in the brain and default activity is the kind of what we revert to when we're not watching tele and when we're instructed not to think of anything at all, what do we think about? We think about our social relations, we think about problems that are important to us. We're not engaged in focal thought. We're moving backwards and forwards on a mental timeline. 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 and what we now know from the kind of brain imaging literature is that when people are engaged in creative problem solving, they're doing two things simultaneously. And this is something that you have to practice.
(00:41:06):
It's not easy to do. You're kind of focused on this big picture, and at the same time you're focused on the detail. This is a hard thing to do. So the metaphor I use in the book is you're trying to see the forest and the trees at the same time, or you're flickering between these two states where you're zooming back from something and then you're focused in on the detail. And the wonderful thing about walking is I think it frees 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 what's in front of you, you've got a chance to cogitate on lots and lots of other things. And that's why, for example, when I walk, I just t to notice on my desk here, I have a page of them, I've scribbled notes and I take my dictaphone and I'll look at those and I'll ignore people looking at me and I will dictate from 'em. And you end up with thoughts and ideas that you wouldn't otherwise have 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,
Mel Robbins (00:42:22):
Right, your phone,
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:42:23):
What you're doing is engaging in a kind of mental zigzag between different ideas until you find the one that makes you go, aha, that's the way I need to do it. And it might be a big idea or it might be a small idea. You might have a small personal thing that you need to sort out, or it might be some big thing like sorting out a table of contents for a book is a big deal. It's really annoying and getting it right is really important, otherwise the book itself will fail.
Mel Robbins (00:42:54):
Well, I'm sitting here wondering if one of the reasons why walking helps you have more creative ideas is because it has this ability to suppress the default mode network. And that sort of 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 quiet a part of your brain that you're not able to tap into when you're sedentary.
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:43:39):
So that's kind of the idea that I get to this concept of mindlessness, that...
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:43:48):
With mindfulness, you're paying attention to the flow of thoughts through your head, but when you're being mindless, you're not paying attention to anything in particular. And I think there's an important psychological distinction between those two things. One where you're actively attending to the flow of thoughts 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 seated now, I'm not using the back of the chair, so I, I'm seated forward, so there's a little bit more strain on my body, which is a good thing for the purposes of this conversation. Why is that? Well, parts of my brain that would be quiet, quiescent are active because they're there trying to maintain my balance. You can see I'm gesturing wildly when I'm talking to you as well. And the kind of idea that I have is that ideas that are just below the level of consciousness get tickled a bit because your brain is a bit more active and they bubble up into consciousness and then you can consider them. Whereas if you're hunched back and there's not a lot going on, you end up somewhat blank and there's nothing coming to mind.
Mel Robbins (00:45:10):
Well, I love that visual because what I just got when you use the word tickle is that when you're outside and you're in nature and you're moving your body and you've got that state of optic flow happening, I kind of picture almost like the energy of your body is creating 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 body. How short of a walk makes a difference? If somebody were to simply just start doing a 10 minute walk every day outside in a wooded area or a quiet area without their headphones on over time, would that make a big difference? Would they...
Mel Robbins (00:45:56):
Likely feel a boost in their mood? Because I'm sitting here thinking a lot of people don't are too sedentary because they think it's going to take 30 minutes, or they think it's going to take an hour. They think it's going to be hard.
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:46:08):
So there's good news and bad news here. Okay, so the good news is that you don't have to do a half hour. You don't have to do 40 minutes in one burst. In fact, the good news is that lots of small bursts distributed right throughout the day is actually probably the best thing for you, that if you look at humans that live in non mechanized groups, they're not engaging in a sudden burst of activity and then doing nothing. What they're engaging in is lots of low level activity distributed 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.
Mel Robbins (00:46:52):
Now, you can get a benefit from a two minute walk?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:46:54):
Just even from a little bit of activity. You don't need to do a lot, but you do need to do some. Now, here's the bad news. Most humans in western societies are not moving at all, are not moving very much. So we know this from mobile phone, smartphone data of which you can grab the levels of activity that people engage in. And what you see in western societies, Ireland, the us, the uk, France, and all the rest of them is sadly that people don't walk very much. The average adult in the US for example, walks at about 4,000 steps a day. Now a child learning to walk does about 1200 steps per hour. Whoa. There's a huge difference. And the country that walks the most is Japan. Why? Because 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, they walk an awful lot. And as I said, most people don't walk very much. So my advice is all walk about 5,000 steps per day more than you're doing, and that gets you, for most people, very close to that magic 10,000 steps. Which, where did that come from? It's made up. It's made up.
