Forget the talking cure, take a walking cure

The quest for mental health has gone walkabout of late. The worried well and the angstily anxious are being asked to do nothing more elaborate than get off their backsides and sally forth. Forget Freud’s talking cure, the answer to our assailed brains lies in a walking cure.

First, there’s the “awe walk”, advocated by Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner, author of the bestselling Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life. Keltner argues that walking in pursuit of “wow moments” allows our sense of self to be supplanted by something greater, a spin on the Romantic notion of the sublime. 

Or you could sample the self-care-focused strolling of amiable Mancunian TikTokkers @softgirlswhohike, inclusive ambling demonstrating that “hiking doesn’t have to be hard”.

You might go “disorienteering”, allowing yourself to become lost and thus embarking upon an adventure, or consider blindfold forest-walking: you start with breath work, then developing the other senses, which yields a drug-like, hyper-visual state once the blinkers are removed. While, for repressed menfolk, there’s the Proper Blokes’ Club. Founded by a football coach, this organisation hosts nine London-based evening walks a week for men to get things off their chests, or simply march matters out, no pressure to ’fess up.

It’s refreshing to learn that, for once, the solution to our ills isn’t to invest vast amounts of time and money in some arcane activity with questionable benefits. (I’m looking at you, crystals – despite my love of a posh rock.) 

Meanwhile, all of us – willing or unwilling – will have observed the way that motion isn’t merely lotion for the body, but the mind; or soul, if one wants to be all pre-20th century about it.

The science of what’s going on here is straightforward enough. When we move, the heart pumps more speedily, supplying additional blood – and thus oxygen – to both the muscles and the organs, the brain included. Striding morphs brains for the better, producing fresh connections between cells, staving off age-related tissue withering, bulking up the hippocampus, and spurring new neurons and message transmission between them.

Walking has also been demonstrated to hold a special affinity with creativity. In this sense, psychologists are merely evidencing what genius has always known: a plodding logic that is reflected in the later Latin phrase solvitur ambulando (it is solved by walking), given to us by Diogenes in the late 5th century BC. 

Since Aristotle and his 3rd-century BC peripatetic school – peripatetic meaning “of walking” or “given to walking about” after the peripatoi (walkways) of Athens’ Lyceum – rambling and rumination have always gone hand in hand.

Compare Thoreau’s journal declaration of August 1851: “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow … A thousand rills which have their rise in the sources of thought burst forth and fertilize my brain.”

In the same vein, I love proto-existentialist Kierkegaard’s letter to his niece of 1847: “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it … But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus, if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”

As a depressive, when the black dog descends, I feel as if I cannot move. My boyfriend’s solution to this was to provide me with an actual dog so that I had to take the pooch for walkies. I’m no nature fetishist, and never understand why people find it soothing. However, I like to think I put the psycho into psychogeography (the effect of a geographical location on the emotions and behaviour of individuals).

Perhaps walking provides a mental salve because one is actually doing something, even if this is as simple as putting one foot in front of the other. One has the impression of moving forward because one is literally moving forward. 

Plus it furnishes all those loose connections – the waves and hellos – that psychologists tell us are so vital for human happiness.

In terms of problem-solving, there’s focus and lack of focus, engagement and absence of engagement, that allows us to be thinking – and not thinking – our way to mental health. 

Compare the much-vaunted “shower principle,” elaborated by NBC comedy 30 Rock, when television executive Jack Donaghy elaborates upon those “moments of inspiration that occur when the brain is distracted from the matter at hand – for example, when you’re showering”. Walking generates a mindful lack of mindfulness that is even more efficacious when said problem is oneself.

Perhaps this evasiveness is why the walking cure proves such a peculiarly British solace. So many of our most loved writers have been trampers who trudged off misery, from Austen, whose heroines are similarly inclined, to Wordsworth, whom the literary critic Thomas De Quincey estimated walked 180,000 miles in his 80 years (an average of six and a half miles a day starting at the age of five), and whose work is rich in trekking. 

Dickens night-hiked because he suffered from insomnia, noting: “If I could not walk far and fast, I think I should just explode and perish”. Woolf left the house in search of pencils, when really she wandered for escape. And, of course, lockdown exemplified the link between sanity and sauntering, the latter deemed essential when we were permitted nothing else.

My beloved will be going on walks this August, whereas I will simply walk. He will yomp miles into the wilds sporting state-of-the-art boots, rucksack, and ultra-light camping gear with a troop of fellow questers. I will trot about in heels, a silk scarf, and lashings of lipstick in a tribute to urban introversion. Either way, we will both be the better for it, mentally as well as physically.