How to Actually Get Rest

By Brad Stulberg, New York Magazine, Oct. 4, 2017

The thing about scrolling through social media is that it often feels like it should be a restful activity. It even looks like one. You’re barely moving, after all; you might even be lying down. And yet when is the last time you closed Twitter feeling refreshed?

In case you haven’t yet heard, rest is important. It’s when our bodies repair and grow; our brains become smarter and more creative; and our minds replenish willpower and gain emotional control. Rest is so important to working in a happy, healthy, and sustainable manner that we’d be wise to think of it not as something separate from doing good work, but rather, as an integral part of doing good work; sometimes, not working is the work.

But there is a science–and art–to resting well, and not all forms of kicking back are created equal. It turns out that lots of the activities we think are restful may actually leave us feeling more tired and stressed.

Before we get into the best ways to rest, it’s instructive to agree on a common definition of what rest even is. Most researchers agree that rest is a physiological state during which your innate fight-or-flight stress response, or sympathetic nervous system, subsides in favor of a more relaxed condition. Your heart rate and blood pressure come down, and your shoulders usually follow. Psychologically, rest is considered a shift from deliberate and effortful thinking–for example, straining to solve a problem or trying to figure out the best way to communicate a complex topic–to a more passive state, sometimes characterized by mind-wandering or zoning out.

While both “stress” and “rest” are somewhat subjective–a five-mile run might be a restful activity for one person and a stressful one for another–there are a few ingredients that are essential to any truly restful activity.

You aren’t exerting self-control. At first, it might take some willpower to resist worrying about work or other seemingly pressing issues, but once you’re in the midst of a nice bout of rest, it should feel pretty easy. Trying really hard to rest–for example, forcing yourself to listen to music and breathe deeply when all you really want to do is respond to emails–defeats its purpose. Either find an activity that more easily lets your mind drift away (more on that below), or just respond to the emails and try relaxing afterwards.

You aren’t consciously thinking about your work or other issues that may be weighing on you. Perhaps your subconscious mind is still connecting dots and problem solving in the background, but your conscious awareness is not on your work–instead, it’s floating freely. Likewise, a restful activity can’t be one that’s triggering anxiety. (See: cable news or a polarizing Twitter feed.)

You aren’t disrupting your ability to fall and remain asleep, which is the ultimate form of rest. As for two of the developed world’s favorite evening activities: If watching television (though not the news) allows you to check out, and doesn’t interfere with your falling asleep, then by all means go for it. Same goes for a glass of wine. But beware: Studies show that if consumed within a few hours prior to bed, both can interfere with sleep–the culprits being blue light from the former and alcohol from the latter. If you are struggling to fall or stay asleep, it’s probably best to eliminate late-night TV and your nightcap.

Plenty of activities meet the above criteria for rest, but a few in particular come with strong evidence of benefits.

Walking: In a study aptly titled “Give Your Ideas Some Legs,” researchers from Stanford University found that individuals who took a short (6 to 15 minute) walking break increased creative thinking by 40 to 60 percent, as compared to those who remained seated at a desk. At first, they speculated that increased blood flow to the brain was the primary reason for walking’s benefits. But it appears the benefits might also emerge from the interplay between walking and attention: mainly, walking requires just enough coordination to occupy the parts of the brain responsible for effortful thinking, allowing us to more easily zone out and mind-wander, both of which are associated with creativity and insight.

Hanging out with friends. The ratio of the hormones testosterone to cortisol acts as a good indicator of stress and recovery. Testosterone is associated with growth and rejuvenation whereas cortisol is associated with stress and degradation–so the higher the ratio, the better. Studies have found that following stressful periods–like a competitive sporting event, for example–individuals who kick back and relax with friends experience a much quicker rebound in their testosterone to cortisol ratio. Other research shows that social connection helps to shift the nervous system into a restful state and releases hormones that have anti-inflammatory properties, like oxytocin and vasopressin.

Experiencing nature. Time spent in nature is associated with more relaxed physiological and psychological states–even just looking at pictures of natural settings for a few minutes has been shown to increase creative thinking. Writing in her book The Nature Fix, Florence Williams suggests that “nature lulls us with soft fascination, helping to rest our top-down, direct attention faculties.”

Hiking. Combine the above three strategies! Group forest walks have been found to decrease stress hormones and attenuate virtually every part of the fight-or-flight stress response. For the full effect, leave your smartphone behind (or at least keep it turned off if you feel the need to bring it). I’ve never met anyone who regretted a digital-device-free hike with friends.

Sleeping! The obvious one, but still: No form of rest is as powerful. During sleep, your body repairs and grows and your mind retains, consolidates, and connects the information that you were exposed to during the day. Short naps (10 to 30 minutes) can give you a boost in energy and creativity, but nothing can replace the massive importance of sleeping seven to nine hours every night. Put simply: Sleep is one of the most productive things you can do.

When it comes to how much you should rest, though there are no straightforward guidelines, a good rule of thumb is to balance stress with rest. The more stress in your life, the more you should offset it with rest. Another good way to think about rest is to mimic “interval” training throughout your days, by alternating between bursts of intense, deep-focus work and short breaks.

If you want to prioritize rest (and you should!), be careful not to fall for a common trap, one that leaves many well-intentioned people believing they’re resting but never feeling too well-rested. The activities that may seem like rest are often far from it. Trade in couch time and screens for walking, nature, mind-wandering, and hanging out with friends. Doing so may seem hard at first, but once you get going, you’ll feel a lot better.

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Weekend Warriors Show Survival Benefits

By Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times, Jan. 11, 2017

Working out only on the weekends or otherwise compressing your total physical activity into one or two prolonged runs or a single vigorous basketball or soccer game each week could lessen your risks of dying prematurely almost as effectively as more frequent, shorter workouts spread throughout the week, according to an interesting new study of the so-called weekend warrior phenomenon.

As most of us have heard by now, the standard recommendation about how much exercise we should complete each week for health purposes is 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous physical activity. Moderate exercise consists of activities like brisk walking or easy cycling that raise heart rates while still allowing us to talk to training partners, and vigorous activities are those like running, fast-paced cycling, and many team sports, including basketball and soccer, that raise heart rates into a zone where speaking is difficult.

Meeting these guidelines is associated with a substantially reduced risk of developing a wide range of diseases and dying too young.

The guidelines also suggest that, for practical purposes, people consider breaking the 150 minutes into five moderate 30-minute sessions each week or a comparable number of shorter, more vigorous workouts.

But many people apparently do not have the time or inclination to exercise five times per week. About a third of American adults engage in zero weekly exercise and others pack their workouts into one or two sessions on Saturday or Sunday, when they have more free time.

There has been little information, though, about whether the weekend warrior pattern of exercise lowers the risk for premature death as effectively as more frequent and generally shorter workouts.

So for the new study, which was published on Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers at Loughborough University in England and other institutions decided to delve into the exercise routines of tens of thousands of men and women already participating in the Health Survey for England and the Scottish Health Survey.

The researchers zeroed in on data from 63,591 middle-aged men and women who had provided detailed descriptions of their workout patterns when they first entered the study at least 15 years before, telling the survey questioners how many minutes they had exercised each week during the past month, what kinds of exercise they had undertaken, and how many times per week they had worked out.

The researchers used that data to categorize the men and women into a variety of groups. Those who never exercised were defined, unsurprisingly, as inactive, while those who worked out but did not meet the standard guidelines were considered insufficiently active. Those who did exercise for the full 150 gentle or 75 vigorous weekly minutes were labeled sufficiently active.

This last group was then subdivided into those who spread their physical activity over at least three sessions and those who jammed it into one or two workouts, presumably on weekends (although the actual days were not specified).

Interestingly, these weekend warriors were mostly male, almost half exercised only once per week, and an overwhelming majority, almost 90 percent, reported that their exercise occurred during vigorous sports like competitive running and cycling or team sports like soccer.

