Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #271 Why Walking Is The Superpower You Didn’t Know You Had with Professor Shane O’Mara (Re-Release)

Episode Date: May 14, 2022

This conversation was first released in November 2019.   When was the last time you gave any real thought to walking? It’s so easy to put one foot in front of the other. Yet this unique, underrated activity sets us apart from other species, and brings incredible advantages – yes, superpowers – if we do it enough.   My guest on this week’s podcast is the neuroscientist Shane O’Mara, a professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin. After reading his remarkable new book, In Praise of Walking: The New Science of How We Walk And Why It’s Good For Us, I couldn’t wait to talk to him about the topics it raises. Shane has always been a keen walker and aims to clock 15,000 to 17,000 steps each day on his pedometer. But as we discuss, the positive effects of walking go way beyond the fitness benefits we all know about.   Walking helps more than our hearts and lungs, our muscles and posture, yet modern, sedentary lives mean we’re doing far less of it than nature intended. It can increase creativity and problem solving, lift our mood and protect us from depression. Shane reveals how it helps learning, memory and cognition and how it can slow and even reverse the functional ageing of the brain. All this science, he hopes, will help convince town planners and public health officials that we must redesign our environments with pedestrians in mind.   This is such an enlightening conversation and I know you’ll gain some fascinating new perspectives on how you could (and why you should) fit more walking into your life. Why not head out for a stroll as you listen? Thanks to our sponsors: https://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore https://www.leafyard.com/livemore https://www.vivobarefoot.com/livemore Order Dr Chatterjee's new book Happy Mind, Happy Life: UK version: https://amzn.to/304opgJ, US & Canada version: https://amzn.to/3DRxjgp Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/3oAKmxi. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Show notes available at https://drchatterjee.com/271 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified health care provider with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

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. Hi, my name is Rangan Chatterjee. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More. Hey guys, how you doing? This is another one of my special Sunday re-release episodes,

and this conversation is all the way back from November 2019. When was the last time you gave walking any real thought? Well, it turns out that the simple act of walking is the superpower that many of us have forgotten about. You see, walking is a unique but often underrated activity that sets us apart from other species and brings us incredible advantages if we do it enough. Now, my guest is the neuroscientist Shane O'Mara, who wrote the wonderful book In Praise of Walking. And in this conversation, we talk about the positive effects of walking that go far beyond the fitness benefits we often

hear about. Walking helps our heart, our muscles, our posture, yet our modern sedentary lives mean that we are doing much less of it than nature intended. Walking helps us with creativity and problem solving. It lifts our mood and protects us from depression. And it also helps with learning, memory, and cognition. And it can even slow and reverse aging in the brain. This honestly is such an enlightening episode that I'm pretty sure will inspire you to get out there and walk more in your own life. I hope you enjoyed listening. And now, my conversation with Shane O'Mara. So Shane, welcome to the Feel Better Live More podcast. Thank you. I'm delighted to be here.

Now, Shane, ever since a friend of mine sent me the Guardian article about your book, I have been really looking forward to trying to get hold of you and actually locking you down for a podcast. And I'm really intrigued as why does a neuroscientist feel that it's important to write an entire book on the subjects of walking? So walking is this astonishing capacity that all humans have. It's kind of like the superpower that we have that we've overlooked. And the science of walking has come together in a really beautiful way over the past 10 or 15 years. And when my agent said to me, I should write a book on walking, I felt like I'd been slapped in the face because, of course, I should have written a book on walking. I knew the literature and it's something I'm passionate about and I wanted to tell the story of it. It's that simple. Amazing. i guess a lot of the best books are the ones with the simplest

ideas right and they often come from a passion as well and so you're hinting there that you've always loved to walk is walking something you've always done if you look back in your life can you can you think back to you know as an adolescent as a kid has there always been something about walking that's appealed to you if it was, yes. But the realisation I should write about it never did. So it's funny that when something is that close to you, that sometimes it takes somebody else to point it out to you. I remember, you know, when I was very young, we lived in the countryside and I used to love tramping across the fields and disappearing for hours at a time and scaring my poor mother and then eventually returning. So even then, I used to love walking.

And this morning before you got here today, we're recording this around lunchtime. It's just gone 12 o'clock. Have you been walking this morning? Is this something you do to prepare for in-speeds or anything like that? I've done about 7,000 steps this morning already. or anything like that? I've done about 7,000 steps this morning already. And on a day that I'm happy with my walking, I typically have done 15,000 to 17,000 steps. And I don't think that's extraordinary. I think this is something we should all be doing. Wow. I mean, that's incredible because I think a lot of people listening to this will be familiar with the adage about walking 10,000

steps a day. And I've written about this before saying I'm not entirely sure that there's, you know, brilliant research saying that it should be 10,000 steps a day, but I think for many, it's a pretty good barometer. So I think we should go into that in terms of, you know, are human beings walking enough in the 21st century? I guess we're recording this in London, so I'm particularly talking about us urbanites who, I guess, are always trying to become and get more physical activity into our lives. Are we walking enough? Yeah, so I don't think we are. I think evolution has constructed us to walk lots from very early in life, from, you know, 16 or 17 months of age, all the way through to really late in life.

So 80s, 90s. We can do that very, very well for long distances, long periods of time. But we've built an environment that acts against us. So humans have two major things we must do. We must source energy. And we've solved that problem in the modern world. We can get food very, very easily from all sorts of places. But the other side of that, the exercise, the movement that we've engaged in to get food, we don't need to do anymore.

So we've designed a world, like look at the world we're sitting in here, where we should be upstanding, mooching about, and we don't do that. Now, the 10,000 steps is a really, I think, is a good guideline. It's not well-founded in terms of good bodies of data, but it's worth thinking about what we know about what people actually do. So we know from smartphone data that the country that walks the most on average per day is the Japanese. They typically walk about 5,000 steps a day each. The country that walks the least is Saudi Arabia. They walk around about 3,000 steps a day.

The UK and the US are in there at about 4,000 steps a day on average. We're capable of very, very much more. So a child or an infant learning to walk does enormous amounts of walking. When you actually measure what they do, the average kid walks about 2,300 steps per hour and falls on average back on their butt about 17 times per hour. So kids are made for this. We adults are made for it, but we've engineered a society that militates against it. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's very similar to the problems we've got with our foods, our food supply, our food environments. We very much, you know, as humans, we, you know, we've always had to go out

and find our foods. You know, it's always been pretty scarce. And so we've got to use activities to go and get that food. What food was available to us would be dictated by geography and climate. Whereas now we're living in a world where actually the food environment is pretty similar, like 12 months a year, whether it's summer or it's winter, we have readily available hyper and ultra processed foods, which are having a consequent impact on our health, not just obesity. So I guess that's a very similar theme, isn't there? The environment in which we are living is working against us. Yeah i think you see that the problem is the default is easy we can blame the individual uh and it's it's very easy not to see

the system around you so where does your food come from how is it sourced how is it treated but actually we treat this as a as a problem of of calories and money we don't we don't treat it in in a much greater and wider sense. And movement is the same issue. In my own building, for example, I always use this example. To get to the stairs, I have to go through three fire doors, whereas to use the lift, the lift is just in front of me. So the default that we provide ourselves is one of ease, when actually we can engineer things so that we get a bit more movement in. so that we get a bit more movement in. And if we can do that during the course of the day, every day,

it will pay us benefits in all sorts of ways that we aren't conscious of, but we will be glad of. Yeah. You know, on the way here, I got the tube from Euston to Pimlico. And when I was coming out at Pimlico Underground Station, there were two sets of stairs on both sides. And there was, sorry, there was two escalators on both sides. And in the middle was a set of stairs and I was coming out. So I was having to go up and I have made it a rule where possible to never outsource my physical activity to a device or a machine or to an electronic appliance, wherever I can. I'm not perfect, but I did think

as I was going there, I thought, okay, you know what? It is quite far, but I'm going to take the stairs. What was interesting is that I observed myself on the stairs. I observed who was around me. And at the top, I had to look back. And I was the only person, certainly in the time that I was there, who took the stairs. Now, I'm not saying that in terms of putting blame on anybody else who was not doing it. I appreciate many people struggle to walk up that much. Maybe the air is not fantastic in the underground. People are tired. They're carrying bags.