(00:48:26):
There are all sorts of apocryphal tales about where it came from. One is
Mel Robbins (00:48:31):
Which one is your favorite?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:48:32):
I think the one that I like the best is that it's a mistranslation from a Japanese activity company in the sixties. I dunno if it's true or not. However, what we do know is that if you look at all what's called all cause mortality, your likelihood of dying of anything rises the more inactive that you are and it falls, the more active you are. So at somewhere between about four and a half thousand and seven and a half thousand steps per day, people's all cause mortality falls and falls quite substantially. Something like 30 or 40%. You must turn on your mobile phone and find out how many steps you're walking per day because most people don't know. So that's the first thing you need to do. And what you'll find for most people most of the time is that they're not walking very much at all. It's probably around three or 4,000 steps a day, and that increases your chances of dying younger, of something unpleasant.
Mel Robbins (00:49:34):
I got 2,800 steps right now,
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:49:37):
So yeah, so you need to add 5,000 steps to that.
Mel Robbins (00:49:41):
Okay. How big of a distance is that?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:49:44):
I guess it's about five kilometers or four and a half kilometers.
Mel Robbins (00:49:48):
That's a lot. So I have to walk two miles a day, two and a half miles a day, you're saying?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:49:53):
Yeah, to my mind it's not much at all, but I can boast because I did 9,785 steps today. And
Mel Robbins (00:50:01):
Shane with the flex, everybody, he's holding up his phone. Well, you are the walking guy. I would hope you walk every day.
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:50:09):
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Mel Robbins (00:50:12):
Okay. So you got to track. You got to do 5,000 more. Okay.
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:50:17):
Nobody knows how many steps they took last Tuesday week. Do you do I? No. Of course I don't.
Mel Robbins (00:50:25):
Well, you should because telling us to track,
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:50:27):
No, of course not. I don't have a brain that's designed to remember the number of steps that I take every day. That's why we offload this to a pocket computer. And again, just to look about at what we know about people in non mechanized societies because we can learn lots from 'em. So there are tribal societies in Africa, the Hadza for example, who live traditional lifestyles and they walk a lot, they walk everywhere. And these people don't have metabolic diseases on average. They don't have diabetes, they don't have lots of body fat. They tend to have very, very healthy hearts. And what you see is they're walking somewhere in the range, depending on whether they're male or female, between 10 and 20,000 steps per day on average. So the benefits are there in terms of health, in terms of heart health and all of the other things.
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:51:39):
Doing a little often is really the key, rather than trying to get one single burst of activity and then hope that that'll 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 lack of movement. Our environment around us determines to a very large extent whether or not we can walk or not. So as I've said, I live in a very pleasant part of Dublin. We have good footpaths, we have local parks and all the rest of it. So it's easy for me and I can take the train to work without any trouble, but if I was living in some of the more difficult parts of the city, there mightn't be adequate footpaths, the infrastructure mightn't support it. There mightn't be adequate lighting at night. People might be afraid because of maybe crime or something else. There are lots of things that go on, or as I said, where my building is concerned is designed so that you have to take the elevator. So the kind of policy decisions bake in the kind of environment around us, and that in turn determines what it is that we are able to do. So 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's accessible on foot more easily than it is in a car, well then people will walk. They will just default to that without thinking about it. But if the reverse is true, well then you can't blame people for getting in their car. That's just the,
Mel Robbins (00:53:15):
That's true. But I think you would agree that even if somebody lives in an area where the only good footpaths or sidewalks or 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.
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:53:37):
All of the things being equal, yes, as I keep saying, movement is good for you and getting out is good for you, but if the conditions are hazardous, if you're an old person and it's winter and there's lots of ice, well then you're going to be trapped. So again, it comes down to how the environment around us is built as well. It's not just on the individual. If you can make it the default so that people walk as their first choice, well then life is very different. And this is why you see, for example, you take a city like New York, it's the city that people walk the most in the us.
