Healthy Minds

Everyone knows how a good walk can help you collect your thoughts especially at stressful times – but there’s more to it than that. Walking improves your overall well-being, and helps fight depression. Even just being in the outdoors in green natural spaces is beneficial to your mental health. And walking can even help you make new friends.

• Walking, like other physical activities, releases endorphins which improve mood and reduce stress and anxiety.
• Regular walking improves sleep patterns.
• Active people have a reduced risk of suffering clinical depression.
• Regular physical activity is at least as effective as antidepressant drugs in treating mild and moderate depression – and has positive rather than negative side effects.
• Exploring your neighbourhood on foot makes you feel more at home there and makes you more likely to talk to neighbours and make friends.
• Walking in a group is a sociable activity that can help improve mental health and overcome feelings of isolation.
• Spending time in the outdoors and in contact with the natural environment – for example by walking in parks, woodland and green spaces – can have a positive effect on mental health.
• Feeling fitter and controlling weight helps improve your body image and confidence.

For more information on the mental health, walking and the environment please visit the Mind website

Filed under: Benefits of Walking
Tagged: depression, exercise, friends, health, loneliness, mental, mental health, mind, outdoors, Ramblers, sleep, walk, Walking
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