I totally get that. But I guess that is very much reflective of what you're saying, isn't it? It's easier for us to take those escalators than it is for us to take the stairs. Yeah, and the defaults are the easy things. Because humans, you know, we are lazy. And I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. We are designed to conserve the energy that we've harvested uh because you know we're waiting for the lean times that will come and we've engineered our world so that those lean

times don't happen anymore um but you know the problem of designing the environment is a difficult one like should there instead of stairs should you have ramps, for example? Should these be actually placed in a kind of a parallel fashion rather than a straight vertical fashion? Would people use them more

if there were other designs available? If there were lifts present, I guarantee you people would use the lifts. And this is the tendency that we cannot blame people for because we've all inherited it.

And, you know, asking the individual to do something about it is not the place to look. What we have to do is to look at the issue of how the environment itself is designed.

Is it one that facilitates movement? And generally, no, is the sad answer. You know, pedestrians are thought of as we're the last path or the last piece in the design chain. But actually, we should have our design centered around what we need to do. Yeah. It's almost seen as impolite as well, isn't it, to point someone towards the stairs. And what

I mean by that is if you check into a hotel, for example, you know, as you get your card or your key, they will say, you know, it's just over here, just walk down here and the lift is there. Lift is, you know, first door on your left, something like that. Uh, nobody really tells you, but also the stairs are just a bit further down through that dark door in that sort of murky passageway. You know, it's everything's set up. And I, I kind of understand that, you know, I think people are trying to be polite. So they think, Hey, you know, someone's checked into my hotel. Let me point them to the easiest way that it is for them to get up to the third floor. But we're seeing around us, aren't we, the consequences of this. And I guess one of the things that really struck me when I was reading your book, which I've got to say is

fantastic, and I would highly recommend people read it, really. If you're wondering if you should be walking more or why you should be walking more, I think that book will certainly convince you. But there was an interesting point where you talked about how many times, and you've touched on it already in this conversation, a child tries and falls on their bum when they're trying to walk. And for me, I'm thinking, why on an evolutionary level, a child is pretty stable, aren't they, on their all fours? They can crawl around, they're not going to fall and do themselves any damage. Why do we as human beings put so much effort into getting off our fours and getting up onto two feet? Yeah, so this is kind of like the great, one of the great questions to try and understand how this evolved. So primates generally adopt

a kind of an intermediate form of walking. So they're not pure quadrupeds. They don't walk around on four limbs. Chimps, if they want to go quickly somewhere, engage in what's called knuckle walking. They lean forward and they power themselves with their limbs, but they also push their knuckles into the ground.

The consequence of the way that we interact, or sorry, the way we move, is that the range that we can extend over is much greater calorie for calorie than a chimpanzee, our nearest living relative can do. And in terms of the calorific demands of walking, our form of walking is extremely efficient. It's about as efficient as it's possible to be. So our food finding, food foraging capability is much greater simply because we can walk. And because we can walk, we can use weapons. We can carry weapons. We can kill things.

We can dismember them. And we can do something which no other species can do. We can jointly carry the prey that we have killed together on a spear and bring it back and cook it. So walking allows us. So the fact that we've evolved this kind of slightly odd posture brings with it all sorts of advantages that are denied other species. And it's an ecological niche that other species don't occupy. So other animals that are bipedal like birds do not occupy the same ecological niche as we do. Their head is in a very different position to ours, and they don't have hands that they can move and interact with the world with.

So in many ways, are you saying that our ability to walk is what fundamentally makes us human? Yeah, and not alone that, but our ability to walk is what allowed us to conquer the planet. Because we are able to walk, let's say, 18, 20 miles a day, every day from early in life until late in life. So if you think of that long walk out of Africa we did 120,000 years ago, it doesn't take long to cover a couple of thousand miles if you don't have a fixed place of shelter. All you need to do is just walk to the next safe place. And we can do that. And we can do it in small migratory groups and have done it in small groups. And we know this because of the trace fossils of human migration that exist in Africa and in other places.

Humans are very, very good at being attuned to others when they're walking. We sense when somebody else senses danger when we haven't. If people turn their heads to something suddenly, we reflexively turn our head in the same direction. Even though we haven't detected anything, we're taking our cue from the other person. We can carry infants and we can also do something which to my, I haven't been able to find any other species that can do it. We can carry infants and we can also do something which to my, I haven't been able to find any other species that can do it. We can carry food and swallow while walking because of the peculiar position of our gullet relative to our stomach. Birds, for example, you'll see them, they might walk a little while they're swallowing a fish, but they have to throw their heads back in order to let the food drop directly into the gullet. But we can walk and talk, hence people walking with burgers and chips and all the rest of it.

It is incredible, Shane, to think about this, that there are all these kind of adaptations, these evolutionary adaptations that we've undergone to facilitate these things. So why should we be able to walk and eat at the same time or walk and carry our prey back or walk our way out of Africa to basically go across the whole world in a way that I don't think many other species have done. No, the mosquito probably and the rat, but they followed us and horses and cattle followed us as well. And horses and cattle have followed us as well. So they're tracking our humans or they're coming along with humans because we've bred them for our own purposes. But it just so happens that when you go back and look at the various kind of evolutions or evolutionary pathways of primates as they evolved in Africa, some are more upright than others. evolutionary pathways of primates as they evolved in Africa. Some are more upright than others,

and that will have given them, at that time, certain advantages that it would have been denied others. So range is a very, very clear one. We can walk very long distances, particularly in the noonday sun, when predators like tigers are lying down asleep, and we cast a small shadow, and we we can sweat and we can carry our own water you know so we can do a lot of things that other species can't yeah absolutely a lot of people make a similar case about running they say our ability to run is fundamentally what makes us human and actually allows us to do a lot of things that our predators can't do and now it allows us to track our prey

for long periods of time. And I guess, have you thought about it in terms of running as well? And is there a fundamental difference between walking and running? Are they almost like sort of brothers and sisters together? Yeah, I don't buy the story on running as much as some people might push it

because children don't run to hunt prey. They will only start to do that when they get into their teenage years when they're strong enough to do it. Now, humans have one remarkable ability where running is concerned and it's called persistence hunting. We can run herbivores to ground

because we can sweat to cool. They can't. They have to stop and gulp air in order to cool down. But we're not fast runners. We're not like antelopes. We're not like gazelles. We're not like tigers or cheetahs. So we can run at moderate speeds for reasonable periods of time, but we can walk at high speeds for very, long periods of time um and i don't think we should think of the two as being uh kind of contraposed to each other you will have in any group of humans some who are exceptionally good at running uh and they'll be the persistence hunters you'll have others that will follow them um and they'll be the uh persistence walkers yeah that's