Finally, the researchers crosschecked their participants against death registries, to determine mortality in the intervening years since each person had joined the original survey.

It turned out that exercise, in any amount, had substantially lessened the risk that someone would die from any cause, including heart disease and cancer. Men and women who exercised, even if they did not meet the guideline recommendations, were about 29 percent less likely to die prematurely than people who never worked out.

Those who met the recommendations gained a slight edge in longevity, being about 30 percent less likely to have died than people who never exercised.

This advantage remained about the same whether people worked out three or more times during the week or jammed all of their activity into a session or two.

“Reductions in risk were similar in the weekend warriors and the regularly active,” says Gary O’Donovan, a research associate at Loughborough University who led the study.

The good news from this study, Dr. O’Donovan says, is that whatever type of activity you can fit into your schedule appears to be better for your longevity than no activity at all.

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Walking Fends Off Disability, And It’s Not Too Late To Start

Katherine Hobson, NPR, September 26, 2016

People who have reached their later years may think it’s primarily a time to relax, not to increase their physical activity. Not so. Previous research has suggested that exercise can improve memory and reverse muscle loss in older adults, among other benefits. And a study out Monday finds that a regular program of physical activity reduces the time spent with mobility-limiting disability.

Researchers took more than 1,600 sedentary people between 70 and 89 years old who had some functional limitations, but who could walk about a quarter of a mile in 15 minutes or less, unassisted by another person or a walker. (Canes were OK.)

Half of the participants got a health education program involving regular in-person sessions and some stretching exercises, while the other group was told to aim for 150 minutes of aerobic activity as well as strength, flexibility and balance training both at the study’s facilities and at home. “Walking was the cornerstone of the program,” says Thomas Gill, a professor of geriatrics at the Yale School of Medicine and an author of the study, which appears in Annals of Internal Medicine.

The study followed participants for about 2.7 years, and found that the physical activity program cut the amount of time that people spent with a “major mobility disability”–defined as being unable to walk a quarter mile–by 25 percent compared to the education program. Previous findings from the same study showed that the exercise program lowered the risk of becoming disabled in the first place; this one showed that it sped recovery from an episode of disability and lowered the risk of subsequent episodes.

“They’ve done a really nice job of showing the incredible power of physical activity,” says Bradley Cardinal, a professor of kinesiology at Oregon State University who wasn’t involved with the study. “It’s the secret ingredient to successful aging in terms of quality of life.” An editorial accompanying the study, by the University of California, San Francisco’s Patricia Katz and the University of South Carolina’s Russell Pate, also noted that people who engage in physical activity have a lower risk for heart disease, diabetes, certain cancers, depression, cognitive impairment and functional decline.

The exercise program pretty closely followed the government’s recommendations for all adults, including older ones: 150 minutes of moderate-intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity exercise per week, plus two strength sessions that hit all the major muscle groups.

But most Americans don’t get that much exercise, and that becomes increasingly true as people age. According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just 28 percent of those 75 and up meet the recommendation for aerobic activity, and only 8 percent also did the suggested amount of strength training.

Cardinal says older adults need to realize that exercise can greatly improve their quality of life by maximizing function as long as possible. But he says that many believe that older age is for relaxing and that physical activity is somehow dangerous or unnatural. That belief “is pervasive among older adults,” he says, even though for many of them, meeting the minimum requirements “is doable.”

Semantics can help. “We try to frame this as more physical activity than exercise,” says Gill. “We talk with older folks and many say, ‘I can’t exercise, but maybe I can become more physically active.’” Study participants were advised to “start low and go slow,” and some were even able to get rid of their canes after six months of exercise, which Gill says they found particularly rewarding.

There are some basic behavioral strategies for getting yourself to get moving, no matter your age, including giving yourself an incentive to change and engineering your environment to encourage the activity.

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Scenic Oceanside Walk

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Walking for a Better Brain

Wayne Curtis, The Atlantic, Oct 15, 2014

Edward Payson Weston started off on foot from New York to San Francisco in March 1909. He was 70 years old, and would eventually arrive 105 days later, averaging about 40 miles per day. Not surprisingly, his walk triggered a lot of talk about aging and the abilities of the elderly.

Coincidentally, that same year, several men gathered at the house of G. Stanley Hall, president of the American Psychological Association, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Present were three well-known psychologists: William James, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung.

While the science of psychology had been around for some time–the first laboratory of experimental psychology had been founded in Leipzig in 1879, and James was considered a pioneer in the field–gerontology, the study of aging, had only recently arisen, with the term itself coined in 1903. Harvard historian Jill Lepore has referred to Hall as the founder of gerontology, among the first to understand that senescence–the opposite of adolescence–was a period worth studying on its own. “Old age takes everyone by surprise, and no one ever really comes to terms with it,” Lepore wrote. “Hall thought this was because old age is the only stage of life we never grow out of, and can never look back on, not on this earth, anyway.”

Others had given thought to aging, of course–ancient Arabs had various special treatments just for the elderly–but no one person had drawn as much attention to theories of aging at the time as the McGill University-trained doctor Sir William Osler. Osler was the chief physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for 14 years, and he found unwitting global fame in 1905 after making an offhand comment during his Johns Hopkins valedictory address before repairing to England to teach at Oxford. Osler spoke of the “comparative uselessness of men above 40 years of age,” and made an apparently jocular reference to the Anthony Trollope novel The Fixed Period, which averred that man’s work was done by age 40, and that he ought to be “chloroformed at 60.”

Ironic comments sometimes fail to travel with their quotation marks. Osler spent much of his remaining years on the earth insisting that, no, really, it was all in jest, and that he actually didn’t believe people over 60 should be done in. (He was 55 when he made the speech. His Times obituary pointed out that “he reached the age of 70 himself, and his last 10 years formed a period of great activity and of his greatest influence.”)

During Weston’s 1909 walk, Osler’s accidental controversy was far from extinguished, and Weston–never averse to publicity–was happy to see his walk prompt the debate to flare anew. Discussion took place in newspapers and drawing rooms and among knots of people gathered along the roads to watch Weston pass by. Most had to agree that he looked healthy and active. With his pluck and dauntless walking style, he demonstrated what those of advanced years can accomplish if they put their minds to it.

“Many physicians, of this city at least,” reported the New York Times, were watching his trip closely. “Their interest is not excited alone by the nature of the feat, though all hold it marvelous that a man of Weston’s age is capable of even attempting it; they are looking deeper, watching for the effect which this example will have in renewing the lost interest in walking as a pastime and an exercise, and for the effect they believe it will have in counteracting the theory they condemn–the theory that at the age of 50 or thereabouts a man is ‘down and out.’”

A column in the Dallas Morning News admitted that many considered Weston’s walk from ocean to ocean “foolishness” and “an idle waste of time.” But, the writer asked, was it “preferred to the needless senility into which far too many men begin to drift at the period of three score years and 10?” The writer chastised those who chose inertness when their working days were over, “lounging about in the sort of aimless apathy which benumbs the soul and closes up all the channels of sensation.” He went on: “Remember that there is mighty little excitement of divertissement in shuffling to town twice a day ‘for the mail,’” and that lapsing into indolence was “far more foolish and ill-advised than it was for Edward Payson Weston to start on his 70th birthday, to walk from New York to San Francisco.”

Around the time of Weston’s walk, exercise at an advanced age was often regarded in poor favor, as if practitioners were involved in a zero-sum game: If you exercised too much, you sacrificed mental agility. A “nerve specialist” from New York named J. Leonard Corning said in 1909 that he was opposed to “excessive exercise,” which was what he believed Weston’s attempt to be. He thought that with the “over-cultivation of the physique the mentality suffered.”

Corning wrote during a period when experts widely believed that brain cells didn’t regenerate. As a result, graceful aging was in large part a matter of learning to cope with gradually diminishing brain capacity. Modern science has shown that’s not the case; we generate new brain cells throughout our lives, although the process can become increasingly imperfect and less efficient with age, as it does with much cellular activity.

