--:-- Mel Robbins: 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. 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 more connected and more energized and as if you're not the only person going through whatever you're going through.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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. 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. His name is Dr. Shane O'Mara. He's not just an expert on walking. 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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: I'm very good, thank you. Delighted to be here.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, I'm delighted that you're here. So, Shane, I was leaving home yesterday and my husband says, "So who are you interviewing tomorrow on the podcast?" And I said, "Oh, I'm interviewing Dr. Shane O'Mara about the science of walking." Why did you write a book about walking? Like what made you want to do this?
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: Well, I suppose the first question is why not? My literary agent, in fact, suggested it to me. And I realized that I know the literature on walking and it would be a very easy and enjoyable book to write. And so it turned out.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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 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 jaw-dropping science about a simple walk. Before we dig into all of it, Dr. Shane, can you share the top reasons why walking is so good for you?
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: So why is walking good for you? What I want to do is just tell you a few things that I hope that you'll take away with you and learn from. So walking is good for you for all sorts 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 know that people who are regularly active, those who move around lots, who take the idea "movement is medicine" seriously, are much less likely to succumb to illness of all types compared to people who are sedentary. So walking can help build your body and brain to cope with the slings and arrows of everyday life.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: We humans have big brains. And it turns out that one of the things that walking is actually very good for is facilitating creative thinking. So we've got resilient walking and now we've got creative walking. When you get moving, it acts as a kind of spur to thinking that might not otherwise happen because your sedentary ideas that would otherwise be quiescent bubble into your consciousness and make themselves felt in ways that otherwise wouldn't happen.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: Walking is good for something else, and that is building a map of the world that you're in. We refer to the brain's map of the world 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. A particular rhythm happens in the brain called theta rhythm, which facilitates learning and memory about the world that we happen to be in.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: Walking does other things for us as well. It allows us to defeat or 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 from many, many experiments that frailty and a loss of muscle mass happens with aging. Whereas if you get up and you keep moving during the course of life, these problems are diminished very, very dramatically. 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 to my last point: walking is an intrinsically social activity. We humans like walking together. And when we're walking together, our bodies synchronize in all sorts of ways—our breathing, our footsteps, all sorts of other things fall into sync in a way that wouldn't happen were we walking simply by ourselves. So walking with somebody else is one of life's great pleasures 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 too.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Most of us underestimate what's actually happening in our bodies and in our minds when we're walking. So let's break it down. What happens in the brain when you go for a walk?
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: Yeah. So I think there's a couple of things to think about here. Let's make it very simple. So I'm sitting here at home and I want to go to the shop. The first thing that you have to do is form the intention that you're going to get up and do something. That could be because somebody has bleeped you or phoned you to say 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? The first thing is you have to stand up, you have to get up, you have to engage in preparatory 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 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 is walking—acts as a positive spur to the brain. Rhythms that would be quiescent in the brain are suddenly alive.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: 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. Well, then there are other challenges happening as well. You have to calibrate your walking speed so that it'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 load 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 it, 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 simple levels, you can see changes across a whole range of things, from the top-down commands coming from the brain all the way down to your foot hitting the ground and you levering yourself off and moving off.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, I certainly don't think about any of those things when I need to get... 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 to a certain place—that all these things benefit the brain. How do they benefit the brain?
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: Probably the best way to think about this is that movement is medicine, which is the lovely phrase going around at the moment. Let's imagine 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.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: Your body is 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?" Those kinds of choices we make. When you think about the conditions that humans lived under for thousands of years, we didn't have 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 hunkers, 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, reaching across the oceans.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: When I said you don't need to be thinking about these things, this is the joy and the wonder of the body that we have. You don't need to be thinking, "I have to maintain a certain line of balance. 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. Like, 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.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: One of the points 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 it's easy for people to walk. I'll 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? If you want to walk to me, you have to walk through four fire doors to 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 walking designed out of it. And that building will be, I guess, there for 100 years. So people will be not using the stairs in that building for 100 years. Generally, 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: Dr. Shane, let's take a quick pause, hear words from our sponsors, and when we come back, we're going to keep on walking. Don't go anywhere.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins, and today you and I are going on a walk with Dr. Shane O'Mara, who has written the book on the science of walking. 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 incorporating a simple walk into your daily routine can have on you. 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? 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: 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. You can demonstrate this in all sorts of ways, but the simplest way to show the short-term boost to mood is by bringing people to the laboratory. Ostensibly, they're there to judge the beauty of the buildings that might be on a college campus or in a city center. And you have two simple conditions. One is they look at pictures on screens or pictures that have been printed out for them. The other is they go for a walk and look at these buildings and they give ratings for each of these buildings. 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.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: 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. Getting people to walk outside so that they have a view of nature, as opposed to walking in a tunnel, 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.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: Those are kind of short-term boosts. But you can look at much better quality studies in terms of tracking people over time. In particular, a very large-scale Australian study shows that people who move the least in the population are the ones who are most likely to succumb to major depressive disorder. 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, how likely is it that they are going to have major depressive disorder? And the likelihood falls the more you move. 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So if I go for a 10-minute walk, why does that boost my mood?
