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How To Find Calm Through Walking
Short Description: Mindful walking isn’t just a stroll—it’s a science-backed way to reduce, improve concentration, and soak in the beauty of your surroundings at the same time.
Episode summary:
Meditation has proven benefits, but the style that works best depends on a person's habits and preferences. In this episode of The Science of Happiness, we explore walking meditation, a powerful practice for feeling more centered and grounded. Dan Harris, host of the award-winning 10% Happier podcast, shares how walking meditation helps him manage the residual stress and anxiety from years of war reporting and high-pressure TV anchoring. Then, Dr. Paul Kelly from the University of Edinburgh dives into the science, explaining how walking meditation can reduce stress, sharpen focus, and improve overall well-being.
Dan’s Walking Meditation Practice:
- Acknowledge the presence of your body.
- Acknowledge the thoughts and attitudes your mind is naturally thinking about.
- Acknowledge the nature around you.
- Repeats steps 1-3 in intervals.
GGSC Walking Meditation Practice: https://tinyurl.com/29dnmndp
Today’s guests:
DAN HARRIS is a NYT best selling author with his book 10% Happier, and hosts a podcast by the same name. He’s one of the country’s best known proponents of meditation and he’s made walking meditation a regular practice for years to manage stress and anxiety.
DR. PAUL KELLY is a professor from the University of Edinburgh studying mindfulness. His studies focus on how meditation can reduce stress, sharpen focus, and improve overall well-being.
More episodes like this one:
The Healing Effects of Experiencing Wildlife: https://tinyurl.com/yh238ekp
How To Unwind Doing Mindful Yard Work: https://tinyurl.com/4p7drusk
How to Use Your Body to Relax Your Mind: https://tinyurl.com/yckyft6t
More Happiness Break like this one:
Walk Your Way To Calm (Guided Meditation), with Dacher: https://tinyurl.com/mp5cptan
Experience Nature Wherever You Are, with Dacher: https://tinyurl.com/mrutudeh
Find Calm When You Can’t Clear Your Mind, With Lama Rod Owens: https://tinyurl.com/4ce353nu
Tell us about your experiences and struggles with achieving mindfulness. Email us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or follow on Instagram @HappinessPod.
Help us share The Science of Happiness! Leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and share this link with someone who might like the show: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap
Transcription:
DAN HARRIS: There’s a list of ways you can practice walking meditation.
You can do the super slow walking where maybe you find 10 yards in your house or outside and you just kind of walk back and forth very slowly.
If you don't want to go at a slow speed, you can just take a normal walk.
Or take a walk in nature, I do that with my wife or child in moments when nobody's speaking. I can just tune into whatever's coming through the senses, and then every time I get distracted, start again.
You know, in the airport, instead of walking and looking at my phone, which I also do, I can put the phone away and just feel the raw data of the physical sensations of the body moving through space, what's coming in through my eyes and my ears
We are moving so often, you know, even if you're in a wheelchair or you're differently abled, we tend to move whatever parts of our body we can move and to, to create this positive Pavlovian response where the body starts moving and that's just a reminder, “Oh yeah. Wake up.”
We live so much of our lives on automatic pilot. Anything you can do to wake up is something you should probably consider doing.
DACHER KELTNER: Welcome to the science of happiness. I'm Dacher Keltner. These days people, like myself, tend to track their daily steps more closely than ever with smart watches that tell you precisely how far you've walked and how many calories you've burned.
But what happens when we stop focusing on the number of steps, and instead open our eyes and ears and mind to the world around us?
This week, we're going to focus on something that humans have been doing for a very long time, which is meditative walking. Our guest today is my friend, Dan Harris. You probably know him as the host of the 10% Happier podcast.
Dan turned to meditation after experiencing a nationally broadcasted panic attack while working for Good Morning America, and since that time, he's become one of the country's leading exponents of mindfulness, and the benefits of meditation. He's also written many books about the subject that have topped bestseller lists and have been wonderful reads.
We'll talk to Dan about his practice of meditative walking. We’ll also dive into what science says about how this simple practice can do wonders for your body and mind.
DR. PAUL KELLY: So by walking meditatively, you are more likely to feel relatedness, connectedness to nature, reduce those feelings of stress, anxiety, all of which will combine to promote overall well being and better mental health.
DACHER KELTNER: More, after this break.
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DACHER KELTNER: I'm Dacher Keltner. Welcome to the Science of Happiness. Today we’re focusing on the benefits of meditative walking and how this simple practice can have a big impact on both our body and mind.
Our guest today is Dan Harris. Dan is the author of 10% Happier and the Host of the podcast by the same name. He’s one of the country’s best known proponents of meditation and he’s made walking meditation a regular practice for years to manage stress and anxiety. We talked about how and why he carries out this practice.
Here's part of our conversation:
Dan, so I want to ask you, about how you got into meditation and it was after a panic attack, on air in front of millions of people and I know that comes out of a deeper context in your life of war reporting and, you know, the images and traumas that you had to process through that. So, tell us, about that moment or that chapter in your life that got you to meditation?