But staying active helps. One study of older rats suggested that running for a total of just 11 to 15 minutes four times a week for four weeks led to healthy developments in the parts of the brain associated with memory; these rats then performed better than sedentary rats did on spatial memory tests. That’s proving true in human testing as well. One of the largest studies ever conducted was on a group of 121,000 nurses, who were surveyed on a wide range of their health and lifestyle habits starting in 1976. The survey was repeated every two years. The results, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, suggested that those who exercised the most–the group that maintained a median level of walking for six hours a week–were 20 percent less likely to show cognitive impairment than those who exercised the least.

Other long-term studies also show that even modest exercise can serve as a bulwark against dementia.

Peter Snyder of Brown University’s Alpert Medical School, who studies the effects of aging on the brain, recently told National Public Radio that “what we’re finding is that of all of these noninvasive ways of intervening, it is exercise that seems to have the most efficacy at this point–more so than nutritional supplements, vitamins and cognitive interventions … The literature on exercise is just tremendous,” he said.

Indeed, a 20-year-long study in 2010 found that walking just five miles per week “protects the brain structure” over a 10-year period in people with Alzheimer’s disease and in those who exhibit signs of mild cognitive impairment. Another study, from 2012, supported those findings, also concluding that even moderate walking helped stave off further deterioration among elderly people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

While different studies arrive at moderately different conclusions via various routes, the recent research of dozens of scientists more often than not converges at a single intersection. And that consistently suggests that if you exercise, your brain will be fitter than if you don’t. This applies to the young, those in the prime of their days, and especially to the elderly.

Weston certainly didn’t know the details, but he understood the contours of the benefits of walking. And others noticed. “Edward Payson Weston is a living example of what open air, temperance, exercise, and healthy-mindedness will do for the human race,” one newspaper trumpeted just days after the walking septuagenarian departed New York for San Francisco. “His example is worth a hundred sermons.”

Weston went on not only to walk from New York to San Francisco, but the following year from Los Angeles to New York. With more cooperative weather on a southern route and tail winds pushing him on, he made it in 77 days. At age 74 he walked from New York to Minneapolis, and then at 83 from Buffalo to New York.

But eventually, the car won. At 88 he stepped off a curb in Manhattan and was struck by a cab. It didn’t kill him, but he wouldn’t walk again. Bedridden, he lived to 90 and died shortly thereafter.

In his nine decades, he’d not only rebuffed Osler, but was emerged as a prescient advocate for the benefits of walking–as a way to quietly collaborate with body, brain and even society at large to build something better.

“Anyone can walk,” Weston said in 1910. “It’s free, like the sun by day and the stars by night. All we have to do is get on our legs, and the roads will take us everywhere.”

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Walk, Jog or Dance: It’s All Good for the Aging Brain

By Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times, April 7, 2016:

More people are living longer these days, but the good news comes shadowed by the possible increase in cases of age-related mental decline. By some estimates, the global incidence of dementia will more than triple in the next 35 years. That grim prospect is what makes a study published in March in The Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease so encouraging: It turns out that regular walking, cycling, swimming, dancing and even gardening may substantially reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s.

Exercise has long been linked to better mental capacity in older people. Little research, however, has tracked individuals over years, while also including actual brain scans. So for the new study, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and other institutions analyzed data produced by the Cardiovascular Health Study, begun in 1989, which has evaluated almost 6,000 older men and women. The subjects complete medical and cognitive tests, fill out questionnaires about their lives and physical activities and receive M.R.I. scans of their brains. Looking at 10 years of data from nearly 900 participants who were at least 65 upon entering the study, the researchers first determined who was cognitively impaired, based on their cognitive assessments. Next they estimated the number of calories burned through weekly exercise, based on the participants’ questionnaires.

The scans showed that the top quartile of active individuals proved to have substantially more gray matter, compared with their peers, in those parts of the brain related to memory and higher-­level thinking. More gray matter, which consists mostly of neurons, is generally equated with greater brain health. At the same time, those whose physical activity increased over a five-year period–though these cases were few–showed notable increases in gray-matter volume in those same parts of their brains. And, perhaps most meaningful, people who had more gray matter correlated with physical activity also had 50 percent less risk five years later of having experienced memory decline or of having developed Alzheimer’s.

“For the purposes of brain health, it looks like it’s a very good idea to stay as physically active as possible,” says Cyrus Raji, a senior radiology resident at U.C.L.A., who led the study. He points out that “physical activity” is an elastic term in this study: It includes walking, jogging and moderate cycling as well as gardening, ballroom dancing and other calorie-burning recreational pursuits. Dr. Raji said he hopes that further research might show whether this caloric expenditure is remodeling the brain, perhaps by reducing inflammation or vascular diseases.

The ideal amount and type of activity for staving off memory loss is unknown, he says, although even the most avid exercisers in this group were generally cycling or dancing only a few times a week. Still, the takeaway is that physical activity might change aging’s arc. “If we want to live a long time but also keep our memories, our basic selves, intact, keep moving,” Dr. Raji says.

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Serra da Freita, Arouca, Portugal

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We all know exercise makes you live longer. But this will actually get you off the couch.

By David Brown, Washington Post, February 22, 2016:

When someone dies in the intensive care unit, the first thing the nurse does is turn off the EKG monitor. That’s because the heart can go on depolarizing–writing its electrical signature on the screen, if not actually pumping blood–for many minutes after everything else stops. It’s creepy, but touching, too. The heart is the soldier who can’t bear to surrender until long after the battle is lost.

Because the heart is the last organ to die, it’s no surprise that medicine has expended much effort to get it to live longer. What’s surprising is that the best strategy is to work it harder, not go easy on it. The ceaselessly pumping organ is happiest if you test its limits in a controlled fashion on a regular basis.

In other words, if you exercise.

Exercise requires time and tolerance for discomfort, and you can’t store it up. For that reason, it lags behind other behaviors that doctors, the government and our consciences tell us to do (or not do). Only 50 percent of American adults get at least 150 minutes of aerobic exercise a week, which is the current recommendation. Larger fractions of people aren’t obese (65 percent), get at least seven hours of sleep a night (65 percent) and don’t smoke (83 percent).

Nevertheless, there’s no getting around the benefits of exercise. The evidence keeps piling up.

Over the past two decades, research has shown that exercise reduces the risk of heart attack, helps control weight, decreases inflammation, lowers the risk of developing diabetes and certain cancers, increases the chances of survival after a heart attack, lifts mood, slows the decline of sexual performance and prolongs independent living in the very old.

“It’s really hard to find something that is not improved with exercise,” said Michael J. Blaha, a preventive cardiologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital and a researcher in the field. “Everyone can benefit from it. Even at higher age, when you’re at increased risk of dying, exercise is able to add time to your life.”

Although many organs, and the body as a whole, are helped by exercise, the cardiovascular system–the heart and blood vessels–is helped the most.

Many people think exercise’s principal benefit operates through blood lipids, the compounds that contribute to artery-clogging atherosclerotic plaques. In fact, exercise alone has only a small effect on them. Total cholesterol, LDL (the dreaded “bad cholesterol”) and triglycerides go down a little, and HDL (“good cholesterol”) increases. However, the dramatic improvement in lipid profiles that many first-time exercisers report is more an effect of weight loss than exercise per se.

Instead, exercise’s action on the heart and the blood vessels is the sum of small benefits acting through many physiological pathways.

Exercise lowers blood pressure. It makes the body more sensitive to the action of insulin, which lowers blood glucose. It makes platelets–the mini-cells that trigger clots in strokes and heart attacks–less sticky, and increases the amount of clot-dissolving enzyme in the blood. It reduces some markers of body-wide inflammation, such as C-reactive protein. It slows the accumulation of calcium in arterial walls, a risk factor for heart attack. It increases the nitric oxide made by arteries, which allows them to expand and carry more blood when circumstances demand. Exercise also lowers the resting heart rate, which benefits the heart over the long run.