a good way of looking at it and i'm mindful that we're recording this literally 24 hours after elliot kipchoge broke the two hour yeah record well not not the record i guess he's the first human to have run a marathon in under two hours from what we can tell certainly um which is incredible i i saw a film uh recently called 3100. I actually interviewed the director of the film recently. And, you know, he filmed a variety of different running experiences around the world. One of them was a tribe in the Kalahari Desert. And he talks about, well, he doesn't talk about it, he shows us that these guys, running is a way of life for them but but i think what you're trying to say i think is that actually not all of us have to be runners and i guess all of us can be walkers yeah i don't think that's the key isn't it all of us have the

ability to walk yeah um but remember as well uh your ability to run in certain environments is really restricted you can't run in a forest very easily. It's dangerous. Your risk of injury rises as your speed rises, especially if the forest is very dense. It's very difficult to run in rocky terrain. You're better off walking rather than running because, again, of the risk posed by the terrain you're on. Muddy riverbanks, things like this. Again, you have to be very, very careful in terms of your strategy for getting around.

And the data are very clear on this. People who run a lot run the risk of injury. And the rate of injury rises per million steps run. It does not rise per million steps walked. It's approximately flat. Wow. Well, that's incredible, especially when many of us are, I guess, we're trying to be more physically active and many people join the gym or they join a new exercise class and within a couple of weeks they get injured and then they can no longer engage in the activity that they wanted to do. And that leads them to being sedentary yeah so you're making the

case i guess that walking is probably one of the lowest risks it's one of the lowest risk but also highest benefit activities that exist yes and i'm also making the case that our society doesn't facilitate it yeah and that's the problem that we have to counter. You know, on the walk to here today, for example, we had to stop multiple times to allow cars to go past. we could and should because engineers typically have worried about engineering car flow and regulating pedestrians for the benefit of cars rather than the other way around. And cars have only been with us a hundred years, but we've been walking for tens of millennia. Yes, it was madness, isn't it? That we've revolved everything around the motor vehicle. I think it's worse in America. I've just come back from 10 days in California. And it's incredible. I was staying with a friend in Santa Monica. And, you know, these guys take Ubers everywhere. And I had a meeting to go to. And I looked at Google Maps, and I thought, that's only one and a half miles away. I think I'm going to walk, you know, I don't need to take an Uber for that. It's a nice day, as often is the case in California.

What was interesting is I had a little look in my head. I tried to figure out roughly which way I needed to go. I try my best not to use Google Maps too much when I'm walking, if I can help it. Obviously, sometimes I need to. And in America, with the kind of block system, it's often a lot easier to kind of facilitate in your head and understand where you are going. And I started walking and then I knew I was on the right track, but then I came up to like an intersection that I simply couldn't cross. And I had to almost back up a few streets and go around it. And I've noticed that in a few American cities that it is literally set up around the motor vehicle. And if you're trying to walk places, you know, you cannot walk every single route. There are only specific ways and you can get rounds. And yes, America's got

a huge obesity problem. Yes, there are many, many different factors when it comes to obesity and, you know, chronic lifestyle-related illness. But I can't help but thinking something culturally in America is causing a big problem. It's set up around the motor vehicle and it's not set up around the human being who wants to walk on their two feet. Yeah, and you see this when you, again, you look at the kind of what are the walkable cities and you look at the indices of what are walkable or what makes a city walkable. indices of what are walkable or what makes a city walkable. So if you look at cities like New York, Boston, and San Francisco, people walk a hell of a lot in those cities. They're very densely packed cities with lots happening in the cities. And there isn't a lot of room, relatively speaking, for cars. There are cars there, obviously. Go to places like Atlanta. Outside of the city center,

Places like Atlanta, outside of the city center, there are no footpaths. You cannot walk. You know, and in California, you look at the contrast between somewhere like San Jose and San Francisco. Very similar climate. One is very car bound. The other is limited in the number of cars because the bay is in the way and they've got a very good public, well, a reasonably good public transport system. So you can see even within the cities that are in the US, some are much more walkable than others. And interestingly, the more walkable cities are the ones that are more expensive and people like living in the more, they don't have the same experience of enemy and other things that people in car-bound cities have. So the US

has a particularly major problem in allowing people to walk. And again, if you look at the index of walkability, cities in which people have to drive a lot tend to be fatter cities, that people tend to have a problem. But it's unsurprising. You have to get into your car to go to the shops, to go to work, to do anything. Yeah, you've got a lovely mnemonic in your book that you hope that town planners and city planners start adopting. I wonder if you could share what that is. And then also share, since the book has been out, has anyone been in contact with you with interest in sort of using your expertise

to help them redesign their city centres or their town centres. So I finish up the book on the theme of social walking. And I think this is kind of one of the things that's been very much overlooked

when you look at the evolutionary literature on how we walk. Our walking is social. We're really good at synchronising our behaviour together when we're walking. We're really good at synchronizing our behavior together when we're walking. We start to walk at the same pace. Naturally, we look upon it as something aggressive when we're with somebody who persistently walks ahead of you at too high a

speed. And what I argue for in that chapter is we must have a charter for mobility that's based around the needs of humans, around pedestrians in our towns and cities. And that needs to be baked into the public policy process at the start. And to do that, what I suggest is we have a very simple way of remembering this. And the word I use is ease. So our cities should be easy. It should be easy for everybody to get around and easy to walk in. This should be accessible to everybody. And I mean that for not just walkers, but also for people who are mobility impaired, who've got problems with vision.

You know, we need to design our footpaths so that they've got the little bubbles for people to step on so that they know that they're at the edge of the footpath. We need to lower the edges of footpaths so that people in wheelchairs can get around much more easily. Our cities and towns should be safe for all walkers. And the walkers should take primacy where movement is concerned. We shouldn't mix cars. We should really try and just engineer cars out of things. And then our cities and towns should be enjoyable, which is the last letter of ease, and it should be enjoyable for all.

And the implication there is that we should stop thinking of streets as thoroughfares. We should be thinking of our streets as destinations, places that people want to hang out, places that people can enjoy. And the reality is, you know, if you want to be strictly utilitarian about it, streets that are thoroughfares are not economically active streets. Streets that are destinations are really economically rich because people hang around and spend their money there. They meet their friends there. They become almost like outdoor shared living spaces or living

rooms that we can all be in together. I think that economic point is super interesting because unfortunately a lot of the things that need to happen in society to make change are when there's an economic driver there. You know, the moral driver, the health driver often doesn't appear to be enough, which is incredibly frustrating. But you're sort of saying that there is an economic case as well when we do this. And I guess there are so many examples these days, even the town in which I grew up and which I now live in. I remember as a kid, the main kind of shopping high street, you know, cars would go down it and people would park on it. And, you know, maybe, it might even be 20 years ago now it became pedestrianized and it was a huge you know kickoff at the time people were unhappy with it but

everyone's accepted it everyone's happy it's a really nice vibrant place to sort of walk around now because there are no cars there so people feel safe the kids can run they're not constantly having their parents telling them stop stop don't do don't do this, don't do that, because they can run freely and walk freely. And is this a pattern that we see? We see this everywhere you go. Really? Resistance at first and then acceptance. Resistance at first. So Galway, where I'm from on the west coast of Ireland, the main street is a street, ironically enough, called Shop Street.