DAN HARRIS: So the brief version is that I spent a bunch of time in my early thirties in war zones.
So, places that are in the news now, like Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Pakistan and Afghanistan. I was in Iraq, so months and months and months in Iraq. And in the middle of this period, I did something very, very dumb, which is I started self medicate with recreational drugs, including cocaine. That contributed to a panic attack on Good Morning America, in 2004, and then another one in 2005. If you Google panic attack on TV, it's the number one result, so that's awesome for me.
And then after a couple of years of being in therapy, I sort of stumbled upon some of the early research around meditation, that shows that meditation can, you know, reduce anxiety and depression and boost your immune system and help with your blood pressure and things like that.
Yoga and meditation, I think, are great preventative tools for reducing the likelihood that you will panic. I mean, also, don't do cocaine, that's another good one.
DACHER KELTNER: What are some of the places in which you do a walking meditation?
DAN HARRIS: Primary use case for me is when I cannot sleep, which is not infrequent. The way my insomnia shows up is like an overwhelming physical restlessness and it's like ants in the pants.
And this walking meditation has really helped.
But now, what I've been doing more recently is doing it every night, no matter what, and so I will set an alarm on my watch, sometimes for 15 minutes, sometimes for 30 minutes and I will do this walking meditation around the house. My wife has caught me on the ring cameras in the winter, walking around in one of those, it's a blanket that you can wear. I think it's called a snuggie. Uh, it's got a hood. It looks ridiculous. So I basically just pick a patch of land on which to walk and walk sort of between ridiculously slowly and normal. And there are many ways to do this, but I'll describe the way I do it.
DACHER KELTNER: Yeah, I'd love to hear.
DAN HARRIS: I use three phrases.
The first phrase is, there is a body. And the phrase comes right out of the Buddhist teachings.
And one of the ways to be mindful is to be aware that there is a body. To use your body to tune into the signals from your body rather than being stuck in your head in the swirling stories. So, I drop that phrase into my mind and try to be aware of my body moving through space. The second phrase I use is, what is the attitude in the mind right now?
It's a humbling thing to ask yourself because it's a bit like shining a black light on the hotel sheets. You probably are not going to like what you see. And when you ask yourself, inquire, like, what, what's the basic attitude in my mind? How am I relating to everything I'm experiencing?
And then the third phrase, it's not a question, it's just a phrase and it's, this is nature. It's kind of a cool idea, which is, we tend to believe everything we're experiencing, thinking, seeing, feeling, is somehow ours. But, it's just nature, you know? We're expressions of the universe. We feel separate from, like we're peering out fretfully from behind these eye sockets at a hostile world, but we're just expressions of nature and everything we think, no matter how idiosyncratic it may feel. It's just nature.
And that can get you to kind of, unhook from all the stuff. So I kind of cycle through those phrases as I'm walking.
I just kind of drop these phrases in at random intervals, usually in that order, sometimes I'll stay with there is a body for a while, because it's nice to build up some continuity of mindfulness. Like, to build up some concentration.
And uh, yeah, that's my practice.
DACHER KELTNER: That's so wonderful. There are a lot of nice, you know, Meta analyses, we call them, bringing together a bunch of studies, comparing walking meditations with just walking typically, and you know, You get the usual stuff, which is good news, of less stress, lower blood pressure, especially less depression, seems to be, yeah, maybe the ambulatory quality to it, just moving is good for depression. What's it like for you? Like, what, how would you describe, like, ah, this is what it gives me in my subjective life?
DAN HARRIS: We live so much of our lives on automatic pilot. Anything you can do to wake up is something you should probably consider doing.
And so I can feel this feeling of me, but I can also notice that the seeing is happening without any effort. So who's in there? And in Buddhist speak, the not finding is the finding because it's pointing you toward this incredible mystery. Seeing the mystery of consciousness, like that, knocking on that door is awe-inspiring. So I like the IV drip of that awe.
We are moving so often, you know, even if you're in a wheelchair or you're differently abled, we tend to move whatever parts of our body we can move. And to create this positive Pavlovian response where the body starts moving and that's just a reminder, “Oh yeah. Wake up.”
DACHER KELTNER: I remember my first walking meditation was probably 20 years ago with all these scientists. I think it was at the Garrison Institute in New York, and we all did the really slow one, you know, like wow, we had these expansions in consciousness. But then, occasionally I'll sort of slip into that outside. I'm like, I'm not going to do this. It looks, you know, people stop you and, hey, you know, what's wrong with you? You know? So how do you get the beginner to start doing these walking meditations?
DAN HARRIS: So you can do a public walking meditation at a regular speed and nobody needs to know.
You know, you can walk through your neighborhood, make it a meditation, but if you see your neighbors, you can still chat with them for a second and then go back to it. I really think flexibility is so important in terms of knitting this stuff into your life, figuring out what works for you, figuring out how to make it work for you, feeling empowered to make changes in the practices to make it work for you. The best practice is the one you actually do. I just want to encourage people to think about how to make it something that they'll actually do.