Studies in lab animals show that moderate-intensity exercise has measurable and even visible effects on the heart.

The body loses muscle mass with age, and the heart, being mostly muscle, isn’t spared. (A 70-year-old man has roughly 30 percent fewer heart muscle cells than a man in his 20s.) Exercise slows the process. It reduces the rate at which cells are lost both through wear and tear and through the programmed process of cell death called apoptosis. Aging rats forced to swim an hour a day have hearts far younger-looking–less thickened and scarred–than their sedentary brethren.

What it all adds up to is longer life.

But it isn’t an all-or-nothing relationship. Instead, the more a person exercises, the more the risk of heart attack and premature death goes down. Only at extreme and prolonged exercise do worrisome effects appear, and even then there’s no evidence that such behavior shortens life.

This “dose-response” relationship is apparent as soon as you get off the couch and do almost anything. It’s like a signing bonus.

A study of 221,000 Australians age 45 and older found that those who simply stood more than two hours a day had a death rate 10 percent lower than people who stood for less than two hours when followed over the course of four years. People on their feet for eight hours a day had a 24 percent lower death rate.

If you walk instead of stand, the payoff, not surprisingly, is bigger. A study of 1,239 Japanese men recruited at age 64 found that those who walked at least two hours a day had half the chance of dying over a 10-year period as those who walked less than 30 minutes a day.

In general, the greater a person’s exercise capacity, the lower the risk of dying. That became clear when researchers looked at the experience of 33,000 people (with an average age of 57) who took exercise stress tests at the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit.

Treadmills measured the intensity of their exertion in METs (metabolic equivalent of task). A MET is the ratio of energy expended during an activity to energy expended while sitting motionless. Working at a computer is 1.5 METs. Bicycling at less than 10 mph requires 4 METs, and very brisk walking requires 5 METs; both fall into the category of moderate-intensity activity. Playing basketball is 8 METs, and running at a 10-minutes-per-mile pace is 10 METs. They are considered vigorous-intensity activities.

In the 10 years after the stress tests, 41 percent of men and 23 percent of women who didn’t achieve 6 METs had died. However, for those who achieved more than 12 METs, mortality was only 3 percent for the men and 1 percent for the women.

Fitness paid off, even among people unlucky enough to suffer heart attacks. A study published this month using the same group of patients found that the risk of dying in the month after a heart attack was 14 percent in the under-6-METs group but only 6 percent in the over-12-METs group.

“Your baseline fitness now predicts your survival of that first heart attack. That’s an important message,” said Blaha, one of the authors of the new study.

Exercise’s ability to reduce a person’s chances of dying from cardiovascular disease extends well beyond the weekly 150 minutes of moderate exercise (or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise) currently recommended for adults.

An analysis of data from studies in the United States, Europe and Taiwan found the mortality risk bottomed out when a person did nine hours of moderate exercise or 4.8 hours of vigorous aerobic exercise per week (roughly 3 ½ times the recommended amount). At that point, a person’s risk of cardiovascular death was half that of someone who didn’t exercise at all.

So that’s the good news. The bad news is that exercise isn’t enough. You also have to stop sitting around when you’re not exercising. It turns out that sedentary behavior–defined as anything that takes less than 1.5 METs of effort–increases the risk of cardiovascular disease even if a person gets enough exercise.

A study of AARP members who got at least seven hours a week of moderate-to-vigorous exercise found that over an eight-year period, people who watched at least seven hours of TV per day were twice as likely to die of heart disease as people who watched less than an hour. Other studies have found similar effects.

The average American spends more than half of all waking hours in sedentary behavior, principally commuting or sitting in front of a computer screen or television. There are no government guidelines on the matter, but some experts say 10,000 footsteps a day–the equivalent of five miles of walking–should be the goal. (That would more than satisfy the exercise recommendation if done briskly enough.)

Taking that many steps is virtually impossible in an indoor job, even with standing desks and walking meetings. Nevertheless, people can make headway with the help of devices that count steps and chart them by hour, day, month and year.

“Tracking what’s happening is half the battle in pretty much everything that involves changing behavior,” said Haitham M. Ahmed, another preventive cardiologist at Hopkins. He advises his patients to use pedometers on wristwatches or smartphones, calling wearable activity tracking “a big breakthrough.”

So, if you don’t have one yet, there’s probably another screen in your future to obsess over, perhaps to better effect than Twitter and Instagram.

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The Surprising Secret to Aging Well

By Barbara Knickerbocker Beskind, Next Avenue, January 25, 2016

As an occupational therapist and someone in my early 90s, here’s what I recommend to age well: good posture and a brisk 30-minute walk daily from early childhood on. This builds bone density and balance reflexes that reduce the impact of falls and injuries in later years.

Walking has enormous benefits–emotionally and even creatively–as recent studies show. This is in addition to the well-known benefits to the pulmonary and cardiovascular systems. A sturdy gait pattern with alternating arm/leg movement helps maintain balance reflexes and strength in lateral hip muscles.

Good posture goes hand-in-hand with good walking, stride and vertical balance. It has been found that going out for a walk midday frees up the frontal lobes from the clutter of study or business. This can enhance creativity as well as reduce stress and/or depression.

Currently, with the reduction of physical education programs in public schools and the exponential increase in handheld technology, there is serious risk that children will not get sufficient exercise. The posture in children and young adults is compromised by the forward tilt to the head over prolonged periods when they use electronic devices. Because of this, it is recommended to leave such devices behind during these daily walks.

Poor posture, compromised gait patterns and less daily walking lead me to think that people under 30 in particular, but also others tied to electronic devices throughout their lives, have a heightened risk of early aging. Carrying heavy backpacks or sports bags causes the hips to thrust back to maintain walking balance when the shoulders are hunched forward. By age 50, people may already be at risk of losing their balance.

Now consider the more common ills of aging, such as loss of joint range and flexibility, loss of strength in lower extremities, loss of balance due to a variety of causes and loss of vision. There’s an even greater need for maintaining good balance from the proprioceptors of the weight-bearing joints as well as the vestibular system of the ear.

For those already in the aging arena, my motto is “stay vertical and moving forward.” This is best done by keeping “ears over hips and hips over heels.”

For the past three years, as my vision has decreased, I have depended on regular use of a pair of ski poles. The vertical grip promotes good posture and enables me to use the natural gait patterns. Ski poles have assured me of the terrain and protected me from stumbling. I apply rocker bottoms (available at sporting goods stores) to provide valuable push-off at every step so it feels like I’m “floating” down the corridor.

Ski poles seem to provide better stability than a cane. They also imply healthy, active aging and that one is fully engaged in life.

Having been an occupational therapist for 44 years, 20 of which were in the U.S. Army, I have seen the benefits of good posture and balance in the physical rehabilitation of service injuries and in treating children with significant learning differences. Now that I’m visually impaired, I realize even more that my own balance skills must be maintained. I watch elderly people in my retirement community and see the damage to overall health from poor posture and leaning heavily on a walker.

In summary, the path to healthy aging begins early. Good posture and good walking habits can optimize bone density, muscle strength and body balance–and are essential to safe mobility in vision loss.

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Walk Hard. Walk Easy. Repeat.

By Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times, February 19, 2015

Intense, interval-style workouts—brief bouts of very hard exercise broken up by periods of recovery—have been shown to improve the health and fitness of people who exert themselves for only a few minutes a week. Such efficiency is alluring, and has helped this kind of conditioning attract widespread media attention in recent years (including in this column). But high-intensity interval training programs aren’t for everyone. As researchers from Australia and England point out in the December issue of Frontiers in Psychology, “a largely sedentary population” is unlikely to “feel physically capable and sufficiently motivated to take up and maintain a regime of highly intense exercise.” That doubt is what makes some news out of Japan about a much-less-punishing form of interval training so welcome.