Okay. Because when it was an old medieval town, this was the first street that shops were built on. And the resistance there to pedestrianization was astonishing. But actually now it's this amazing street that runs from the center of the city all the way down to the river. And it's a really vibrant cultural quarter and nobody would go back.

And if you look in London, for example, where we're doing the recording here, when you look at something like TripAdvisor or one of these things to find out what tourists rate as the best attractions in London, it's Covent Garden. There are no cars in Covent Garden. It's Buckingham Palace. There are no cars outside Buckingham Palace. It's the galleries. It's all of these places that humans can assemble freely together. It's not the gyratory at the Elephant and Castle. It's certainly not the A40 West.

You know, people might drive in that and think, whoa, I'm glad I don't live here. But people do not come to London in order to enjoy the motorway system. They come to places that other humans can congregate. And this, you know, again, another theme that comes out of the book is that we underestimate how important sociability and social life is to humans. And the creation of kind of social spaces that we can freely walk around in

is one of the, you know, when architecture does it well, it's one of the great achievements that makes a city an attractive place to be. Like the old Italian cities, for example, bologna wonderful place to to walk around uh florence if you look at piazza della repubblica those kinds of places wonderful places for social living yeah and i think back now to european cities i visited on on holiday and there is something you know particularly these italian little town centers it's so it's so you know there's not much room for cars that's the joy right yeah that's the

joy of those cities um there is no room for cars and uh what you have is a kind of a stable and wonderful lifestyle that has been there for hundreds of years long before the car evolved and will be there long after we've decided that actually car bound living is a mistake and italians love their cars you know yeah absolutely but they haven't tried to squeeze them into these little old towns and they're lovely for that for their absence you mentioned social walking and i find that incredibly interesting this idea that as we're walking people around you probably start to synchronize their cadence and their speed and many other things that allow us to walk in large groups. And I think about,

there's a lot of protests going on at the moment about climate and all kinds of things. And often it's done with peaceful marches. So is there something about a group of humans walking together in a march that is i mean what is that doing is something going on with our brains why do we feel that walking together is a great way of actually demonstrating it and expressing the strength of feeling that we have for a particular issue yes so this is something else that sets us apart from all those other species other species heard uh but they do it you know for reasons of herd, but they do it, you know, for reasons of protection or they do it for reasons of migration.

We do it for something which is in our minds, which is, you know, to protest against legal structures. You know, they're not something you can touch in the world or political structures. You can't touch them,

but it's something that we all share together. And humans, when we gather, many of of us not all of us but many of us have this feeling of effervescence as it's referred to uh which is the kind of the joy of the merging of yourself with others who are bound together in in a similar kind of of mission and uh again as i said it's's an absolutely uniquely human propensity. The problem is, though, kind of twofold. On the one hand, autocratic states don't want people gathering together in shows of force, sorry, showing their dissent against the regime.

And the other is the walkers themselves. It's all very well to go out for a protest march against X, whatever X happens to be. But that's not going to change the world unless you do something afterwards. And that afterwards involves engaging in a democracy, in the political system. It involves voting for members of parliament to do things. It involves writing policy documents. It involves organisation. It involves a whole members of parliament to do things it involves writing policy documents it involves organization it involves a whole lot of other things so sending the signal that you're unhappy is one thing but taking the action after you've sent the signal is something else entirely yeah for sure and i get that in terms of actually making change i just find it fascinating that

so many things are done over walks, you know, and you dedicate a whole chapter in your book to social walking, which is incredibly fascinating. 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 the brain, including the hippocampus. And that's an area that can get affected quite powerfully by walking. I wonder if you could expand. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1. AG1 has been in my own

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all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. That's drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Yeah, so, you know, I think one of the great discoveries or rediscoveries of the last kind of couple of decades in neuroscience is the realization that the brain is a muscle or functions like a muscle. It's plastic. If you work it, it changes dynamically in response to what you do to it. If you leave it, it tends to atrophy. So the parts of the brain that are concerned with learning and memory is a part of the brain called the hippocampal formation.

It's also the same part of the brain that's involved in the processing of information about stress. And it's also very badly affected by depression. And here's, I think, one of the amazing discoveries. 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 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 bicycles, 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, 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 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 for about a mile and a half with a physiotherapist in small groups, groups of two. 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 tele-watching lifestyle, they continue on a pathway of decline. Yeah, I mean, that's incredible.

And I like the point you're making, that 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. Yeah. And I guess walking, and I'm thinking about people in my family now, walking is something, I think this is actually part of the problem as well. And one of the reasons why I think you had to write this book is it's such a simple thing. It's something that many of us don't think about. We just put one foot in front of another and we're walking. So we don't give it maybe the credence that it deserves. We don't, we don't probably recognize its importance. Yeah, but I think until we lose it.

What you've said though is the key point that we don't think about it. We just put one foot in front of the other. And that's the point, I think, that has gone wrong in how we've engineered our modern world. 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 other without thinking about it. Yeah. That's what we need to do. Yeah, it's mind-blowing.

And as you're describing all these benefits, I'm thinking back to, I went to Nairobi in 2011 for the first time. I'd never been to Africa before, never been to Kenya. And my wife's father, so my father-in-law has a lot of his family living out there and they are Jains. And it's really interesting that, you know, the environment in Nairobi is certainly not set up for walking. It's a busy city with lots of cars, but this Jane community, they have a center. And every evening at sort of dusk time, everyone in the community seems to congregate there. And for about an hour, they've got this track. They all walk together for an hour together, just in, I wouldn't say in meditative silence, but it's a very quiet, it's a very reflective time. And

because it's done in a community, because there's other people there, I think it attracts people. They come each day and I guess there's social connection. They're seeing your friends, your family, but there's something about that daily walking together, which is extremely powerful, I think. And you see this in Italy. In Italian towns, they have the wonderful phenomenon of the passeggiata. At seven or eight o'clock in the evening, in these car-free centres, people come out for a walk around together. It's an amble. They talk to each other.

They see each other. If you go to some of the squares in Rome, you'll see it happening, but you particularly see it in the smaller towns. It happens in Sicily. And I think, you know, you're hitting on something really important there

that this time that we can gather and chat and talk free from the clamor of the day. And we can have also this wonderful thing, companionable silence. It really gives you a great opportunity

just, you know, sort things out in your head. Yeah, and I guess in many ways, it's never been more important than in the busy, distraction-filled 21st century in which we now live, where, you know, many of us, you know, anytime we have a bit of downtime, we pick up our phones, we're consuming, we're reacting. We are, you know, we're not alone with our own thoughts. And I think there is something powerful about walking. I know you certainly talk about this.

I've written about this in the past as well, about creativity and what happens when I was writing my books. And I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I would guess it was the same. If you're coming across writer's block, what do I do? Put everything down, go outside for a walk. You come back and before you know it, problem solved, right? You're recharged. go outside for a walk, you come back and before you know it, problem solved, right?

Yeah, you're recharged. Yeah. And in fact, I wrote a lot of this book by making notes on pages of my kitchen table, numbering those pages, and then going out and walking with a dictaphone and dictating it. And what you often find, apart from getting the weird looks as you're going along, looks as you're going along, is that you talk far past the notes that you've made and thoughts come to you that wouldn't have come to you had you been sitting at your keyboard. And then you end up with this big slab of text, which has too many pauses in it and all the rest of it needs to be edited. But this is something that many of the great writers of the ages have done. You know, philosophers like Immanuel Kant, for example, enormously productive.

