I’m going to try to convince you that daily walking is one of the best things you could ever do to improve the quality of your life.

If you’re not already a regular walker, you probably don’t realise how rewarding walking is for your mind and body. I know that sounds exaggerated. How could putting one foot in front of the other be so rewarding and appealing?

Read on and I’ll tell you exactly how.

First, walkers avoid diseases far more than people with sedentary lifestyles. Here’s a sample of what walking does to your body:

• Lowers the chances of you getting heart disease or a stroke.
• Helps you maintain a healthy weight – walking burns almost as many calories as running and is much easier, and it doesn’t ratchet up your appetite (unlike running).
• Increases your bone density – vital as you get older.
• Regulates your blood sugar (especially when done after a meal).
• Strengthens your cartilage and joints (again, unlike too much running). If you’re overweight, walking is the perfect introduction to exercise, because more intense forms of cardio like running can be hard on your joints.
• Protects against neurodegenerative diseases like dementia and Parkinson’s disease. Step by step, you’re protecting your future.

Built to walk

Your body evolved over millions of years to move throughout the day. We are hunter gatherers in our DNA. We are designed to move. Our ancestors walked out of the Great Rift Valley in Africa some 60,000 years ago and spread out across all of Europe and Asia, Australia and New Zealand, and eventually to the Americas.

But long before that – for at least 4 million years of your ancestors’ history – daily life involved walking, foraging, carrying, persistence hunting, and climbing.

In fact, the human brain originally evolved to manage movement. Everything else — memory, language, emotion, abstract thought — grew from that foundation. Little wonder movement is so good for us. We’re built for it.

Miracle-Gro for the brain

Walking increases levels of a protein in the brain called BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), often described by neuroscientists as “miracle-gro for the brain”. BDNF promotes neuroplasticity and plays a major role in allowing the brain to learn new skills, form memories, and recover from injury or damage.

Low BDNF levels are linked to depression, anxiety disorders, cognitive decline, and addiction. All forms of exercise trigger BDNF, but walking is one of the easiest ways of doing it. (Our training plan incorporates a lot of walking.)

Walking also improves blood flow to the brain with rapid positive effects on cognition. Take a look at this image of brain activity before and after walking:

If you’re feeling mentally sluggish or ill at ease, a walk can do wonders. Even a short 5-10 minute walk can be enough to blow off the mental cobwebs.

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard famously wrote:

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, 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.

Another philosopher, Bertrand Russell, had a similar point (lightly edited):

Humans are animals, and their happiness depends upon their physiology more than they like to think. This is a humble conclusion, but I cannot make myself disbelieve it. Unhappy people, I am convinced, would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy.

So, why does a walk outside feel so restorative?

How moving scenery calms the nervous system

Something interesting happens to your mind when you move through a physical landscape. When you’re walking forward, the scenery shifts around you. This stream of visual information is what vision scientists call “optic flow”, and it’s been shown to reduce activity in the amygdala (a part of the brain responsible for fear and stress).

A shifting scenery calms the nervous system, lowers anxiety, and creates a sense of calm and safety in your mind. It helps you shift from a narrow, stressful focus to a more relaxed, widened, panoramic perspective. It’s a bit like a signal to your brain saying, “All is well, you’re moving forward, there’s no immediate threat.”

Treadmills are great – you’re getting exercise after all – but for the full mental benefits walking outside is better.

Walking also helps reset your mind’s ability to focus, allowing you to get back into a high level of concentration throughout the day. It’s been known for decades that taking plenty of breaks (say, every 30 minutes or hour) when studying or working beats large herculean multi-hour bursts of effort.

Morning light and the mind: the power of a simple habit

The morning is an ideal time to go for a walk. Daylight early in the morning triggers a cascade of positive neurochemical activity that helps boost your mood and optimise your body’s “circadian rhythm”, which has profound and underappreciated effects on your mind and body. Early light exposure also directly affects the quality of your sleep the coming night. Just 5-10 minutes makes such a difference. Even if it’s drab and grey out.

And in general, getting daylight and being in nature helps calm the nervous system and reduce stress.

Another good time to have your daily walk is right after a meal, as this helps lock in the habit (the trigger – finishing a meal – helps reinforce it).