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: 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 a good thing to be able to do. Sometimes we get annoyed at 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.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: Walking in nature brings with it 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 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. 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 speeds of 70 miles an hour, that will be a very stressful and unpleasant experience.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay, hold on. 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 like just 10 minutes. You're going to take a brisk walk. Does dopamine kick in? Like what is happening in your body?
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: 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 to see 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 the correlation is itself good enough. When people are walking under their own steam or moving under their own steam through nature, people report changes in well-being that are very positive when you compare them to sedentary controls.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That's pretty cool. We've all had the experience where we've gone for a walk and you immediately feel better. Going for a walk outside can solve like 90% of the problems that you have. It boosts your mood. It makes you feel a 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 it 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.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: And experiencing movement. You've got optic flow, you've got lots of other things going on.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What is optic flow?
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: 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. Optic flow generates the sensation of movement. It prepares the body. 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 contact that your feet make with the substrate.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And why does that feel good?
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: Well, 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 didn't get eaten. Evolution has given us these positive feelings that come as an end consequence of doing things that are good for us. In evolutionary terms, it has to be true. Populations that don't move, they're subject to predation, they're subject to all sorts of things. So you have this 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: How does taking a walk improve your creativity?
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: We're damned with this one word for this activity that does so many things.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wait, are you saying there's different types of walking?
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: Of course.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, you've just brought up one, which is... Wait a minute. Hold on a second. See, this is what I'm talking about. Of course, he says, like I'm some sort of idiot.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: No, no.
--:-- Mel Robbins: No, no. But I'm saying, I don't think... I think you've written the book on it. And none of us think about this. Like, I wouldn't think, for example, if I had a heart problem, I got to walk faster. I would think I got to take it easy or else I'm going to have a freaking heart attack. I wouldn't think that there's a different walk that you take when you want to be creative versus a walk that you take when you want to feel something else. So this right here is an epiphany 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 or purposes.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: 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 key point that I want to get across is that we're cursed because we have this one word, which is a label for something that ends up being lots and lots of different things. So I've mentioned social walking already.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: We walk together. We've mentioned walking for health. So what do we call that? Health walking? I don't know. Healthy walking. I'm sure we could come up with a phrase. And then there's walking for creative ideation. So I'm in the middle of writing my next book.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: How do you go for a walk to have the maximum benefit if you want to have creative ideation?
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: Yes. So there's a couple of ways of approaching this. One of the things that's 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, where walking and creativity are concerned, there are lots of ways of demonstrating this. 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. We're really only at the early stages of trying to figure this one out.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: In my own case, I dictated a lot of the book to get a first draft. 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: 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: 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. You shouldn't have the thing in your hand. 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. A key part of creative thinking is the preparation and incubation kind of stage. This is the research stage, then you just need to let the ideas percolate around, come together in a variety of different ways. 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 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 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.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: I think we're still at a sufficiently early stage in 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What I read in your book is that it can increase creativity two times. It really boosts the creative flow in your brain. Why is that?
