{"id":5528,"date":"2019-07-30T08:56:02","date_gmt":"2019-07-30T13:56:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abundantlife.hwacollege.org\/?p=5528"},"modified":"2019-07-30T08:56:08","modified_gmt":"2019-07-30T13:56:08","slug":"walking-is-a-superpower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abundantlife.hwacollege.org\/?p=5528","title":{"rendered":"Walking Is a \u201cSuperpower\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Shane O\u2019Mara\u2014a professor of experimental brain research, focusing on stress, depression and anxiety; and learning, memory and cognition\u2014has written a new book titled <em>In Praise of Walking.<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/lifeandstyle\/2019\/jul\/28\/its-a-superpower-how-walking-makes-us-healthier-happier-and-brainier\"><em>The Guardian <\/em><\/a>did a feature on in him. Some quotes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Guardian: \u201cHe knows this not only through personal experience, but from cold, hard data \u2013 walking makes us healthier, happier and brainier.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>O\u2019Mara: \u201cOur sensory systems work at their best when they\u2019re moving about the world.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>O\u2019Mara: We can see \u201cfrom the scientific literature, that getting people to engage in physical activity before they engage in a creative act is very powerful. My notion\u2014and we need to test this\u2014is that the activation that occurs across the whole of the brain during problem-solving becomes much greater almost as an accident of walking demanding lots of neural resources.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>O\u2019Mara: When you\u2019re walking \u201cthere are all sorts of rhythms happening in the brain as a result of engaging in that kind of activity, and they\u2019re absent when you\u2019re sitting. One of the great overlooked superpowers we have is that, when we get up and walk, our senses are sharpened. Rhythms that would previously be quiet suddenly come to life, and the way our brain interacts with our body changes.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more-->o\u00a0\u00a0 Advantages of walking as exercise:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>From the article: \u201cSome people, I point out, don\u2019t think walking counts as proper exercise. \u201cThis is a terrible mistake,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat we need to be is much more generally active over the course of the day than we are.\u201d And often, an hour at the gym doesn\u2019t cut it. \u201cWhat you see if you get people to wear activity monitors is that because they engage in an hour of really intense activity, they engage in much less activity afterwards.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>From the article: \u201cNot that he is opposed to vigorous exercise, but walking is much more accessible and easily woven into everyday life: \u201cYou don\u2019t need to bring anything other than comfy shoes and a rain jacket. You don\u2019t have to engage in lots of preparation; stretching, warm-up, warm-down \u2026\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>o\u00a0\u00a0 Some studies<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In 2018 a study was published that tracked people over 20 years. It found that those that lived the most sedentary \u201cshowed malign personality changes, scoring lower in the positive traits: openness, extraversion and agreeableness.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Other studies show that walkers have much lower rates of depression.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>o\u00a0\u00a0 The author talked about her partner, who had a brain injury. Walking help him recover.<\/p>\n<p>o\u00a0\u00a0 O\u2019Mara also lists a number of famous people who used walking in their routines<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>William Wordsworth wrote poetry as he walked around.<\/li>\n<li>Charles Dickens was, according to the article, \u201cas prolific a walker as he was a writer.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Aristotle would deliver lectures while walking around his school<\/li>\n<li>Philosopher Bertrand Russell said walking was integral to his work.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div id=\"iLikeThis-5528\" class=\"iLikeThis\"><span class=\"counter\">0 <a onclick=\"likeThis(5528);\">I did this!<\/a><\/span><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Shane O\u2019Mara\u2014a professor of experimental brain research, focusing on stress, depression and anxiety; and learning, memory and cognition\u2014has written a new book titled In Praise of Walking. The Guardian did a feature on in him. Some quotes: Guardian: \u201cHe knows this not only through personal experience, but from cold, hard data \u2013 walking makes us [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[243],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abundantlife.hwacollege.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abundantlife.hwacollege.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abundantlife.hwacollege.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abundantlife.hwacollege.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abundantlife.hwacollege.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5528"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/abundantlife.hwacollege.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5530,"href":"https:\/\/abundantlife.hwacollege.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5528\/revisions\/5530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abundantlife.hwacollege.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abundantlife.hwacollege.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abundantlife.hwacollege.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}