3 Ways That Walking Improves Your Life

Hello everyone,

This post is going to serve as your reminder that taking a brisk walk daily is one of the greatest things you can do for yourself. There are more reasons than purely physical benefits, but that is where I will begin before the more interesting stuff.

So without further ado, here are the benefits of taking a brisk walk.

1. Walking Increases your life expectancy.

Spending too much time sitting, whether at work or at home, not only reduces muscular and respiratory fitness, but it also increases our appetite and reduces our desire to participate in activities. Yes, being too sedentary can cause you to gain unwanted weight, but here are some more health problems it can lead to:

Hypertension,

Cardiovascular disease,

Osteoporosis,

Cancer.

There is also a connection between the lack of physical activity and the acceleration of telomere destruction. Telomeres are basically a protective cap on the end of your DNA strands. Every time your cells divide and multiply, the telomeres decrease in length. The shorter the length, the more the cell ages, and after a certain point, when the telomeres get too short, the cell dies. So to put very simply, sitting down too much increases the rate at which the cells in your body DIE.

If you want proof of how walking slows this process, look no farther than Okinawa, Japan. Okinawa is home to the most centenarians in the entire world, relative to their total population. And you know what habit they all have as a part of their routine? You guessed it.. walking often. In Japan, people remain very active and stay on their feet, well after they retire. You could argue that they never truly retire, because they keep on their feet doing things they love for as long as their health allows them too. If you look at almost any region in the world with a high age before death, staying on their feet and remaining physically active is one of their defining habits. Here are some more places in the world that have the same defining pattern:

*Nicoya, Costa Rica*

*Ikaria, Greece*

*Sardinia, Italy*

*Loma Linda, California*

But prolonging your life isn’t the only benefit to walking… Many of the world's greatest minds and creatives made it a ritual to go on long walks on a daily basis. Did you know that Beethoven walked for an hour after lunch? Einstein, 5Km every day? Charles Darwin for 45 minutes… 3 times per day? This leads us to the second benefit of taking brisk walks.

2. Walking can boost creativity.

Let me break it down…

Whenever you perform a physical task - especially one that demands a lot of energy, your body has to redistribute resources accordingly to keep up with the sustained movement. This also means that some resources get reallocated from the brain. This can alter the way you behave and think. Remember, the brain, specifically the prefrontal cortex, is responsible for your decision making, deliberate actions, and your internal dialogue - basically everything you consciously think and do every day.

If you don’t believe me, think about this for a second. Try to recall any time you were physically pushing your limits. The last time personally was when I bench pressed. Throughout the duration of that lift, I didn’t have time to be worried about what happened last week. Nor did I have time to worry about what could happen the next day. Why? Because I have to focus on pushing the heavy bar above my chest or else it will fall and crush me.

When it comes to walking, you may not be physically taxed as much as running 10km or lifting weights, but the same thing happens to a lesser degree. Your brain redistributes some of its resources to your body in order to sustain walking for a long time. This is called "transient hypofrontality". You become less physically able to think about the future or past, and become immersed in your present task. For creative and productive reasons this can be a good thing because after a certain point, your ability to think in future and past tenses gets reduced, and you are able to be completely immersed with the problem, or task that you may be thinking of.

Putting yourself in this mental state is what athletes and gamers call, “being in the zone”, or as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it, “Flow.” Flow is when you are so immersed in a task or problem that you lose track of time, all your worries seem to disappear, your confidence is through the roof, and all you can think about is what you are doing in the moment. Mihaly has described this an optimal experience, and seeking flow has been cited by many researchers as a habit of the highly happy. It makes so much sense when you realize that some of the world's greatest scientists and creatives went for walks as a ritual. All of them have cited in some shape or form that walking helped them come up with creative breakthroughs.

Here are some numbers:

Einstein walked 5km every day.

Charles Darwin walked 45 minutes, 3 times a day.

Beethoven an hour after lunch every day.

Tchaikovsky, 45 minute walks per day.

Gustav Mahler - 4 hour walks after lunch

Erik Satie - 5 mile walks per day.

On top of this, I believe the greats made walking a ritual because they intuitively knew that walking was good for solving problems. The science to explain why walking helps with creativity didn’t exist back then, but nonetheless they made walking a habit. Which leads us to the third benefit of walking.

3. Walking is perfect for creating strong habits.

Walking serves as a great medium in order to create strong habits that will help you become the person you want to be, or solve any problem you currently have, because walking has its own reward system.

Lemme break this down…

Research has shown that walking promotes the release of endorphins and endocannabinoids into your body to stimulate relaxation and improve your mood, and this happens even when walking is performed at a comfortable pace. By just walking, your body feels better than it previously did and this can serve as a strong motivator to go walking in the first place.

Taken a step further, heh, you can develop a new habit by using this rewarding feeling from the endorphins. You can pair the habit you want to cultivate into your lifestyle by associating it with walking. This process is called “Habit Stacking”, and it’s logic is as follows:

“After (Current habit), I will do (New habit)”. For example, If I wanted to practice my video editing skills, it could be great after a brisk walk, because I may be in a state of flow and I may feel good from the endorphins. The formula in that situation would look like this:

“After (a brisk walk), I will (practice my video editing).”

Taken everything I explained, taking a brisk walk is not only good for your health because it prevents ageing, but it can also put you into a state of “flow”, and your body REWARDS you for doing this. The greats made walking a ritual because walking gave their body a positive feedback loop as follows.

Walk → get into flow → problem solve → progress→ body feels good → walk → get into flow… etc

This simple strategy has contributed to some of their greatest creations.

Anyways, what do you think? What other benefits does walking have? Let me hear your thoughts below.

Thank you,

Orville