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: One of the major discoveries in neuroscience over the last 20 or 25 years is this idea of default activity in the brain. Default activity is what we revert to when we're instructed not to think of anything at all. What do we think about? 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 brain imaging literature is that when people are engaged in creative problem solving, they're doing two things simultaneously. You're focused on this big picture and 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 flickering between these two states where you're zooming back from something and then you're focused in on the detail.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: The wonderful thing about walking is it frees you from 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. 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: Right, your phone.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, this feels like a great place to pause. So let's take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsors. And when we return, more about the science of walking and creativity. We'll be right back.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins. I'm so glad you're here. And we are talking to none other than Dr. Shane O'Mara, who's a neuroscientist and professor at Trinity College in Dublin. And he's written a bestselling book about the science of walking. So, Dr. O'Mara, 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 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: This concept of mindlessness. 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. 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'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. Parts of my brain that would be quiet are active because they're there trying to maintain my balance. And you can see I'm gesturing wildly when I'm talking to you as well. 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 hunchbacked and there's not a lot going on, you end up somewhat blank and there's nothing coming to mind.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, I love that visual because what I just got when you 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 optic 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 body. Can you talk a little bit about that study that tracked participants' activity levels and personality traits over 20 years and how walking had impacted people over time?
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: 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. The bottom line is very, very simple: people who spend increasing periods of time being sedentary as they move along in life—and it's not a question of getting older, this can be in midlife—they tend to show changes in their personality which, for want of a better phrase, are tending them towards being more asocial, being less open to experience, and probably experiencing more negative emotion compared to people who get up and get out and get moving.
--:-- The other study I'm thinking of was conducted just a couple of years ago in older people, people in their late 60s and early 70s. Again, a beautiful US study conducted in the Chicago area showed that 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 arise from getting up and moving and getting out and going for a good walk. So the intervention is a very simple intervention: go for a walk three times a week for a couple of miles along with a walking partner.
--:-- 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 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 than they need to, or than they would have if they had been active over that period of time.
--:-- The key point here to really drag out is: yes, 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 sit on your couch doing Homer Simpson, eating a bag of potato chips and watching telly.
--:-- Mel Robbins: How short of a walk makes a difference? If somebody were to simply 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 likely feel a boost in their mood? I'm sitting here thinking a lot of people 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: So there's good news and bad news here. 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, lots of small bursts 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'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 is really good advice rather than sitting at your computer for that time.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You can get a benefit from a two-minute walk?
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: 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 very much. We know this from smartphone data, which can grab the levels of activity that people engage in. Sadly, people don't walk very much. The average adult in the US, for example, walks about 4,000 steps a day. Now, a child learning to walk does about 1,200 steps per hour.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Whoa. There's a huge difference.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: And the country that walks the most is 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, they walk an awful lot. As I said, most people don't walk very much. So my advice is always 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Where did that come from? It's made up.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: There are all sorts of apocryphal tales about where it came from.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Which one is your favorite?
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: I think the one I like the best is that it's a mistranslation from a Japanese activity company in the '60s. I don't know if it's true or not. However, what we do know is that if you look at what's called all-cause mortality—your likelihood of dying of anything—it rises the more inactive that you are, and it falls the more active you are. At somewhere between about 4,500 and 7,500 steps per day, people's all-cause mortality falls quite substantially, something like 30 or 40 percent.
--:-- Mel Robbins: OK, I want to make sure everybody hears that. Shane is saying if you were to simply, on average, walk 4,500 or between 4,000 and 7,000 steps a day... Get it north of... It depends on the study. I want to know your recommendation.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: My recommendation is the bare minimum.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: My recommendation 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. So that's the first thing you need to do.
--:-- Mel Robbins: OK, hold on. I want to make sure our audience hears this. Shane is saying, everybody, 5,000 steps a day minimum.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: And I'm saying 5,000 more than you're doing.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, my God. Well, how do I know what I'm doing?
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: By turning on your mobile.
--:-- Mel Robbins: OK, give me my phone. Let me see what I'm doing. We're about to outmate steps that you've done. OK, I don't even know if I've tracked this thing.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: So that's the first thing you've got to do: know how many you're doing. 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 four thousand steps a day. And that increases your chances of dying younger of something unpleasant.
--:-- Mel Robbins: OK, I got a lot to do. I got 2,800 steps right now.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: So you need to add 5,000 steps.
--:-- Mel Robbins: OK, how big of a distance is that? I guess it's about five kilometers or four and a half kilometers. 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: To my mind, it's not much at all, but I can boast because I did 9,785 steps today.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Shane with the flex, everybody. He's holding up his phone.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: Well, you are the walking guy. I would hope you walk every day.