Mel Robbins (00:54:16):
True.
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:54:16):
And there are lots of other cities where people don't walk as much because they're designed very, very differently.
Mel Robbins (00:54:25):
It's true, it's absolutely true. If you had to say, because a lot of what we've talked about is how being sedentary 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 every day? What are all the benefits to doing it?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:54:56):
Well, there are lots. And the obvious one is to start with is how you feel. You will feel better slowly over the days. If you've been sedentary and you haven't been moving before, you're going to find it a bit of a struggle, perhaps at first when you get walking. But you will, over the course of a few days, you will discover actually you feel pretty good and you miss it when you stop walking and you will adapt very, very quickly. And the example that I give is we can adapt easily to walking 20 or 25 miles a day if we have to. It only takes a week or two to do that, but we won't adapt that quickly to running 20 or 25 miles a day, the equivalent of a marathon a day. We can walk the equivalent of a marathon a day, day in, day out without too much trouble.
(00:55:49):
But we can't run the equivalent of a marathon 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 walkup into a couple of maybe phases of three or four miles in the morning, another three or four miles in the early afternoon, another three or four miles in the evening or whatever it happens to be. So we adapt very quickly and our mood adapts positively because of that. I think you'll also find in terms of cognition, a general benefit, which is that you'll feel a clarity of thinking that you might find eludes you otherwise. I think you'll find social benefits that walking with others are walking and happening to meet others because randomly intersecting with your neighbors or those familiar strangers turns out to be a very good thing for you as well. So you've got all of those kinds of benefits.
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:57:01):
So those are all kind of head centered ones, but then there are lots of others for the other organ systems of the body. We know, for example, that things like metabolic disorders, things like type two diabetes 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 positive feedback where that's concerned. Simple things like if you have a bad back because you're seated all day, rather than taking some pills to try and damp the inflammation down, go for a walk and generate some natural anti-inflammatories, which will act against the inflammation and loosen your back out. And you'll feel an awful lot better from that point of view as well. So there's a whole constellation of things that happen to be under this one word, which is why I say we're damned by this word because we've only got one word which covers all of these other things.
Mel Robbins (00:58:11):
Are there times when you should walk fast versus walking slow? And what's the difference in terms of the benefits,
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:58:23):
I guess? Again, it depends on your intention, where the walk is concerned. If you're walking to enhance heart health, walking fast and walking at a pace where it's difficult to talk to another person is a really good way of doing that. That's better than jogging. Slowly you're going to be placing more demands on your cardiac system and your circulatory system than you would've been otherwise. So it really depends. Am inclined to the view, and this is just based on personal experience that if you're trying to think through a difficult problem, if you're trying to engage in creative ideation, that it's hard to do that when you're walking very fast, that walking at a slightly lower speed is probably the way to go. And then if you're walking with kids, well, then you're going to be walking at the rate that they're walking out. I guess it really depends on the purpose of your walk. If you're walking, I think to boost your overall physical health, walking at a good clip is what you really need to do. But if you're walking to think something through, probably walking a bit more slowly is probably the thing to do. And there's a way to demonstrate that. Imagine, for example, I ask you to engage in a complex edition problem.
Mel Robbins (00:59:51):
Okay?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (00:59:52):
Add seventeens until you get to 999.
Mel Robbins (00:59:56):
Oh my God, I used to like you, Shane,
Dr. Shane O'Mara (01:00:00):
That's hard. Or take 17 minutes 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 drops to zero.
Mel Robbins (01:00:14):
I'm sitting here, so I'm sitting here going, what is a thousand minus 17 right now? 9 89. Eight seven. No, that's not it. 9, 8, 7. Isn't that it? What's that? 9 8 3?
Dr. Shane O'Mara (01:00:27):
No, no, 8 83 it. 800, sorry. Nine. Don't have it either. You're putting me off 9 83. Anyway, my point is that we can see it here when we're doing something that imposes a mild mental strain while we're talking to another person under slightly unnatural circumstances, our ability to do a simple arithmetical problem drops dramatically as well. So my point really is that if you're thinking about something, probably walking a little bit more slowly is fine, but if you're walking for physiological health, walking more quickly is the thing to do. It depends on the purpose of the walk.