A decade ago, scientists led by Dr. Hiroshi Nose at the Shinshu University Graduate School of Medicine in Matsumoto, Japan, started developing walking programs. They knew that walking was physically the easiest (and also the most practical) exercise for those in middle age and older, but the researchers suspected that people might need to push themselves to achieve the greatest health benefits. So they created a regimen consisting of three minutes of fast walking at a pace that Nose says approximates a 6 or 7 on a scale of exertion from 1 to 10. Each “somewhat-hard” three-minute spell was followed by three minutes of gentle strolling.

In their original experiment, the results of which were published in 2007, walkers between the ages of 44 and 78 completed five sets of intervals, for a total of 30 minutes of walking at least three times a week. A separate group of older volunteers walked at a continuous, moderate pace, equivalent to about a 4 on the same exertion scale. After five months, the fitness and health of the older, moderate group had barely improved. The interval walkers, however, significantly improved aerobic fitness, leg strength and blood-pressure readings.

In their latest study, which came out in December in the Journal of Applied Physiology, Nose and his colleagues report that most of the participants stayed with the walking program long after their original five-month commitment ended. Two years later, almost 70 percent of the walkers with whom the researchers remained in contact were still following their regimen at least three times a week and had retained or improved their health gains. Those who quit often cited “family, health and job issues,” says Dr. Shizue Masuki, the new study’s lead author, but they rarely complained about the complexity or difficulty of the training.

So those who have considered high-intensity interval training but have been apprehensive about its demands should go for a walk. “Perform the training for 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes in the afternoon and 10 minutes in the evening,” Masuki suggests. Three days of exercise per week is best, but if that’s too challenging, she says, “do it on the weekend” and cram the workouts into two days. Doing so, Masuki adds, “can have a profound effect on physiological regulation.”

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The Incredible Benefits of Humankind’s Most Basic Form of Exercise--Walking

By Jay Walljasper, AlterNet, December 3, 2014

Walking is going places.

Humans’ most common pastime—forsaken for decades as too slow and too much effort—is now recognized as a health breakthrough, an economic catalyst and a route to happiness.

Real Simple magazine (circulation: 2 million) declared “walking America’s untrendiest trend” in its February 2014 cover story. A month later Builder magazine (a construction trade journal) announced on its cover, “Walkability. Why we care…and why you should too.” The reason? Simple: “Increasingly, the market is demanding places where homeowners can hoof it.”

The New Yorker weighed in last September quoting the new book A Philosophy of Walking, which asserts that walking “makes it possible to recover the pure sensation of being, to rediscover the simple joy of existing.”

This sheer pleasure of walking is highlighted in one of the year’s top music videos, “Happy” by soul singer Pharrell Williams. It’s an exuberant celebration of life on foot showing all kinds of people (including Magic Johnson, Steve Carrell and Jimmy Kimmel) strutting, stepping, striding and sashaying down city streets. It’s been viewed 465 million times on You Tube.

There is sure to be continuing coverage of foot power next year when the Surgeon General’s office releases a Call to Action on the health and social benefits of walking and walkable communities—a step some are comparing to the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report on the dangers of smoking.

Already the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends all adults engage in 30 minutes of physical activity such as walking five days a week based on the proven connection between moderate physical activity and lower incidences of major medical problems—not just heart disease, diabetes and obesity, as you’d expect, but also depression, dementia, anxiety, colon cancer, osteoporosis and other serious conditions.

This flurry of attention about walking is more than a flash-in-the-pan. Evidence that millions of Americans are now rediscovering walking for transportation, fitness and fun is as solid as the sidewalk beneath our feet.

“Walking is the most common form of physical activity across incomes and ages and education levels,” explained Thomas Schmid of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the Pro-Walk, Pro-Bike Pro-Place conference in Pittsburgh this fall. The CDC’s most recent research shows the number of Americans who take a walk at least once a week rose from 56 percent in 2005 to 62 percent in 2010—which represents almost 20 million more people on their feet.

Speaking on the same panel, Paul Herberling of the US Department of Transportation noted that 10.4 percent of all trips Americans make are on foot—and 28 percent of trips under a mile. For young people, it’s 17 percent of percent of all trips. Americans walk most frequently for exercise, errands and recreation, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Last year the first-ever Walking Summit was held in Washington DC, drawing more than 400 people from 41 states and Canada representing 235 organizations ranging from the PGA Tour to the Sioux Falls (South Dakota) Department of Health. A second summit is scheduled for October 28-30, 2015 in Washington, DC.

The 2013 summit, which sold out weeks in an advance, marked the birth of a new walking movement committed to: 1) encouraging everyone to walk more; and 2) boosting policies, practices and investments that make communities everywhere more walkable. It was convened by the Every Body Walk! Collaborative, a joint effort of more than 100 influential organizations across many fields to promote walking as part of the solution to problems ranging from chronic disease and health care costs to climate change and the decline of community.

“In addition to the health benefits of getting regular physical activity, people’s health can be correlated to having strong relationships, and living in connected communities with high levels of social cohesion,” said Kaiser Permanente vice-president Tyler Norris at the Pro-Walk Pro-Bike Pro-Place conference. “Among the important determinants of this sense of belonging is ‘Do I know my neighbors?’ A walkable community fosters these connections every day by helping us meet people we otherwise wouldn’t.”

Americans overwhelmingly view walking as a good thing, according to a national survey from GfK Research sponsored by Kaiser Permanente. Here are some of benefits of walking shown in the survey:

Good for my health (94 percent)
Good way to lose weight (91 percent)
Great way to relax (89 percent)
Helps reduce anxiety (87 percent)
Reduces feelings of depression (85 percent)

Even the American dream is being remodeled to meet the public’s growing enthusiasm for walking. Sixty percent of Americans would prefer to live in a neighborhood with stores and services within easy walking distance, according to a recent survey from the National Association of Realtors, nearly twice as many who want to live where stores can be reached only by car.

This is especially true for the millennial generation, who are now entering the workforce and housing market in large numbers. “With drastically different views of transportation from those of generations that came before them, millennials are transforming communities,” notes another report from the National Association of Realtors….” Millennials own fewer cars and drive less than their predecessors. They’d rather walk, bike, car-share and use public transportation—and want to live where that’s all easy.”

What’s driving the growing passion for walking? “It’s a convergence of factors”, says Christopher Leinberger, a real estate developer, George Washington University business professor and a leading advocate that walkable communities are crucial to our future prosperity:

1. The well-established link between walking and better health, which is reinforced by recent research pointing to the dangers of sitting for long periods. A comprehensive study charting 240,000 Americans between ages 50 and 71 published in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that “overall [time] sitting was associated with all-cause mortality”.

2. The accelerating costs of owning one, two or more cars, which many Americans, especially younger people, find a poor investment of their resources. Transportation is now the highest cost in family budgets (19 percent) next to housing (32 percent). In auto-dependent communities—where walking is inconvenient and unsafe—transportation costs (25 percent) approach housing costs (32 percent).

3. Metropolitan areas with many walkable neighborhoods do better economically than those with just a few. Leinberger’s recent report Foot Traffic Ahead finds that walkable metropolitan areas “have substantially higher GDPs per capita” as well as a higher percentage of college graduates. Office space in walkable locations enjoys a 74 percent rent-per-square-foot premium over offices in auto-oriented developments in America’s 30 largest metropolitan regions.

4. More people discovering the personal satisfactions of walking. “Seeing friends on the street, walking to work, strolling out for dinner or nightlife,” are among the pleasures of walking that enrich our lives, says Leinberger.

Firms in the booming tech, information and creative industries are at the forefront of the trend toward walkable communities because the coveted young talent they need to stay competitive in fast-changing fields want to work in places a short stroll from cafes and cultural attractions.

The first thing Google did after buying the electronics firm Motorola Mobility was to move its headquarters away from the freeways and strip malls of Libertyville, Illinois to the walkable environs of downtown Chicago. “They felt like they couldn’t attract the young software engineers they needed” to an isolated 84-acre complex, says Leinberger. Other companies that recently moved from suburban Chicago to the city include Medline, Walgreen’s, Gogo, GE Transportation, Hillshire Brands and Motorola Solutions.