He would go and you could set the clock by him, apparently, in Regensburg. 3 p.m. every day, he went for a two holidays and enjoyed the feeling of not being in pain from 30 mile walks. But for his regular writing, he would get up, make a few points on a page, go for an hour's walk and then come back and compose. back and compose. Stephen King, the novelist, in his book on writing describes how he goes for very long country walks before he starts writing every day. It really, really does help. Yeah. Do we know the mechanisms by which we become more creative and we can solve problems when we go out? We take a break and we go out for a walk. Do we know exactly what is going on there? So I think there are probably two or three different things going on here. So I think we have a misperception about how we problem solve.

And we think problem solving is active. It's time on the task. It's banging your head against the problem. And actually, when we look at how the brain operates, we have what's known as a kind of a default mode, sometimes called the default mode network, where we're actually zooming back out. We're looking at kind of the bigger picture. And to do that, we're not engaged with the environment. And then we have what's called a task positive network where we're focused on the thing. network where we're focused on the thing. And creative problem solving happens best when you're able to flicker between these two states where you're looking at the forest, then you're looking

at the trees, and then you come back out. So you're searching for the pattern. And I have the suspicion, although I can't prove this, but I would hope that we would be able to soon, that one of the things that happens when you're walking is that you're able to engage in kind of an active idle mode of thought where you can flicker in on the problem, focus back out from it, hone in on it again and come back in and out. And walking facilitates this kind of rhythmic focusing, defocusing on a problem. And I also think there's another thing going on. When we're sitting as we're doing now, our brain doesn't have to work very hard. It doesn't have to work to maintain posture. When we stand up, one of the first things you have to do, or one of the first things you see is our blood pressure changes, our heart rate changes, our breathing changes. And the brain has the particular job of keeping you stable.

So there's a lot more activity going on. So I think what's also happening when you're up and about, more of the brain is active and ideas that would be kind of just below the level of consciousness previously are now just being brought above and into consciousness because the brain is a bit more active. Yeah. And you mentioned at one point in your book that actually when we walk, other senses are heightened. Yeah. Which I found, you know, it kind of makes sense. I think a lot of it intuitively makes sense. But only when you say it. Only when you say it, exactly. You don't think about it.

So what happens to all these other senses? Yeah, so again, you know, I think we've had this kind of view of how the brain works, which is manifestly when you think, again, when you say it out loud, it's wrong. We think about the brain as something that passively takes in information from the outside,

does something to it, and then we engage in a motor movement. But actually, the world is too complex for us to do that. And instead, a better way of looking at the brain is that it's kind of information hungry. It's predicting things continually that are about to happen and searching for information about the world to allow us to predict what we're going to do next. And it's engaged in the generation of possibilities. And it does this all the time when we're moving around. And if you imagine,

for example, you're a cat, imagine you're a mouse. And I use this example in the book. As a mouse, you don't want to get eaten. As a cat, you want to eat the mouse. So you're walking around and your job as the mouse is to detect the presence of the cat. And what you find in the mouse's brain when it's moving like that, activity in its visual areas are heightened, activity in its areas that are concerned with hearing and all of those parts of the brain are heightened. When it's in movement, they're not when it's not moving. And the same is true of the cat, because when you're moving, that's how you're going to capture your prey. You don't capture your prey passively if you're a cat. You're a predator, you hunt. So it makes sense that, and, you know, again, think about humans out on the African plains 100,000 years ago carrying a fairly small spear.

Is that yellow thing moving over there an antelope? In which case I can go after it quickly. Or is it a tiger? And should I run away? Or can I run away? You need to make these decisions really, really quickly. They have to be really, really fast. So a selection effect in favor of

a brain that anticipates what's about to happen makes a lot more sense. I mean, that is incredibly deep on one level, because in many ways, what you've just articulated is saying that maybe if we're sat down all day, or we're certainly not walking, maybe our brain is only in first gear. And maybe to get into second, third, fourth, and fifth gear, maybe we need movement. We need walking. So if we're living sedentary lives, if we're sat down in our car to get to work, if we're sat at a desk all day and we sit down to eat our lunch at our desk and we come back and we sit on the sofa in the evening, that for many of us maybe our brains have not got out of their scare no no and the weird thing of course is that sitting around all

day is tiring yeah and then you come home after not having done a day digging ditches uh sitting at your computer and you're exhausted and the reason you're exhausted is because our bodies and brains need movement. And that movement generates all sorts of wonderful molecules that feed back on our sense of well-being, that facilitate good things in terms of our musculature, in terms of our heart rate, and in terms of what's going on in the brain. So actually, somehow, we need to break this. of what's going on in the brain. So actually, somehow, we need to break this. I don't have a solution for it except to say that we,

right at the outset, need to bake into design principles for work, for buildings, for all the things that we do. For schools? For schools, absolutely. No question about it. The facilitating movement

and making sure that much more movement happens. The other thing, of course, we have to do is honor sleep. You know, the two things that will do the best for your mental health

and for your physical health is to get lots of walking in, get lots of proper quality sleep. I don't deal with that in this book, but there are many excellent books. I've dealt with that in my team. But it's a great point. It's such a good point and again you know my wife and i this summer we reflected on a lot of things and our children have moved school recently and it's a bit further away

so the natural tendency would be or would have been to drive there and we've made it a little bit of a vow in the family that we are literally going to be trying our very best every day to walk the kids to school, even though it's probably 25 minutes. I know that that is not long. You talk to a lot of people and they'll be like, you know, people around the world walk way more than that to school every day. But I guess it's how used we are to convenience and quick, short car journeys. But we made a big difference. and quick, short car journeys, but we made a big difference. And I think 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 it. Yeah, and we perform it more creatively, which is the other thing. We generate more ideas. So a very simple way of demonstrating that is, you know, 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 in this capacity but it's a very good measure of creativity knowledge workers

creative artists highing scientists will typically come up with many more uses for a common object than somebody who's not working in those kind of domains. But here's the rub. For 100 years or more, psychology has explored creativity in people who come to a lab and sit down and do a creative task. What psychology has not done is asked, what would happen if we got people to move prior to getting them to do a creative task? And what you find is that if you have people do a short period of movement, walk for five or ten minutes prior to them generating these new creative ideas, for five or ten 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.

And the studies on this are very beautiful. They're very carefully controlled. There's one where they've had people sit on a treadmill, on a chair, and they've had them walk on the self-same treadmill. And again, you find the same thing coming through that walking either on the treadmill or walking around an environment, you will on average generate about twice as many new ideas. Now, here's the important thing. It's often suggested that creativity diminishes with age. 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 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 um how accessible is that you know walking before you do a task you know whether it's walking your kids to school whether it's before we get in the office whether it's simply a case of you know 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. Yeah. So the trick, at least the trick I use

is write down the few bullet points of what it is that you're trying to do. And that organizes your thoughts into a kind of a schema. And then just put it down and go for a walk and come back to it. Yeah, that's the way. So you kind of almost signpost it to your brain. These are the four or five things that I need to worry about. And then you forget about it. Just go for a walk.