--:-- Mel Robbins: OK, so you've got to track. You've got to do 5,000 more. Nobody knows how many steps they took last Tuesday week. Do you? Do I? No, of 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 offload this to a pocket computer.
--:-- To look at what we know about people in non-mechanized societies, because we can learn lots from them. 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 heart health and all of the other things, but you actually have to put in the miles.
--:-- This is why I say doing a little often is really the key, rather than trying to get one single burst of activity in and hoping that will 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. As I 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 might not be adequate footpaths, there might not be adequate lighting at night. People might be afraid because of crime or something else. 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.
--:-- So the policy decisions bake in the kind of environment around us, and that in turn determines what it is that we're 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, then people will walk. They will just default to that without thinking about it. But if the reverse is true, you can't blame people for getting in their car. That's just the way things are going.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That's true. But I think you would agree that even if somebody lives in an area where the only good footpaths 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.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: All of the things being equal, yes. As I keep saying, movement is good for you. Getting out is good for you.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What are five easy ways you can start getting more steps in right now?
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: The five easy steps. The first one is: if you're commuting to work, get off your train or your bus a stop or two early. Do the same on the way home. This will add an extra two or three thousand steps a day without you noticing. And if you drive to work, park as far as you reasonably can from your office and walk from there. That's a really easy thing to do. Rather than trying to park right up against the office door, take the extra couple of hundred steps.
--:-- 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 to a cafe that's an extra 10 or 15 minutes walk away. You'll get an extra couple of thousand steps in and you won't notice it.
--:-- 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 post-it on something to tell you to get up and walk about every 25 or 30 minutes, is a really simple and easy thing to do. If you can get a walking desk—they're quite expensive, but they're very effective—try and use one of those.
--:-- If you take phone calls, always take them standing up and walking. If you take an hour-long phone call, you can get 4,000 steps in the course of an hour and you won't notice at all. And it has the added benefit that because you're walking, you're going to get a little bit of creative problem solving going as well.
--:-- Another simple tip is to find a partner in crime. Join a Facebook walking group or find a colleague, a WhatsApp group or whatever. We evolved as social walkers, and having somebody to walk with is a way of making walking much more enjoyable than going out by yourself. Although walking by yourself can be very enjoyable too, especially if you've had a busy, stressful day and you've had lots of challenges from other people. Getting away from other people's voices might actually be a benefit of walking by yourself.
--:-- And then the final thing I would say is: if you've got a difficult and creative piece of work to do, a very simple way to deal with that to prime yourself is to write down a few questions about what you're worried about, scroll them on a piece of paper, stick the piece of notepaper in your pocket, bring along a pen, and head off for a walk. Bring a voice recorder or a notebook. You'll come up with many more ideas than you would have done otherwise. It's a very, very easy and straightforward thing to do. So the next time your boss is annoying you about you not being at your desk, you can correctly say that you're solving problems more effectively by going for a walk.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Based on your research, is there any connection between the time of day that you walk and the benefits that you receive?
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: I can talk about it. I don't know that I can give you lots of hard scientific evidence on it, so I'll give you my prejudice more than anything else. The first thing to say is that regular walking right throughout the course of the day is a good thing for you. Walking early in the morning when the sunlight is up is a good thing from the point of view of setting your circadian rhythm and getting you awake, in addition to having your cup of morning coffee or whatever else it is that you have.
--:-- I also have a theory, which I haven't been able to test, but I think it's probably correct, that walking 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 it's cooler at night, and one of the things that you need to do and that your body starts to do 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've kicked yourself awake with high light levels in the morning and activity in the morning, and the reverse is also true.
--:-- We're not nocturnal creatures. We're creatures that are designed by and large to walk around and live during the course of the day, and we use light to entrain our daily rhythms. So walking in the evening—just a stroll, it doesn't have to be much, under conditions of reduced lighting—to my mind, is a very good way of helping you get to sleep. And of course, if you have insomnia, again I don't offer this by way of scientific data, but if you find it difficult to get to sleep, many insomniacs say that going for a good long walk is a very good way of helping them get to sleep.