Mel Robbins (01:01:19):
You know what? You're delightful. And if I ever come to Dublin, I hope you'll take a walk with me.
Dr. Shane O'Mara (01:01:25):
Of course,
Mel Robbins (01:01:26):
You can even bring your dictator and do your little dictating as we walk I'll let you do that.
Dr. Shane O'Mara (01:01:31):
Thank you. You're very good.
Mel Robbins (01:01:35):
Oh, you're great. You're really great. I learned lot. I learned a lot and I had a lot of fun.
Dr. Shane O'Mara (01:01:41):
Thank you.
Mel Robbins (01:01:42):
And one of the things that I've always said about this podcast is that I always envisioned it being a walk between friends. And when you take a good walk, as you know, you always feel better, you feel a little more motivated, you feel connected to the person that you talk to, you laughed a 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, Shane.
Dr. Shane O'Mara (01:02:26):
Delighted to. And like I say, just go for a good walk and everything will feel much better.
Mel Robbins (01:02:33):
Oh, I, you're the best. YouTube, you're watching me, which means everybody that's listening to this podcast on their walk right now, you know what they're doing. They're listening to ads and ads support this show. So I got a favor to ask for you. Please hit subscribe wherever it is. It's somewhere around here, but hit subscribe because the ads and sponsors on the show help me bring you new videos every single day. So don't freeload. If you love this channel and you love all the information we bring you, please, please, please, it really supports us. Hit the subscribe. It costs you nothing. It helps our show and our channel, and I love you for it. Alright, you ready? Let's go back to the show. Wasn't he awesome? Can't you just picture him in your mind, walking around with his paper and his little dictaphone talking out loud to himself?
(01:03:23):
I wonder what his neighbors say about it. Oh, there he is again. That guy that's always talking to himself. They don't even realize that he's a neuroscientist professor and wrote this bestselling a book about the science of it. But we thank him. And you know what else? I thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for going on this metaphorical 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 your ass off the couch, get your butt out the door and go for a damn walk. Alright, I'll see you in a few days. Oh, and one more thing, and no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist, and this podcast 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 you in the next episode.
(01:04:46):
Hey, it's Mel. Thank you so much for being here. If you enjoyed that video, bye. God, please subscribe because I don't want you to miss a thing. Thank you so much for being here. We've got so much amazing stuff coming. Thank you so much for sending this stuff to your friends and your family. I love you. We create these videos for you, so make sure you subscribe.
Guests Appearing in this Episode
Dr. Shane O'Mara, PhD
Dr. Shane O'Mara is a neuroscientist, professor, and author specializing in the science of walking, brain health, and resilience. Dr. O'Mara is Professor of Experimental Brain Research at the University of Dublin. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from NUI Galway and a DPhil from the University of Oxford.
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Book: In Praise of Walking
In this captivating book, neuroscientist Shane O’Mara invites us to marvel at the benefits walking confers on our bodies and brains, and to appreciate the advantages of this uniquely human skill. From walking’s evolutionary origins, traced back millions of years to life forms on the ocean floor, to new findings from cutting-edge research, he reveals how the brain and nervous system give us the ability to balance, weave through a crowded city, and run our “inner GPS” system. Walking is good for our muscles and posture; it helps to protect and repair organs, and can slow or turn back the aging of our brains. With our minds in motion we think more creatively, our mood improves, and stress levels fall. Walking together to achieve a shared purpose is also a social glue that has contributed to our survival as a species.
Resources
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- Harvard School of Public Health: Don’t stress about 10k steps; even 4,400 steps work!
- American Psychological Association: Want to boost your mental health? Take a walk.
- The Washington Post: Got 11 minutes? A daily brisk walk could lower risk for early death.
- Stanford University: A landmark study found that creative output increased by a whopping 60% when participants were walking.
- National Library of Medicine: Walking improves memory and lowers memory loss.
- Harvard Health: The benefits of walking with friends.
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