And let your deeply clever brain do the work for you. Yeah. And if it hasn't worked as a result of the walk, sleep on it. And, you know, there's John Das Passos, the novelist, used to say whenever he had trouble with writing, he would let the committee of sleep solve the problem for him. And it is clearly the case as well that for difficult problem solving, you know, having a good night's sleep can often, not always, but can often facilitate the problem solving. And having had a good day of movement before sleep helps you sleep. Yeah, I think the powerful message for me in what you're talking about at the moment is that our brain is always trying to solve these problems for us if we allow it to. And it's very powerful what you said, that the two most important things we can do for our mental health is sleep well and walk lots. And they're things that actually really are available to so many of us. I know many people struggle with their

sleep. And I think that the human being's default state is to be able to sleep. And generally speaking, I would say in my many years of clinical experience, I would say that the majority of people who are struggling with their sleep are usually doing something in their lifestyle that they do not realize is affecting their ability to sleep at night. You do get primary sleep disorders, but by and large, I think it's rare compared to the people who are struggling because they're not moving enough or they're not switching off in the evening or their stress levels are too high, whatever it might be. But walking and sleeping are two things that are available. So as you mentioned mental health, and I think that will be a perfect sort of place to go in this conversation is how important is walking for our mood, for our happiness and for our overall mental health?

So there are two different ways of looking at this. So let's look at it kind of on the positive side first. 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, 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. They underestimate just how much are the positive effect of a walking and kind of raising your mood at the moment. Now, for a much more difficult population or a more difficult problem,

which is really a blight in modern life, major depressive disorder, the lifetime risk for males and females combined is about 10%, which is astonishingly high, way, way, way too high. combined is about 10%, which is astonishingly high, way, way, way too high. And a recent remarkable study in Australia following, I think, about 35,000 adults looked at the risk of succumbing to major depressive disorder as a function of the amount of walking that the adults were doing. And for every level of walking above the most sedentary in the population, the risk of succumbing to depression falls. So the lesson there is that you're less likely, if you do not have a major depressive disorder, you're much less likely to succumb to it if you are walking more. It's a simple prescription that kind of acts to inoculate you against the likelihood of succumbing to depression.

What we don't know is whether or not walking is a good and effective treatment for people who are already depressed. There are no good studies that I've been able to find in the literature where this is concerned. I have a sense, though, that when you look at the effect of very long-term walking, now I mean weeks in nature, what you see from the kind of deep case studies that have been done, people's whole series of inflammatory factors in the blood, the interleukins and a bunch of other things, they all fall and fall really dramatically. After walking. After walking substantial periods, you know, so for four or five or six weeks. I mean, I think on that point, I think just to really amplify it,

we've spoken many times on this podcast before how chronic unresolved inflammation is at the heart is at the root cause of so many of the chronic problems that we see today whether it's uh many cases of depression whether it's type 2 diabetes high blood pressure um obesity is an inflammatory disease on so many levels. And what you've just said is that prolonged periods of walking can have an anti-inflammatory effect on the body. Yeah. There's no question about this. The problem is few people have the capacity or the means to undertake a six-week walk in the wilderness. Yeah.

take a six-week walk in the wilderness. And there's an ethical issue, of course, if you've got somebody who's succumbed to major depressive disorder, they need treatment and they need treatment. Now, organizing a nature walk for them and doing this over a six-week period would be a very, very difficult thing indeed to do. But I think that the kind of,

the more causal issue still is there. We see in those people who do these very long periods of walking, all these inflammatory factors fall in their blood. And Ed Bulmore and others have posited the kind of theory that one of the key drivers of depression is inflammation in the brain. And his recent book, The Inflamed Brain, actually argues that this is the case. And you see, and we've been doing studies on this, in humans and others, or sorry, humans who are treated with drugs like interferon alpha for cancer and other things, and alpha for cancer and other things become very, and hepatitis C, they become, or often become very acutely depressed as the result of the treatment with interferon alpha, which

is a pro-inflammatory cytokine. So there may well be, you know, at least one subclass of major depressive disorder, which is inflammatory or inflammation related yeah i interviewed ed's um i don't know six nine months ago or so on this podcast we had a great conversation people really responded very warmly to to our chats and um i think mechanistically we can now start to put these things together and understand yes we want more data of course we always want more and more robust research but i think mechanistically there's enough there to to be suggesting that you know more walking potentially could be used as yeah you know an adjunct at least yeah you i've spoken about two hunter-gatherer groups in the book

which i find super fascinating because i always think when we can go back into our evolutionary history observe how humans have lived how they've evolved how we've evolved how we've thrived in a variety of different environments it helps to put into perspective many of the problems we're having today i have written about the hadza tribe um but more specifically in relation to their diet and in terms of the amount of fiber they're getting and the impact it's having on their gut microbiome but you shared some insights on the hadza tribe and another tribe as well, actually, that I found very surprising. I wonder if you could elaborate on that. Yeah. So the other tribe are the Samani in South America. And the average 80-year-old Samani has the coronary artery health of a 50-year-old American because they spend so much time out and about and moving. And what's remarkable is, you know, when you look at the kind of diets that they have, they certainly have meat in their diet.

There's no question about that. But they have almost no processed food or basically have zero processed food. They have a very high fibre diet. They forage for nuts and berries. And the sweeteners they use are typically either crushed fruits or honey. And their calorie intake is typically lower than the calorie intake of a Westerner. It's not that they're burning more energy. In fact, actually, when you look at the amount of energy burned by Hadza or Tsimane, it's more or less the same as a Westerner. That's really interesting. Just say that again because I think that will surprise people.

Yeah, and I was just going to elaborate on it. So the amount of energy they burn is approximately the same as a Westerner. And the reason for this is that we overestimate the effects physical exercise have on energy burn and on our metabolism during the course of the day. So here's an easy way to think about it. The kind of recommendation for males is that they consume 2,500 calories per day. So let's call that 2,400 for sake of of easy easy maths so that's 100 calories uh in a per hour for a 24 hour cycle that 100 calories has to uh take care of your breathing

uh your heart is beating 60 70 times a minute or whatever it happens to be um your brain burns an astonishing amount of energy 20 of the cardiac output of the heart goes to the brain and the brain needs energy being pushed into it all the time. The liver burns an enormous amount of energy. And the energy that we use for running and all of these other functions turns out to be a very limited amount of the energy that we burn during the course of the day because housekeeping in our body absorbs so much of it. So what happens in these other groups is they just eat less. And the calories that they eat, or the sources of

calories come from foods where the available calories require extra work by the body. So if you're eating calories that are bound up in fiber, your body has to work to extract those calories. Whereas, you know, you get a cheesecake, you get the hit from the cheesecake within a couple of minutes. So the highly processed foods that we're consuming really are a major problem. What we really need to do is to try and shift away from the very highly processed foods in favor of foods that are, where the calories

are a little bit less accessible, where we have to work a little bit harder. And I describe it in the book. Ironically, there's a diet that's used in lab animals and its nickname is the Western diet. And the Western diet is amazing um it's a a diet that consists of a fat and sugar kind of uh mixture and rats go nuts for

it um they will eat it until they are bloated um and humans love this stuff as well. We call it ice cream. We call it cheesecake. We call it chocolate. If you have, we don't eat spoons of sugar. It'd be quite disgusting thing to do. We don't eat spoons of fat. But if you mix fat and sugar together in the right proportions and you emulsify them just right, in the right proportions and you emulsify them just right, they become highly palatable sources of direct energy that we can eat really, really easily. And this is actually the problem. So sugar tax, to my mind, might modify behavior a bit. It might take down the amount of sugar in

a fizzy drink. But actually, the issue is to do with something much more subtle to do with the fat sugar ratios that we're consuming yeah and i've said many times before that the thing that is consistent with many populations around the world who seems to have really good health outcomes when we look at their diets is that they're having minimally processed foods yeah that seems to be more consistent than whether we're looking at the fat content or the carb content or any other sort of reductionist type approach we might take.