“Two things seem to resonating for businesses about the importance of walkability—how to attract the best workforce and wanting to locate in communities where health costs are lower,” says Mark Fenton, a former US National Team race walker who now consults on public health planning and transportation. Employees with more opportunities to walk at work and at home are healthier, meaning lower insurance rates for their firms.

From his vantage point at the CDC, Thomas Schmid observes, “If a business is located in a community that is not healthy, they’re paying more to be there. Think of it as a tax or cost of doing business because of health care costs.” One company relocating to Chattanooga, he said, would do so only if a walking and bike trail was extended to their facility.

The walking movement has picked up a lot of momentum in a very short time. “The wind is behind our sails,” says Kate Kraft, a public health expert working with EBWC and America Walks. But she goes on to note that “it took 80 years to make America unwalkable, and it will take a lot of work to make it walkable again”.

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Take Daily Walking Breaks To Refocus

By Rachel Gillett, Fast Company, Aug. 22, 2014

How much of your day do you think you spend sitting? 20%? 30%?

Research published in Diabetologia medical journal shows that the average adult spends 50% to 70% of his time sitting. Today we live in a world where most working professionals suffer from what the scientific community calls the sitting disease, and research shows that the longer you sit, the more likely you are to develop heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and obesity.

In addition to staying healthy, there are so many other good reasons to get up and move around that this advice is hard to ignore.

For one thing, taking a lunch break away from your desk can boost your mood and prepare you for the afternoon ahead. And researchers from the University of Edinburgh say that taking a walk in the park—or any green space you can find in your area—can lessen your brain fatigue and frustration.

While you’re outside enjoying the greenery, you’ll more than likely be soaking up some sun as well—no matter the season or climate—which helps alleviate feelings of sluggishness and boosts productivity.

Looking for some creative inspiration? Scientists at Stanford suggest going for a walk—whether indoors or outdoors, in a green space or on a treadmill—to give your creativity a boost. Compared to sitting, they found any form of walking could increase creative thinking by about 60%.

“We’re not saying walking can turn you into Michelangelo,” said researcher Marily Oppezzo. “But it could help you at the beginning stages of creativity.”

It’s no secret that our energy slumps mid-morning and mid-afternoon (which is why it’s the best time to drink coffee). Research shows that getting up and taking a 15-minute walk at these times instead of checking Facebook can help you refocus.

Challenge yourself to go for a walk at least once a day.

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This Might Be The Easiest Way To Boost Concentration And Memory

Lauren F. Friedman and Kevin Loria, Business Insider, Aug. 10, 2014

Mind wandering after a long day at work? Forgetting where your keys are when you finally decide to leave the house on the weekend?

While many things could be going on, one often-overlooked possibility is that you might simply be nature-deprived. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix for that, especially in the summertime: Head for the trees.

Time In Nature Can Boost Short-Term Memory. In one study, University of Michigan students were given a brief memory test, then divided into two groups.

One group took a walk around an arboretum, and the other half took a walk down a city street. When the participants returned and did the test again, those who had walked among trees did almost 20% percent better than the first time. The ones who had taken in city sights instead did not consistently improve.

Another similar study on depressed individuals also found that walks in nature boosted working memory much more than walks in urban environments.

Natural Environments Restore Mental Energy. You know that feeling where your brain seems to be sputtering to a halt? Researchers call that “mental fatigue.”

One thing that can help get your mind back into gear is exposing it to restorative environments, which, research has found, generally means the great outdoors. One study found that people’s mental energy bounced back even when they just looked at pictures of nature. (Pictures of city scenes had no such effect.)

Studies have also found that natural beauty can elicit feelings of awe, which is one of the surest ways to experience a mental boost.

A Walk Outside Can Help You Focus. We know the natural environment is “restorative,” and one thing that a walk outside can restore is your waning attention. In one early study, researchers worked to deplete participants’ ability to focus. Then some took a walk in nature, some took a walk through the city, and the rest just relaxed. When they returned, the nature group scored the best on a proofreading task. Other studies have found similar results—even seeing a natural scene through a window can help.

The attentional effect of nature is so strong it might help kids with ADHD, who have been found to concentrate better after just 20 minutes in a park. “‘Doses of nature’ might serve as a safe, inexpensive, widely accessible new tool … for managing ADHD symptoms,” researchers wrote.

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Get moving: Doctor warns we are ‘sitting ourselves to death’

Catherine Garcia, The Week, Aug. 1, 2014

In words that will strike fear in the heart of lazy people everywhere, Dr. James Levine says that sitting around could be worse for your health than smoking.

In his new book Get Up!, the director of the Mayo Clinic-Arizona State University Obesity Solutions Initiative writes that people lose two hours of life for every hour spent sitting. He says it’s not hard to get moving, and even taking a short walk after dinner is better than doing nothing. “On one hand, the good news is that this is incredibly easy,” he told the Los Angeles Times. For those that are tied to their computers for eight hours a day, though, “it’s incredibly difficult.”

In his book, Levine talks about nonexercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT. This is the energy expenditure of an activity that isn’t a sport, like going for a walk or shoveling snow. Someone with a job that keeps them moving and active uses more NEAT calories, and “low NEAT is linked to weight gain, diabetes, heart attacks, and cancer.” He thinks employers are starting to understand that their workers can’t be sitting down all day, and that soon they’ll learn “you will make money if your workforce gets up and gets moving. Your kids will get better grades if they get up and get moving. The science is not refuted.”

Until everyone is free to frolic all day, the most important thing they can do is get up whenever they are able. “Sitting is more dangerous than smoking, kills more people than HIV and is more treacherous than parachuting,” Levine said. “We are sitting ourselves to death.”

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Want to Be More Creative? Take a Walk

By Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times, April 30, 2014

If you are unable to think of a catchy, creative way to present sales data or begin a newspaper column, take a walk. A brief stroll, even around your office, can significantly increase creativity, according to a handy new study.

Most of us have heard by now that exercise, including walking, generally improves thinking skills, both immediately and in the longer term. Multiple studies have shown that animals and people usually perform better after exercise on tests of memory and executive function, which is essentially the ability to make decisions and organize thoughts (although prolonged, intense exercise can cause brief mental fatigue—so don’t take a math test after a marathon).

Similarly, exercise has long been linked anecdotally to creativity. For millenniums, writers and artists have said that they develop their best ideas during a walk, although some of us also do our best procrastinating then.

But little science has supported the idea that exercise aids creativity.

So researchers at Stanford University recently decided to test that possibility, inspired, in part, by their own strolls. “My adviser and I would go for walks” to discuss thesis topics, said Marily Oppezzo, at the time a graduate student at Stanford. “And one day I thought: ‘Well, what about this? What about walking and whether it really has an effect on creativity?’”

With the enthusiastic support of her adviser, Daniel Schwartz, a professor in the Stanford Graduate School of Education, Dr. Oppezzo recruited a group of undergraduate students and set out to see if she could goose their creativity. Gathering her volunteers in a deliberately dull, unadorned room equipped with only a desk and (somewhat unusually) a treadmill, Dr. Oppezzo asked the students to sit and complete tests of creativity, which in psychological circles might involve tasks like rapidly coming up with alternative uses for common objects, such as a button. Then the participants walked on the treadmill, at an easy, self-selected pace that felt comfortable. The treadmill faced a blank wall. While walking, each student repeated the creativity tests, which required about eight minutes.

For almost every student, creativity increased substantially when they walked. Most were able to generate about 60 percent more uses for an object, and the ideas were both “novel and appropriate,” Dr. Oppezzo writes in her study, which was published this month in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Dr. Oppezzo next tested whether the effects lingered after a walk had ended. Again, walking markedly improved people’s ability to generate creative ideas, even when they sat down after the walk. In that case, the volunteers who had walked produced significantly more and subjectively better ideas than in their pre-exercise testing period.