But you can walk any time that works for you. You can be entirely flexible and listen to music or podcasts, or take a work call, or walk with a spouse or partner or friend, or catch up with friends on the phone. You can track your steps if you like, but it’s not needed, and might even be counterproductive if you’re the type to get overly fixated on the number.

If you use a wheelchair, you can still tap into many of the same benefits. You can access the same underlying mechanisms (movement, rhythm, self-propelled motion, being outdoors, engaging with your environment) through many forms of mobility.

It’s about the power of moving under your own steam: exploring your surroundings, raising your heart rate, having the freedom to go where you choose, and giving your brain a reset. Speaking of your brain, the next benefit of walking is truly extraordinary:

Your best thinking

Not only does walking help you fight off disease, reduce stress, and boost your ability to focus, it helps you access surprising moments of clarity and insight. For reasons that aren’t fully understood, people’s best ideas come to them often while walking (if you think the shower is where all your ideas come to you, try walking!)

Yet another philosopher (a trend is emerging), Friedrich Nietzsche, went as far as to say, “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking” and “only those thoughts which come from walking have any value.”

Charles Darwin would probably agree. His biographers pointed out that Darwin had a well-worn walking path (called the Sandwalk) along his home in Kent, England. He would walk a loop when he had a problem to figure out. The Sandwalk was where he tested ideas, rehearsed arguments, and let his thoughts settle. His children nicknamed it “the thinking path”.

And the entrepreneur and essayist Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator (a company that helps other people start companies)

Many (perhaps most) of the essays I’ve written started with something I thought about while walking. My default way to do office hours at Y Combinator was to take a walk with the founders—we even decided to start YC itself in the middle of a walk.

For some reason, running doesn’t work as well as walking for generating ideas. Maybe it’s because running takes slightly more attention than the near zero that walking requires. Perhaps the reason walking helps us think is that we evolved as persistence hunters.

Whatever the reason is, countless people have discovered that walking is when they do their best thinking.

At least some of the time, it’s worth going tech-free on your walks. Constantly exposing your mind to stimuli from podcasts, music, YouTube videos, social media feeds, news and so on doesn’t give your brain a chance to properly assimilate information and generate its own creative, original ideas.

You don’t have to actively be thinking of anything when you’re out walking. In fact, most creative insight comes as a sudden burst of insight, not the culmination of active deep thought. This brings me to one of the best benefits of walking. It helps you be present and to slow down the perception of passing time.

Stretching time

Your attention strongly influences your perception of time passing. When you’re absorbed in your surroundings, rooted in your body and the physical world – shifting light, breeze, footsteps, scents, all the various subtle details – your sense of time passing “stretches”. Bodily movement increases the number of events the brain encodes. More “mental markers” causes time to feel longer.

You can experience this easily for yourself. Set a timer for ten minutes and open up your social media feed. Notice how rapidly social media incinerates your time and shortens your life. The ten minutes shaved off your life feels much shorter than ten minutes. Then set a timer for ten minutes and go outside for a walk, or just sit or stand still without your phone.

Pay attention to your surroundings and how you feel. Time dilates. It opens up. And if you’re “bored”, lean into it. You need that for creative thought and to settle the chatter of your mind. As the comedian Jimmy Carr put it, “boredom is unappreciated serenity”.

An antidote to modern ills

Too many of us are tangled in webs of self-absorption, mental chatter and “busyness”, as we flit from thing to thing and task to task. This can constrict the panorama of life, giving us a type of tunnel vision that distracts us from the brutally rapid passing of time. We also spend far too much time sedentary, staring at screens, scrolling our lives away.

Walking is an antidote to that. Walking every day for its own sake, letting your senses roam, and not doing it for any future benefit – even though there are enormous benefits – helps you slow the passing of time, quieten the chattering monkey mind, and be here now.

I recommend starting with just 5 minutes of walking outside, ideally first thing in the morning, and then work your way up to longer walks.

Soon, you’ll look forward to it because the benefits will be so obvious, not in an abstract way but as an undeniable proven feeling. It’s not magic. It won’t give you telekinesis or let you levitate, but it will measurably improve your life.