Generally speaking, they're minimally processed. And I guess that already fits in with what you're saying is that there's a bit of effort that we have to use in our bodies to actually extract the energy from them in which we're trying to do. Think about the smoothie.

Don't eat the smoothie or drink the smoothie. Eat the fruit that goes into the smoothie. It's better for you. And your body has to work a bit harder to get the calories out of it. Yeah, for sure. Just going back to energy expenditure in these hunter-gatherer tribes, are you saying that actually when we walk or when we run, we're not burning as many calories as we think we might be? Absolutely. Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can

break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health and together we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life, and I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour and I can't

wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now, journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision making, and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits, and improve our relationships. There are, of course, many different ways to journal. And as with most things it's important that you find the method that works best for you one method that you may want to consider is the one that i outline in the three question journal in it you will find a really simple and

structured way of answering the three most impactful questions i believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three-question

journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal, or click on the link in your podcast app. This whole idea that, oh, you know, I went to the gym after work, so I can now chill out on the sofa and actually treat myself with, you know, A, B or C. It's even worse than that because you've gone to the gym. Your body thinks, hmm, I've persistence hunted. I deserve a reward. So you've done your hour of running and you've run down the antelope and there's the meat.

You've done your hour of running and you've run down the antelope and there's the meat. So actually, your body is saying to you after exercise, we're going to have a period of inactivity now. So you have this phenomenon known as exercise-induced inactivity. And during that period of inactivity, especially in the evening, we're much more likely to eat and we're also likely to feel hungry. we're much more likely to eat and we're also likely to feel hungry because of course the hunger hormone ghrelin is increased in our in our blood in the evening before we go so this is another reason why we should go to bed on time is as we stay up this hormone is there and it makes us want to eat but we we do have this exercise-induced inactivity phenomenon. So to expand that even further, in some cases, I need to be careful how I word this, but in some cases, could it be that going for your run after work or going for your intense gym session after work may potentially be counterproductive if it then leads to you feeling that you've expended more energy than you had, it leads to you feeling more hungry and eating more than you otherwise would have done. Could in some cases… That can happen.

Yeah. Yeah, you have a psychological license effect. So what you really have to do is look at the total energy expenditure across the day. So if you're engaging in very little activity you're sitting down all day you do this big spike of activity and then you're back again um of course you're gonna uh eat more whereas if you're engaging in high levels of activity during the course of the day distribute excuse me distributed across the day that would be better for you because that's what we're designed to do we're designed to mooch about more or less every hour during the course of the day.

That echoes many studies we're seeing now, which are suggesting at least that you really can't outdo the benefits. You really can't outdo the negatives of sitting down all day simply by going to the gym for one hour after work. No, it doesn't work. It just simply doesn't work like that. And again, just to be super clear, I'm not telling people, and I don't think you are either, not to go to the gym after work. We're not saying that. We're saying look at the total energy expenditure across your day and the total pattern of activity across your day. The gym can be a very important part of that.

But if you're sitting down all day and then going to the gym for an hour, don't expect it to be a magic cure. Yeah. Shane, do we sometimes think that walking is a little bit too easy it's a little bit too simple like we're looking for those um you know we get more excited when we hear about the latest new gym fad that's come out you know the the i don't know the boxer size or the cross trainer or the cross trainer or whatever and i'm not i'm not i'm not absolutely you know i'm not trying to say that those things don't have value i'm just saying have we missed what is sitting right in front of us by looking for more exciting forms of movement and physical activity is it

is it sitting right there in front of us and have we i don't know is it 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. Whereas walking probably does all of the above and more. Yeah, well, humans are novelty seekers. There's no doubt about that. And we are status seekers. Of course, you know, people buy cool pieces of gym kit so they can look down on the people who don't have them. But, you know, we can leverage this in other ways. You know, one of the or some of the best experiences you can ever have of walking or when you're walking with another person, you know, so it is something that's very easy for us to do. It's in front of us. But, you know, have a walking group, have a text group, have a WhatsApp group or whatever it

happens to be. And we can get the benefits of it very easily. And, you know, have a walking group, have a text group, have a WhatsApp group or whatever it happens to be. And 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. It's not, you know, it should just simply be the default that we have it as something that we don't have to think about. But it happens naturally all the day or all during the course of the day, every day. Yeah, for sure. I was struck by something I heard you say once. And that was that we've been trying to get robots to be able to walk for a long period of time, but we just can't and we find it very, very difficult.

And I think that really made me think, you know, is walking, is putting one foot in front of the other as simple as we think it is? Is walking, is putting one foot in front of the other as simple as we think it is? Or is it actually deceptively complex in such a way that actually we can't train robots to do it? Yeah, it is horribly complex. So it's easy to put a robot on wheels and it can get around very, very well on wheels. But to get a robot to walk with the facility and ease that humans can, that has been a really, really difficult thing for roboticists to engineer. And again, we all kind of overlook the long period of training that we engaged in when we made that transition from being crawlers to walkers. It took about a year.

We had to do 15,000 or 16,000 steps a day across all sorts of terrain. We fell 50, 70 times a day. And we had to develop range and movement. We had to learn how to get balance. We had to learn how to carry the dolly to mommy or daddy or whatever it happened to be when we were moving around. We had to learn that certain areas of the kitchen were dangerous. There were all those kinds of things that happen during that early phase. And robots don't get that training phase, you know.

So it may well be the case that in future years, roboticists will just say, look, we can defeat the problem if we can have robots that learn, and that's fine. Or it's just easier to build things that have wheels or tracks. And I suspect, you know, that's the route that they would probably go down because they're easy to control in a way that learning to walk isn't.

It seems that at its core, what we have here is that walking has got a PR problem. Your book, Clearly in Praise of Walking, is trying to solve that problem and give it more PR. But I guess if, if we look at it as a PR problem, Shane, and we think about why, how we can make walking more attractive to people. If you were head of an advertising company and you had two minutes to actually, you know, talk about why all of us should walk more than we do, what would you say?

Oh, I would say you'll feel better, you'll look better, you'll think better. All of those things will happen. But unfortunately, I don't think it's a problem for PR. I really think it's a problem for the invisible system that's around us. Why are our footpaths so narrow? Why do we give so much space to cars? Why do we make it so difficult for elderly people to cross the road? Because we've engineered the crossing time to be slower or to be faster than they can walk. It's all of those kinds of problems. I think

walking will happen naturally and easily if we facilitate it, and it doesn't when we don't. I do think we should all be walking more, but I think we individually run into a collective action problem, which is that we need our society, our urban world to be designed better for us. And this is a common theme that I think keeps coming up in the social commentary around health. It keeps coming up on this podcast. I had Chris Boardman, the Olympic cyclist on this podcast a little while ago. And again, he's very keen to try and raise the profile of cycling. And he's, again, trying to get these cities to make cycling easy. Easy, exactly. So that people, you know, and the whole helmet issue is a separate issue, but Chris almost makes

the case, I think, that actually let's make it safe so that people don't feel they have to put on helmets every time they get on a bike. Let's just make it easy. Let's make it not something that's a real pain for people to have to do every time they want to go and cycle to work. Just make it the easy thing. And, you know, you're saying a very similar thing with walking. Let's engineer our environment so that the behavior we want is easy. So the behavior we want is the default option. That is what all these healthy societies around the world do. That's what all the blue zones have.