Just how a brief, casual stroll alters the various mental processes related to creativity remains unclear, Dr. Oppezzo added. “This is an acute effect,” she said, making it distinct from any long-term physiological changes that exercise might produce inside the human brain. “It may be that walking improves mood” as its primary effect, she said, and creativity blooms more easily within a buoyed-up mind.

Or walking may divert energy that otherwise would be devoted, intentionally or not, to damping down wild, creative thought, she said. “I think it’s possible that walking may allow the brain to break through” some of its own, hyper-rational filters, she said.

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Take a Walk, Sure, but Don’t Call It a Break

by Dan Pallotta, HBR, February 27, 2014

Every weekday morning, I take a three-and-a-half mile walk around my neighborhood, in pretty much whatever weather my New England town throws at me. I split an apple and give half to each of the horses at the corner of Cross Street. The sounds of their chomps and slurps fill me with vicarious happiness.

When I was a kid I walked to school every day with John Flaherty, Doug Casey, and Rollie Graham. At the end of the day, after debate practice, Bill Bailey, Paul Salamanca, and I would walk home. We never stopped talking for a minute, and we could have used another hour each day to say all that was on our minds.

Part of the reason I created the Breast Cancer 3-Days, a charity walk, back in 1998, was to offer women with breast cancer and their supporters the luxury of having three days to converse, to daydream, and to imagine—without any of the aggravation of day-to-day life intruding.

But we’re wrong to think of walking only as a way to calm the mind, a source of exercise, or as a leisurely luxury. When it comes to work, walking can dramatically increase productivity. In a very real sense, walking can be work, and work can be done while walking. In fact, some of the most important work you may ever do can be done walking.

Last year I gave the closing talk at the 2013 TED Conference. The talk has been viewed nearly three million times and is now one of the 100 most-viewed TED talks of all time. I rehearsed the talk entirely on icy-cold morning walks over the course of about two months last January and February. Far from a luxury, I dreaded those walks, because my rehearsing was hard work. The productivity of that hour was so dense—it was mentally exhausting. Had I stayed home, chained to my desk, where most of us are taught that real serious work happens, the work would have been easier—but far less productive. I’d have gone online every few minutes to check a favorite news site. Grabbed a chocolate chip cookie or a glass of water. Checked my e-mail. Walking affords no such distractions. It’s just you and the work.

A 2013 study by cognitive psychologist Lorenza Colzato from Leiden University found that people who go for a walk or ride a bike four times a week are able to think more creatively than people who lead a sedentary life. The British Journal of Sports Medicine found that those benefits are independent of mood. Sunlight also boosts seratonin levels, which can improve your outlook.

These findings are absolutely true for me. The first mile of my walk is just a racket of competing voices of judgment and to-do lists. But after about two miles, no matter how low my mood may have been at the outset, those voices settle down.

Henry David Thoreau said famously, “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” The endorphin increase that comes with climbing hills makes the ideation that happens almost predictable. There are particular spots on my walks at which the ideas begin popping into my head, as if dropping from a magic tree on the side of the road there. Many refinements in essential phrases or visuals for my TED talk came to me at that spot.

But it’s work. The ideas don’t come unless I’ve engaged with the issue at hand. If I had U2 blaring in my ears, which would be a lot easier, they’d stay buried or just out of reach.

Last year my company, Advertising for Humanity, was up against a final deadline for a big branding assignment for a major client, and after months of work the idea just wasn’t gelling. On a morning walk it came to me. The new campaign has been a huge success. Our creative team did a walk together a few months back for another major assignment. The road seemed to be far more effective than a whiteboard for distilling the problem down to its essence. The clearing we created led to yet another big idea that has been a phenomenal success.

Walking is great for professional heart-to-heart talks. When I was running a large business in Los Angeles, I would often take employees on walks down Sunset Boulevard to talk things out. Biographer Walter Isaacson noted that walking was Steve Jobs’s preferred way to have a serious conversation. It’s not a break. It’s a change of scenery, but it’s work. The walking just makes it more productive work. The movement makes the conversation less stiff, more authentic, more responsible, even.

So, when you really need to get something done, get away from your computer and your conference room, and go for a long walk. It’s not a luxury. It’s work.

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Why a Brisk Walk Is Better

By Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times, December 4, 2013

Walking, fast or slow, is wonderful exercise. But now a first-of-its-kind study shows that to get the most health benefits from walking, many of us need to pick up the pace.

The findings stem from a new analysis of the National Walkers’ Health Study, a large database of information maintained at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory about thousands of middle-age men and women who walk regularly for exercise. Recruited beginning in 1998 at walking events and from lists of subscribers to walking-related publications, these volunteers filled out a lengthy survey about their typical walking distance and pace, as well as their health history and habits.

As most of us would likely guess, walking is the most popular physical activity in America. But people who walk for exercise do so at wildly varying speeds and intensities. Some stroll at a leisurely 2 miles per hour, which is low-intensity exercise. Others zip along at twice that pace or better, resulting in a sweatier workout.

Exercise guidelines generally suggest that for health purposes, people should engage in 30 minutes of moderate-intensity activity most days of the week. For walkers, a moderately intense pace would probably be about 15 or 16 minutes per mile.

It has generally been assumed that if people walk more slowly but expend the same total energy as brisk walkers—meaning that they spend more time walking—they should gain the same health benefits. But few large-scale studies have directly compared the impact of moderate- and light-intensity walking, especially in terms of longevity.

To do so, Paul T. Williams, a statistician at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, gathered data about 7,374 male and 31,607 female participants from the walkers’ health study, who represented almost every speed of fitness walker, from sluggish to swift. His findings were published online this month in PLoS One.

Dr. Williams divided participants into four numerically equal categories, based on their normal pace. Those in Category 1, the fleetest, averaged less than 13.5 minutes per mile, putting them on the cusp of jogging, while those in Category 4, the slowest, strolled at a relatively dilatory 17 minutes or more per mile. The majority of the walkers in this group in fact required at least 20 minutes to complete a mile, and many had a pace of 25 minutes or more per mile. (Interestingly, on average, female walkers were faster than men in all of the categories.)

Next, Dr. Williams cross-referenced his data against that in the essential if somewhat ghoulish National Death Index to determine which of the almost 39,000 walkers had died in the decade or so since they had joined the survey and from what.

It turned out that nearly 2,000 of the walkers had died. More telling, these deaths disproportionately were clustered among the slowest walkers. Those in Category 4 were about 18 percent more likely to have died from any cause than those in the other three categories and were particularly vulnerable to deaths from heart disease and dementia.

Unexpectedly, the death rate remained high among the slowest walkers, even if they met or exceeded the standard exercise guidelines and expended as much energy per day as someone walking briskly for 30 minutes. This effect was most pronounced among the slowest of the slow walkers, whose pace was 24 minutes per mile or higher. They were 44 percent more likely to have died than walkers who moved faster, even if they met the exercise guidelines.

One important inference of these statistics is that intensity matters, if you are walking for health. “Our results do suggest that there is a significant health benefit to pursuing a faster pace,” Dr. Williams said. Pushing your body, he said, appears to cause favorable physiological changes that milder exercise doesn’t replicate.

But there are nuances and caveats to that conclusion. The slowest walkers may have harbored underlying health conditions that predisposed them to both a tentative walking pace and early death. But that possibility underscores a subtle takeaway of the new study, Dr. Williams said. Measuring your walking speed, he pointed out, could provide a barometer of your health status.

So check yours, your spouse’s or perhaps your parents’ pace. The process is easy. Simply find a 400-meter track and, using a stopwatch, have everyone walk at his or her normal speed. If a circuit of the track takes someone 6 minutes or more, that person’s pace is 24 minutes per mile or slower, and he or she might consider consulting a doctor about possible health issues, Dr. Williams said.

Then, with medical clearance, the slow walkers probably should try ramping up their speed, gradually.