And, you know, just be really gentle about this. You can do it one minute out of your walk. You can do it for five minutes, see what works for you.
DACHER KELTNER: Dan, it's always good to hear what you're thinking about and thank you for promoting walking and being on our show and being in conversation. It's always a delight for me.
DAN HARRIS: Likewise, man. I always love talking to you.
DACHER KELTNER: Dan will be guiding us in a walking meditation on next week's Happiness Break. So be sure to check it out. Up next, we’ll hear about the growing research on the many ways walking meditation can enrich our lives.
DR. PAUL KELLY: And it doesn't matter, you know, if you currently have low fitness, or that you don't think of yourself as a sporty person. Walking and meditative walking are available to you. And you know the benefits are tangible and at your fingertips.
Dacher Keltner: Welcome back to The Science of Happiness, I'm Dacher Keltner. Today, we’re talking about the benefits of walking meditation, and to learn more about the science behind this practice, we spoke to researcher Paul Kelly at the University of Edinburgh.
DR. PAUL KELLY: So my job involves trying to promote physical activity at a population level. That's what we're trying to do. Support people to be more physically active as many people in the population. Walking and by extension meditative walking are one of our key approaches.
DACHER KELTNER: One of Paul's goals is to convince people of its accessibility.
DR. PAUL KELLY: Thinking about common misconceptions around meditative walking, the one that comes up most often in our research is that a decent proportion of the general public don't think that it's enough to benefit their health. The misconception would be that you need to be in a gym, you need to be wearing Lycra and you need to be sweating to see any health benefits and that's just not the case.
DACHER KELTNER: There are many physical benefits that make meditative walking such a potent form of exercise.
DR. PAUL KELLY: Things like better cardiovascular health, better muscle tone and health. And over time that can reduce your risk of diseases such as type two diabetes, your metabolic health, cardiovascular disease, certain cancers and premature mortality in the end.
DACHER KELTNER: It has an array of scientifically proven psychological benefits too.
DR. PAUL KELLY: So by walking meditatively, you are more likely to feel relatedness, connectedness to nature, reduce those feelings of stress, anxiety, all of which will combine to promote overall well being and better mental health.
DACHER KELTNER: Some of this isn't about the walking per se, but rather about the mindfulness element of the practice.
DR. PAUL KELLY: Meditative walking is more likely to make you someone that walks in general, and as a result of that you're going to feel more connected to your community. Perhaps those reduced feelings of isolation that can really impact people's overall health.
And it kind of relates to this idea about connecting with nature because there's evidence that if you're out for a walk and you take the opportunity once per walk to appreciate something about your natural environment, you know, be that the way a certain flower looks, be that, you know, a certain view from a certain point, of water, or the sky, or the trees. That can be an excellent way of getting that, relating and connecting with what's around you. All of which will lead to improved mental wellbeing.
DACHER KELTNER: There’s another psychological benefit to walking meditation --- its ability to lead to habit forming behavior.
DR. PAUL KELLY: Once you get into a behavior like that and you start to enjoy it, you're more likely to do it over the long term and make it a habit.
DACHER KELTNER: The literature backs this up. A recent study from Thailand found that Parkinson’s patients were more likely to stick with meditative walking compared to other exercise programs, suggesting it could be a helpful practice for better follow-through.
DR. PAUL KELLY: And you know if you contrast that to it's January and new year's resolutions, you take out a gym membership, but if you only do it for four or six weeks, you don't get the benefits. Whereas the walking I think meditative walking is more likely to form a habit that you can do for weeks, months and years and experience both those mental and those long term physical health benefits.
DACHER KELTNER: It's precisely the simplicity of meditative walking that makes it easy to form a habit, or to even start it in the first place.
DR. PAUL KELLY: One of the reasons that walking has such a powerful potential is that even people who are starting from perhaps a very low level of fitness or people who don't have access to outdoor green spaces can do it in their own homes. It doesn't have to be many kilometers or things like that.
There are some people who are unable to walk because of their physical, you know, they might have a physical disability or physical limitation. So I'm not sitting here saying it's for 100 percent of people, but it's for a very large percentage of people, a very large proportion. It's an option that doesn't require money, specialist equipment, specialist coaches, gyms or facilities.
I think the key message would be that any walking but particularly meditative walking, is enough to benefit your physical, mental and social health. It's easy to get started and even a small, very small amount will benefit you.
And it doesn't matter, you know, if you currently have low fitness, or that you don't think of yourself as a sporty person or you didn't like sport at school. Walking and meditative walking are available to you. And the benefits are tangible and at your fingertips.
Thanks for joining us on The Science of Happiness. This episode was produced by Noam Osband. Our associate producers are Dasha Zerboni and Hamza Fahmy. Selina Bilal is our research assistant.
Our sound designer is Jennie Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Shuka Kalantari is our executive producer. I'm Dacher Keltner, have a great day.
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