They're not trying to be healthy. The environment is set up in such a way that health is the easy option. But the problem is a kind of a public health one, isn't it? You know, public health isn't sexy, but public health has actually delivered the kind of great health gains over the past 100 or 200 years. We don't think about sewerage anymore.

200 years ago, you could not walk the city. We couldn't have walked the city in Dublin or whatever because people didn't have public sewers. You know, they had chamber pots and they threw whatever out the window. And there was disease rampant and all of the problems. So we've engineered that problem away. And I think the challenge for architects, for town planners and others, is to do exactly the same thing.

Take the public health issue seriously and engineer the way our cities and towns are designed so that people can actually walk easily around in them. Yeah, absolutely. Shane, in terms of your own behaviour, I'm really intrigued. You've written this great book on walking. By writing that book, by going into the research, I think you already knew, but no doubt you dove a little bit deeper when you were writing the book. Did writing it actually change your behaviour in any way? Are you doing anything differently now than before you wrote the book? I don't think so, is the honest truth. I've always walked and walked lots. And I think what's changed for me most in the recent years

where walking is concerned is the presence of a pocket help pedometer in my phone and i i'm now very obsessive about checking the number of steps that i take every day and i'm much more conscious i think of how uh good i feel on days when I've had lots of walking. And when occasionally, as it does happen in life, you have a couple of days where just it's raining too much, there's too many things happening, and I've just haven't managed to get my 15,000 steps in. How bad I feel on, well, not bad,

but just a slightly silted up I feel on those days. Well, let's just briefly touch on technology here because i think you brought up a very good point so you track your daily steps and um you know whether we should be tracking our daily steps is something that people seem to have quite um quite powerful views about either way and you made the case in the book that it's a good thing to track your daily steps. And one of the things I can see from hearing that story in terms of what you do is you're helping to almost tap into your own intuition. You're seeing, hey, when I've done 15,000 steps, actually, I feel better. My mood's better. I'm sleeping better, whatever it might be.

And when I don't hit the same amount, actually, I don't feel as good. So I guess that's one thing I think a lot about is can we use modern technology in a way to help tap into our own intuition? It sounds like you're doing that. Yeah, use it to support how you're functioning. You know, the reality is if I ask you, how many steps did you walk last Thursday fortnight? No idea. You have no idea. How many steps did you walk yesterday? No idea.

No idea. You have no idea. How many steps did you walk yesterday? No idea. No idea. We are not designed to remember either the periods of time that we walk for or the number of steps that we take because our bodies and brains are too busy doing other things. So we do need to record them and it's easy to do. I cannot see a meaningful argument in the world that says that we shouldn't. cannot see a meaningful argument in the world that says that we shouldn't. And what we know is when we look at the self-report data, what people say they do against what we know they've done because we've got the smartphone data, people under and overestimate really terribly how many walking steps they take every day, how fast they walk, where they've walked. People are awful at this. And that's fine. Our brains are not designed to remember this kind of stuff, but we've designed

little pocket-held robots to do it for us, so we should use them. I think the flip side is, and I guess blood pressure monitors are a great example of this. I think they work beautifully well for half my patients. The other half, they're actually problematic in the sense that if you're the kind of person who uses it once a week to see how you're getting on and it motivates you to make positive lifestyle choices i think it's great some people on the other hand will check it three or four times a day they'll really stress themselves out every time they see you know a slight increase in the reading and actually for many of those patients it starts to become counterproductive yeah i don't necessarily think walking um tracking your walking steps is is the same i don't either i think i think you know this is a kind of a just a passive record of yeah what you're doing over

the course of the day with my patients i found actually it's more positive motivating factor actually it's like if they set a goal um of let's say they want to do 8 000 steps a day and if if by dinner time they've only done 6 000 steps often it it's a motivator for them to go hey you know what after dinner i'm just just going for a quick 20 minute walk yeah because they want to they want to meet that sort of standard that they've set for themselves the other thing i wanted to just briefly touch on at the end of this interview about uh technology is you mentioned all the benefits of going out for long walks in terms of what it does for our brain and our minds. Now, I'm conscious when I ask this

question that many people are listening to this conversation right now whilst out walking or running. But is there something to be said for going out and walking without headphones in your ear, without losing yourself in music or a podcast? Yeah. So I listen to podcasts when I walk. Sometimes when I'm walking, what I'll do is I'll listen to a podcast for the first half and I stop listening to it for the second half. So I simply don't know. I think, you know, the best experiences I've ever had of walking have been walking with other people, you know. So I think if listening to the podcast gets you out for an hour that you would otherwise have spent sitting in a chair, go for it. I think it's great.

If you're trying to problem solve, if you're trying to think through a difficult problem, I think having the auditory distraction is a bad idea, especially if you want to have a quiet conversation with yourself about something. You know, you want to think through, why did I say that? Or, you know, you know you're going to have a difficult problem to deal with tomorrow. How do you approach it?

What are the ways you're going to approach the person you have to talk to about it? I think in those cases, but I think we just need to be a little bit self-conscious about this. And we also need to think, our ears need to rest from time to time so maybe you know keep the uh the sound down a bit yeah i love that you're trying to solve a problem maybe you know what go out with nothing on but if you're just going to sit home listen to a podcast and you have an hour want to go out and walk whilst you're listening absolutely so i

think it's beautiful because it's not like demonizing technology. It's just sort of saying, hey, just think about what you're trying to achieve or what your current state of mind is, and then do the appropriate behavior. Shane, I've really, really enjoyed chatting to you. I think you've written a brilliant book. This podcast is called Feel Better, Live More. When people feel better in themselves, I think they get more out of life. I think this conversation in many ways is very, very strongly making the case that when we walk more, we live more. Yes, it's the environment. Yes, we'd love it if urban settings and cities and workplaces and schools could be set up in a way that makes it much easier for all of us to walk. Having said that, I wonder if on an individual level,

you can provide some tips, some actionable tips that people listening to this podcast can think about applying into their own life immediately to improve the way that they feel. Yeah, so always have a comfortable pair of shoes close. You know, if you're wearing high heel shoes to work, keep a pair of runners under the desk so you can go out for a walk at lunchtime. Set your computer, if you're working at a computer,

to have the alarm go off every 25 minutes, which I do, and get up and go for a walk around. If you find that you have to drive your car to somewhere, park as far away as you reasonably can and walk that extra distance. If you're taking the train to work, as I do, get out two stops early and walk that last remaining distance. Those kinds of things, just very, very simple changes. If you're going out to get lunch at lunchtime, don't go to the closest shop. Use Google to help you do the restaurants near me or the shops near me and try and find somewhere new that's a little bit further away so that you just get in an extra 1,200 steps here, an extra 800 steps there, so that at the end of the day, somehow you've racked

up 10 or 12 or 14,000 steps and you haven't thought about it at all. Shane, I love it. You've written a fantastic book. Thank you for putting all the research together in one place. Keep up doing the incredible work that you are doing. And thank you for joining me today. Thank you. I've really enjoyed it. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation and that it has inspired you to get out walking a little bit more than you currently do. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. Always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it because when you feel

better, you love it.