The most encouraging news embedded in the new study is that longevity rises with small improvements in pace. The walkers in Category 3, for instance, moved at a speed only a minute or so faster per mile than some of those in the slowest group, but they enjoyed a significant reduction in their risk of dying prematurely.

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Study: Fast walkers stay ahead of the game

WTOP, 6/10/2013
WASHINGTON—Some folks like to take time to smell the roses, but walking quickly could mean you’ll be around longer to enjoy them.

Senior citizens who are the fastest walkers live longer than those with the slowest gaits, according to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and their collaborators.

The researchers crunched numbers from nine studies involving nearly 35,000 people.

Looking at the lives of slow and fast walkers who were 75 years old, only 19 percent of the slowest men and 35 percent of the slowest women lived another 10 years.

However, 87 and 91 percent, respectively, of the fastest walkers were still going.

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Is It Better to Walk or Run?

By Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times, May 29, 2013

Walking and running are the most popular physical activities for American adults. But whether one is preferable to the other in terms of improving health has long been debated. Now a variety of new studies that pitted running directly against walking are providing some answers. Their conclusion? It depends almost completely on what you are hoping to accomplish.

If, for instance, you are looking to control your weight, running wins, going away. In a study published last month in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, and unambiguously titled “Greater Weight Loss From Running than Walking,” researchers combed survey data from 15,237 walkers and 32,215 runners enrolled in the National Runners and Walkers Health Study—a large survey being conducted at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

Participants were asked about their weight, waist circumference, diets and typical weekly walking or running mileage both when they joined the study, and then again up to six years later.

The runners almost uniformly were thinner than the walkers when each joined the study. And they stayed that way throughout. Over the years, the runners maintained their body mass and waistlines far better than the walkers.

The difference was particularly notable among participants over 55. Runners in this age group were not running a lot and generally were barely expending more calories per week during exercise than older walkers. But their body mass indexes and waist circumferences remained significantly lower than those of age-matched walkers.

Why running should better aid weight management than walking is not altogether clear. It might seem obvious that running, being more strenuous then walking, burns more calories per hour. And that’s true. But in the Berkeley study and others, when energy expenditure was approximately matched—when walkers head out for hours of rambling and burn the same number of calories over the course of a week as runners—the runners seem able to control their weight better over the long term.

One reason may be running’s effect on appetite, as another intriguing, if small, study suggests. In the study, published last year in the Journal of Obesity, nine experienced female runners and 10 committed female walkers reported to the exercise physiology lab at the University of Wyoming on two separate occasions. On one day, the groups ran or walked on a treadmill for an hour. On the second day, they all rested for an hour. Throughout each session, researchers monitored their total energy expenditure. They also drew blood from their volunteers to check for levels of certain hormones related to appetite.

After both sessions, the volunteers were set free in a room with a laden buffet and told to eat at will.

The walkers turned out to be hungry, consuming about 50 calories more than they had burned during their hourlong treadmill stroll.

The runners, on the other hand, picked at their food, taking in almost 200 calories less than they had burned while running.

The runners also proved after exercise to have significantly higher blood levels of a hormone called peptide YY, which has been shown to suppress appetite. The walkers did not have increased peptide YY levels; their appetites remained hearty.

So to eat less, run first.

But on other measures of health, new science shows that walking can be at least as valuable as running—and in some instances, more so. A study published this month that again plumbed data from the Runners and Walkers Health Study found that both runners and walkers had equally diminished risks of developing age-related cataracts compared to sedentary people, an unexpected but excellent benefit of exercise.

And in perhaps the most comforting of the new studies, published last month in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology and again using numbers from the versatile Runners and Walkers Health Study, runners had far less risk of high blood pressure, unhealthy cholesterol profiles, diabetes and heart disease than their sedentary peers. But the walkers were doing even better. Runners, for instance, reduced their risk of heart disease by about 4.5 percent if they ran an hour a day. Walkers who expended the same amount of energy per day reduced their risk of heart disease by more than 9 percent.

Of course, few walkers match the energy expenditure of runners. “It’s fair to say that, if you plan to expend the same energy walking as running, you have to walk about one and a half times as far and that it takes about twice as long,” said Paul T. Williams, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories and the lead author of all of the studies involving the surveys of runners and walkers.

On the other hand, people who begin walking are often more unhealthy than those who start running, and so their health benefits from the exercise can be commensurately greater.

“It bears repeating that either walking or running is healthier than not doing either,” Dr. Williams said, whatever your health goals.

For confirmation, consider one additional aspect of the appetite study. The volunteers in that experiment had sat quietly for an hour during one session, not exercising in any fashion, neither running nor walking. And afterward they were famished, consuming about 300 calories more than the meager few they had just burned.

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Daily Rituals

By Mason Currey, Slate, April 25, 2013
In 1885, Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky rented a cottage in a small village some 50 miles northwest of Moscow. After years of restless wandering through Europe, the 45-year-old composer found his new living arrangement a wonderful relief. “What a joy to be in my own home!” he wrote to his patroness. “What a bliss to know that no one will come to interfere with my work, my reading, my walks.”

Those walks were especially important. Before sitting down to work in the morning, Tchaikovsky took a short stroll, lasting no more than 45 minutes. Then, after lunch, regardless of the weather, he went out again. Tchaikovsky’s brother later wrote, “Somewhere at sometime he had discovered that a man needs a two-hour walk for his health, and his observance of this rule was pedantic and superstitious, as though if he returned five minutes early he would fall ill, and unbelievable misfortunes of some sort would ensue.”

Tchaikovsky’s superstition may have been justified—his walks were essential to his creativity, and he often stopped to jot down ideas that he would develop later at the piano. But then this is true of the majority of the composers in my Daily Rituals book—most of them required a long (and sometimes very long) daily walk to keep the ideas flowing.

Beethoven went for a vigorous walk after lunch, and he always carried a pencil and a couple of sheets of paper in his pocket, to record chance musical thoughts. Gustav Mahler followed much the same routine—he would take a three- or four-hour walk after lunch, stopping to jot down ideas in his notebook. Benjamin Britten said that his afternoon walks were “where I plan out what I’m going to write in the next period at my desk.” Working outside of Paris in 1971, Morton Feldman described his routine: “I get up at six in the morning. I compose until eleven, then my day is over. I go out, I walk, tirelessly, for hours.”

But the most extreme example is the French composer Erik Satie, who each morning would walk from his home in a Paris suburb to the city’s Montmartre district, a distance of about 6 miles. There he would visit friends, work on his compositions in cafés, eat dinner, and go out drinking—often missing the last train home, in which case he would walk back again, slipping into bed just before sunrise (and then getting up and walking back a few hours later).

Of course, it is not just composers who take long walks. Søren Kierkegaard had his best ideas during his daily walks, and sometimes he would be in such a hurry to get them down that, returning home, he would write standing up before his desk, still wearing his hat and gripping his walking stick or umbrella. Immanuel Kant took a walk every afternoon at precisely 3:30. Milton walked up and down his garden most afternoons, for three or four hours. And, according to one biographer, “If it rained, he would swing himself to and fro in a seat suspended from the ceiling, pulling on a rope.”

Most artists prefer a solitary walk, but I ran across some figures who enjoyed company. Mahler liked to drag his wife along on his afternoon hikes. Ludwig Wittgenstein would ask a close associate to accompany him on his walks. “A walk with Wittgenstein was very exhausting,” wrote Norman Malcolm, in a memoir of his friendship with the philosopher:

“Whatever we talked about, he turned his mind to it with great seriousness and intensity, and it was a formidable strain on me to keep up with his thoughts. He would walk in spurts, sometimes coming to a stop while he made some emphatic remark and looking into my eyes with his piercing gaze. Then he would walk rapidly for a few yards, then slow down, then speed up or come to a halt, and so on. And this uncertain ambulation was conjoined with the most exacting conversation!”

Whew! I could go on, but you get the idea: If you’re trying to generate creative work, you should really consider taking a daily walk—and maybe look into rigging up an indoor rope swing, too.

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