Walking Helps Me Stop Worrying

Walking is one of the best things you can do to elevate your mood. Taking slow, quick, soft, hard, stiff, and flexible steps has helped to ease my worries and soothe my heart.

Walking has helped relieve the weight of my pain, my emotions, and my thoughts. It has put a rest to my anxiety and released me from sleepless nights. Because walking can make you healthier, both cognitively and emotionally.

Why? There are many reasons, but the most significant one is that it pushes you to reserve a piece of your soul for yourself. We often forget to do this, which creates huge problems on many levels.

When you’re overwhelmed and stressed, take a walk!

When you’re overwhelmed with and stressed, take a walk! It’s not just an ingredient in the recipe for happiness, but it is an important sweetener of life. Something so obviously simple can help you solve your problems and reorganize your mental drawers.

This goes hand in hand with the simple factors that determine one’s base emotional and cognitive state. While your behavior is the visible tip of the iceberg, you are who you are based on the interaction between thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

If you stay active, your mind will activate alternative thoughts and calm the emotions that destroy your ability to face your problems. If you get to it right now, you’ll see very positive results.

To be clear, never forget that every behavior determines and is determined by thoughts and emotions. These three pillars coexist within us like the gears of a clock.

Did you know that you can meditate while walking?

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the father of mindfulness in the West, proposed that a simple way to be more conscious is to practice meditation while you walk. This involves bringing your attention to the actual experience of walking as you do it.

It’s nothing more than walking and knowing that you’re walking. However, it’s important to clarify that this doesn’t mean you have to look at your feet. When you attempt to do this, you’ll realize that nothing is as easy as it seems.

It’s rare to just take a walk just because. We usually walk because we want to get from one place to another, which means that the body is just a vehicle for the mind.

As Kabat-Zinn eloquently stated in his book, Full Catastrophe Living:

“…the body is really the chauffeur of the mind, willingly (or reluctantly) transporting it and doing its bidding. If the mind is in a hurry, then the body rushes. If the mind is attracted to something it finds interesting, then the head turns and your body may change direction or stop. Thoughts of all kinds are, as usual, cascading through the mind while you are walking, just as they are when you are sitting still and breathing. As a rule, all this happens without the least awareness on our part.”

The process of meditation through walking involves:

• Making an effort to notice when your foot comes into contact with the ground, when your weight is supported on it, when the other foot rises and moves forward, and when it comes back down to come into contact with the ground once again.
• If your mind wanders away from your feet or legs or the sensation of how your body is moving, just calmly bring it back when you realize it’s gone.
• It’s not necessary to look at your feet, because they already know how to walk by themselves. At first, it might even be good to not look at your surroundings, so that you can prevent your thoughts from wandering and interrupting the process of meditation and abstraction. Remember that it’s all about experiencing the activity that you’re performing.
• After increasing your capacity to walk with your full attention on your feet and legs, you can widen the focus of your attention to the rest of your body, as if it were a whole entity moving through space. This will help your mind rest, because it has nowhere to go, so there’s nothing to distract it.

Walking, with or without meditating, will help you clear your mind and conquer those experiences that accompany the anxiety of following a path full of obstacles (because, as we all know, life can often be like this).

Any time is the perfect time to experience the pleasure of walking through a place that fits your needs. People who do this know that after a long walk, moving to the beat of life is much easier and more satisfying.