Benefits Of Walking

Walking is widely recognized as an activity that provides many benefits, including boosting heart health, strengthening muscles and bones, and helping to maintain a healthy weight.

Now, research published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine has added another benefit: Walking every day can add up to 11 years to your life—even for the least active people.

According to Dr. Adedapo Iluyomade, a preventive cardiologist with Baptist Health Miami Cardiac & Vascular Institute, the study confirms that engaging in activities such as walking can greatly increase your life expectancy.

“For those who are currently least active, adding just one hour of walking a day can result in measurable gains in longevity—potentially adding hours [of life] for every hour walked,” Dr. Iluyomade told Prevention.

For the study, researchers used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), focusing on Americans aged 40 and older. The survey participants wore activity monitors for at least four days, and researchers collected data from the trackers.

The data collected from the activity monitors were combined with data that researchers analyzed from the 2019 U.S. Census and 2017 death data from the National Center for Health Statistics. Using this information, the investigators created a mathematical model to predict how different levels of physical activity affected lifespan.

The researchers then compared the most active group to the least active group and found that the most active individuals generally had the highest life expectancy. The 25 percent of participants who were the most active walked 160 minutes (2 hours and 40 minutes) every day at 3 mph (which would be considered an average-to-brisk walking pace, depending on your age).

The research team estimated that if everyone increased their activity to this level, they could extend their life expectancy from 78.6 to 84 years—an increase of over five years.

Being in the bottom 25 percent for activity levels was linked to roughly six fewer years of life expectancy. However, being in the lowest 25 percent of activity was associated with a decrease in life expectancy of around six years. Still, the researchers discovered that if the least active group walked an additional 111 minutes every day, they could potentially live almost 11 years longer.

Regular walking is an activity health experts often recommend, especially for older adults, because it is a popular, accessible form of exercise that can be done anytime, anywhere. It also has far-reaching benefits, according to Dr. Ilyuomade.

“It improves cardiovascular health, lowers blood pressure, and helps maintain a healthy weight, Dr. Ilyuomade told Prevention. “It also supports mental well-being, reducing stress and boosting mood.” He also said that walking regularly reduces the risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and other chronic diseases, as well as some cancers.

Adding more walking to your daily routine does not necessarily mean taking multiple laps on the gym track or around your neighborhood to get extra steps. According to Dr. Alisha Goodrum, an internal medicine physician with PlushCare, you can add more steps in different ways.

“This can include parking your car further away from the entrance of a store or using the stairs instead of the elevator,” Dr. Goodrum told Prevention. “You can also take multiple shorter walks in the day instead of making time for a longer exercise.”

You can also make it a social event by meeting a friend for a walk in the park instead of getting coffee or lunch.

Taking an Awe Walk

Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, has a way of making your daily walk routine awesome. All you have to do is look for the “awe.”
For Keltner, who has studied “awe” for the past 20 years, it’s all about finding—and feeling—the “awe,” the overwhelming wonder in people, nature, and life.

In an interview on HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast, Keltner discussed the “awe study” that he and his colleagues conducted. The eight-week study involved participants aged 75 or older. At this point in life, “you’re starting to get anxious and depressed about the end of life [and you’re experiencing] more body pain,” Keltner said.

The participants were divided into two groups and told to go for a walk once a week. One group was given instructions to look for “awe” as they walked.
Keltner said the participants were told, “You know, while you’re out on your walk, go some place where you might feel a little child-like wonder and look around—look at the small things and look at the big things and just follow that sense of mystery and wonder. That’s all we asked them to do.”

Finding awe was not difficult. Keltner told the group that they could stop to look at “something as seemingly small as a newly blossomed flower to something as big as a sunset stretched across the entire sky.” It could also be what Keltner described as “moral beauty,” which involved listening to music, looking at art, contemplating big ideas, or seeing the kindness, goodness, or generosity of other people.

Over the eight weeks, Keltner said the “awe walk” group started to feel “more and more awe” and “less pain and distress.”

“Chronic pain and pain when you’re old is serious,” Keltner said. “It just rattles your consciousness, and here was a little technique that gave them some peace.”

According to Keltner, awe not only affects us emotionally, but it also has a positive effect on our bodies. For example, Keltner explained that awe activates the vagus nerve, a key part of the nervous system. It starts at the top of your spinal cord and “helps you look at people and vocalize,” Keltner said. It also slows down your heart rate, helps with digestion, “cools down” the inflammation process, and is part of the immune system that fights disease.

Awe also quiets down the part of our brain where all the “self-representational processes take place: I’m thinking about myself, my time, my goals, my strivings, my checklist,” according to Keltner. This was evident in the awe walk group, who learned to pay attention to things bigger than themselves, according to the study.

Each week, the participants were told to take a picture of themselves. The researchers noted that those in the awe walk group were not in the photo. Keltner called this “the disappearance of the self.”

“What that tells us is their consciousness is — they’re not thinking about ‘OK, there’s my face and I get it perfectly situated in the photo,”’ Keltner explained. “They’re more interested in the vaster scene that they’re part of and losing track of themselves and that’s important—that’s important to expand our attention to things outside of the self.”

Keltner contends that the more awe and wonder people of any age feel, the better off they’ll be.

“It [creates] an amazing cascade of physiology that we can find almost any day and is very good for you,” he said.

Source Links:

https://www.prevention.com/health/a69930051/walking-adds-up-to-11-years-to-life-study/
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/awe-wonder-walk-dachner-keltner-podcast_l_695917afe4b048f68c302db6