--:-- Now, the gold standard for insomnia is actually cognitive behavior therapy. We know that works better than drugs, better than anything. But accessing CBT for problems with sleep is difficult in most countries. Charles Dickens, for example, just to pick up on the insomnia theme for a moment, was a famous insomniac. He walked at night for hours through the back streets of London, would come home, go to sleep at four or five in the morning, and then write furiously during the course of the day. So maybe there's something to that, that it helps combat insomnia. But again, I say that without too much data.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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 taking a walk outside every day? What are all the benefits to doing it?
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: There are lots. The obvious one 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 over the course of a few days, you will discover actually you feel pretty good, and you miss it when you stop walking. You will adapt very, very quickly.
--:-- 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 and day out, without too much trouble. But we can't run the equivalent of a marathon day in and day out because our bodies are designed for walking—walking together with others, carrying children, carrying food. And we can break a walk up into three or four miles in the morning, three or four miles in the early afternoon, another three or four miles in the evening. So we adapt very quickly, and our mood adapts positively because of that.
--:-- I think you'll also find, in terms of cognition, a kind of general benefit: you will feel a clarity of thinking that you might find eludes you otherwise. I think you'll find social benefits from walking with others, or 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: The fact that so many people are stuck at home working hybrid roles, and you feel a sense of deep isolation—you underestimate the difference that simply getting out, even alone, and walking in your neighborhood can have on you feeling connected.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: No, that's for sure. And I think if you take those two different examples—you going for a walk by yourself versus you going for a walk with others—the very fact of you going for a walk for yourself brings clarity 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. We get 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, and people walking together in a common cause.
--:-- We humans are the only species that does this. No chimpanzee has ever gotten up and 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 US over the last 50 or 100 years. You've got those amazing marches that happened in Washington. And we've had similar marches here for all sorts of reasons. Humans are unique because we will do this together. As I said, chimpanzees won't do it. Fire ants won't do it. This is something unique to us as humans.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Even if you take that point that you just made and distill it down to 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. One of the things that I know 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. I hadn't thought that much about the fact that walking is something 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.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: So you've got all of those kinds of benefits. 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 2 diabetes or heart 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. You'll feel an awful lot better from that point of view as well. 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: 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: It depends on your intention where the walk is concerned. If you're walking for enhanced 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 than on your circulatory system than you would have been otherwise.
--:-- I'm 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, it's hard to do that when you're walking very fast. Walking at a slightly lower speed is probably the way to go. And then if you're walking with kids, you're going to be walking at the rate that they're walking. So it really depends on the purpose of your walk. If you're walking 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, walking a bit more slowly is probably the thing to do.
--:-- Imagine, for example, I ask you to engage in a complex addition problem. Add 17s until you get to 999.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, my God. I used to like you, Shane. That's hard.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: Or take 17s 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 it drops to zero.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I'm sitting here going, what is a thousand minus 17 right now? Nine, eight, three? Nine, eight, seven? No, that's not it. Nine, eight, seven, isn't that it? What's that? Nine, eight, three. No, no. 883? It's 800 and... Sorry, 983. You don't have it either.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: We should be watching. It's 983.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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. My point really is that if you're thinking about something, probably walking a little 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: 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: Of course. You can even bring your dictator and do your little dictating as we walk. I'll let you do that.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Thank you. You're very kind.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: Oh, you're great. I learned a lot. I learned a lot and I had a lot of fun. Thank you.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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 talked 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. You left all of us with so much to think about and so many things to try when we take our next walk. I just want to tell you how much I appreciate you taking the time to be with us, Shane.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: I'm delighted to. And like I say, just go for a good walk. Everything will feel much better.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, you're the best. Thank you. 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? 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 book about the science of it. But we thank him.
--:-- And you know what else? I thank you. 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. All right. I'll see you in a few days.
--:-- [End of interview. Bloopers and legal disclaimer follow.]
--:-- Mel Robbins: Where's Galloway? That's that's that's also in... See, I'm very bad with geography.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: Well, is it Shane or Sean?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Shane. Shane. Sean is saying Shane. Shane. Why am I saying Sean? Jesus. OK, sorry. Shane is saying... See, he didn't want me to call you Dr. O'Mara.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: What is a honker? You said "sit down on your honkers."
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, hunkers. Hunker down. Oh, hunker down. Sorry, that's my accent. A hunker is something else entirely.
--:-- Dr. Shane O'Mara: We told you this would be a fun interview.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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.
