#160 BITESIZE | How Walking Improves Our Brain and Mental Health | Shane O’Mara
Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee
Dr Rangan Chatterjee
4.8 • 10.9K Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2021
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Walking can slow and even reverse functional ageing in the brain, improve our cognition, our creativity and our mental health but yet it is such an underrated activity.
Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my new weekly podcast for your mind, body and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests.
Today’s clip is from episode 84 of the podcast with neuroscientist Shane O’Mara, a professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin.
Shane believes walking can be our superpower. In this clip he explains how the many benefits of walking go beyond the physical – it’s important for our mood, our happiness and our wellbeing.
Shane reveals the results of a study that showed that walking improved memory and attention and reversed functional ageing of the brain, and that if we walk before doing a task, we perform it more creatively.
The benefits of walking are retained throughout life and it’s never too late to start. As Shane says, ‘you only get old when you stop walking, you don’t stop walking because you’re old’.
Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/84
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Feel Better, Live More Bite Size Your Weekly Dose of Optimism and |
| 0:06.2 | Positivity to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 84 of |
| 0:12.7 | the podcast with the neuroscientist Shane Omara, a professor of experimental |
| 0:18.2 | brain research at Trinity College Dublin. Warking can be such an underrated |
| 0:24.2 | activity but Shane believes it can be our superpower. In this clip he explains |
| 0:30.0 | how the many benefits of walking go beyond the physical and can boost our |
| 0:34.2 | cognition, our creativity and our mood. |
| 0:42.1 | How important is walking for our mood, for our happiness and for our overall |
| 0:48.2 | mental health? If you ask people to rate before they go for a walk how how |
| 0:53.0 | they're feeling now on a scale of one to five they might say I'm feeling it |
| 0:56.5 | around about a two and if you ask them to rate how they'll feel after they've |
| 1:00.7 | gone for a walk they'll say probably about a two then you bring them out for a |
| 1:04.6 | walk for 20 minutes and you ask them to rate how they feel they'll now say a |
| 1:08.1 | four. So we persistently underestimate how good a walk will make us feel and |
| 1:16.0 | that's true even for people who dread walking who dislike walking. But you're a |
| 1:21.0 | neuroscientist and I know from doing some research on you that you have |
| 1:25.1 | studied a lot of things about stress and depression and its impacts on |
| 1:28.5 | particular parts of the brain and cleaning the hippocampus and that's an area |
| 1:31.8 | that can get affected quite powerfully by walking and what if you could |
| 1:36.6 | expand? Yeah I think one of the great discoveries of the |
| 1:39.4 | our rediscoveries of the last kind of couple of decades in neuroscience is |
| 1:43.9 | the realization that the brain is a muscle or functions like a muscle it's |
... |
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