Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #160 BITESIZE | How Walking Improves Our Brain and Mental Health | Shane O’Mara

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Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More, bite-sized your weekly dose of optimism and positivity to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 84 of the podcast with the neuroscientist Shane O'Mara, a professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College, Dublin. Walking can be such an underrated activity, but Shane believes it can be our superpower. In this clip, he explains how the many benefits of walking go beyond the physical and can boost our cognition, our creativity and our mood.

Starting point is 00:01:50 How important is walking for our mood, for our happiness and for our overall mental health? If you ask people to rate before they go for a walk how they're feeling now on a scale of one to five, they might say, I'm feeling it around about a two. And if you ask them to rate how they'll feel after they've gone for a walk, they'll say, meh, probably about a two. Then you bring them out for a walk for 20 minutes and you ask them to rate how they feel. They'll now say a four. So we persistently underestimate how good a walk will make us feel. and that's true even for people who dread walking who dislike walking but you're a neuroscientist and i know from doing some research on you that you have studied a lot of things about stress and depression and its impacts on particular parts of

Starting point is 00:02:37 the brain including the hippocampus and that's an area that that can get affected quite powerfully by walking and what if you could expand? Yeah, I think one of the great discoveries or rediscoveries of the last couple of decades in neuroscience is the realization that the brain functions like a muscle. It's plastic. If you work it, it changes dynamically

Starting point is 00:02:59 in response to what you do to it. If you leave it, it tends to atrophy. I think one of the amazing discoveries we now know with absolute certainty, as certain as we know anything in science, that lots of aerobic exercise, getting out and moving, walking lots, materially affects the volume

Starting point is 00:03:19 of the hippocampal formation. It gets bigger as the result of exercise. And the functions it supports get better as the result of exercise. And you can demonstrate this in all sorts of ways. We've done studies, for example, with sedentary college students, and we've made them do forced exercise regimes on exercise bikes and shown that molecules that are expressed in the brain, which float into the blood, including brain-derived neurotrophic factor, go up and memory in these students goes up. But even more dramatically, this capacity is retained right throughout life. So it's never too late. So I'll just pick on one very important study. Art Kramer's group in Chicago

Starting point is 00:04:05 have taken a group of about 120 people in their early 70s, divided them into two groups, one who were just left to live their life as randomly into two groups. They live their life as they always live it. And the other group are brought out for a walk three times a week, that's all,

Starting point is 00:04:23 for about a mile and a half with a physiotherapist. And they're followed for a year or so. And what you see is in the walking group, improvements in memory, improvements in attention, an increase in the volume of the hippocampal formation, an increase in the amount of this amazing substance BDNF in the blood. And the 72-year-olds start to perform on psychological tests at the same level as 68-year-olds do. So in a very important sense, you've reversed the functional aging of the brain, whereas the other group who just continue their sedentary

Starting point is 00:05:00 tele-watching lifestyle, they continue on a pathway of decline. Yeah, I mean, that's incredible. And I like the point you're making, but it's never too late. That's the important thing. And I like to suggest that you only get old when you stop walking. You don't stop walking because you're old. Have we missed what is sitting right in front of us by looking for more exciting forms of movement and physical activity? Is it sitting right there in front of us? And have we, I don't know, is it reflective of culture where we're at? That we're always looking for the new gimmick, the new thing that's going to somehow, you know, reverse our biological age and get us fitter and healthier.

Starting point is 00:05:42 Whereas walking probably does all of the above and more. Yeah, well, we can get the benefits of it very easily. And, you know, it's something that I think, you know, it should be engineered invisibly into our lives. We've made it easier for the default to be to get into your car. What we should do is at all of the points of the day, whenever you're moving around, we should make it easy for you to just put one foot in front of the points of the day whenever you're moving around we should make it easy for you to just put one foot in front of the other without thinking about it yeah that's what we need to do you have shared some research that suggests actually if we walk prior to doing some sort of intellectual task we perform it better if we have walked just before yeah and we perform it more creatively

Starting point is 00:06:22 which is the other thing. We generate more ideas. So a very simple way of demonstrating that is, you know, to take a common household object like a pen, for example. And I ask you to come up with as many uses for that as you can in the next three minutes. And you might come up with seven or eight uses. You might come up with 25 uses. People vary and reliably vary in this capacity. But it's a very good measure of creativity. And what you find is that if you have people do a short period of movement, walk for five or ten

Starting point is 00:06:52 minutes prior to them generating these new creative ideas, they generate on average twice as many after having walked compared to those who are seated. Here's the important thing. It's often suggested that creativity diminishes with age. And that doesn't appear to be entirely true. But what is certainly correct is that if you get elderly people or people who are older in their 70s to walk prior to a creative idea generation, they will generate twice as many ideas as sedentary 20-year-olds who haven't walked. So I've already said it's never too late in terms of changing what happens inside your head as a

Starting point is 00:07:42 result of walking. Neither is it too late where creativity is concerned. It's mind-blowing, isn't it? We're seeing benefits for our physical health, for our mental health, for our creativity. How accessible is that? Walking before you do a task, whether it's simply a case of having a break at lunchtime where you go for a 10 or 15 minute walk. It is, it's not only that it's going to make you feel better, it's going to make you more creative. And so many of us are trying to actually become more creative, solve problems that we have in our lives, relationship problems, all kinds of things. It's always better after a walk. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Please do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the full conversation

Starting point is 00:08:32 with my guest. And if you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my new bite-sized Friday email. It's called the Friday Five. And each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles or books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it at drchastity.com forward slash Friday five. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday

Starting point is 00:09:20 and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #160 BITESIZE | How Walking Improves Our Brain and Mental Health | Shane O’Mara

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