I’m 63 and I finally understand why I’ve always preferred long walks over gym workouts — my brain is wired to achieve mental clarity through rhythmic movement and changing scenery in a way that stationary exercise has never been able to replicate

I’ve tried the gym. I really have.

In my forties, after years of shift work had hollowed me out, I joined a gym near the hospital with the best of intentions. I showed up in my new runners, got on the treadmill, and stared at a wall for forty minutes while someone else’s music thumped through the speakers.

I went back twice, maybe three times, and then quietly cancelled my membership and pretended it had never happened.

At the time I told myself I was too tired, too busy, that nurses don’t need to exercise because they’re on their feet all day anyway. But honestly? The real reason was simpler than that. It didn’t make me feel better. Not in the way I needed.

Compare that to my morning coastal walk. I’m out the door before six most mornings, Biscuit — my ageing kelpie cross — trotting along beside me. Within ten minutes my shoulders have dropped, my breathing has slowed, and whatever was crowding my head when I woke up has started to organise itself into something manageable. By the time I get home, I feel like myself again.

I’m 63 now. And I’ve finally stopped feeling like I need to justify this to anyone.

Rhythmic movement quiets the noise in a way nothing else does

There’s something about the repetition of walking — the steady, predictable rhythm of one foot in front of the other — that seems to switch off the part of my brain that won’t stop running lists and replaying conversations.

I’ve noticed this pattern in myself for decades, long before I had language for it. When I was a young nurse in the emergency department in Sydney and the shifts were relentless, walking home instead of catching the bus was the only thing that reliably helped me decompress. I didn’t know why it worked. I just knew it did.

Stationary exercise never gave me this. When I’m on a bike going nowhere or lifting a weight in a room with mirrors, my brain doesn’t wander — it fixates. The lack of external input seems to turn the volume up on my internal noise rather than down. Walking, particularly outdoors, gives my body enough to do that my mind can finally relax its grip.

Changing scenery is doing more work than most people realise

The coastal track near my house changes every single morning. The light is different. The tide is in or out. The dog startles a bush turkey or doesn’t. A neighbour is out early or the path is empty. None of it is dramatic, but all of it is real, and all of it is asking my eyes and brain to engage gently with the world rather than turn inward.

This matters more than it sounds. There’s strong research suggesting that exposure to natural environments lowers cortisol levels and activates the parasympathetic nervous system — what most of us just call calming down.

Walking through changing scenery means your brain is constantly receiving low-level novel input, which keeps it alert but not activated. It’s a very different state from staring at a screen or a blank wall while your legs move underneath you.

I also think there’s something to be said for beauty. The lorikeets coming in at dusk, the way the ocean looks on a clear morning, the smell of eucalyptus after rain — these things don’t just feel good, they interrupt the mental ruts I can get stuck in. You can’t spiral particularly well when a wren has just landed two feet from your face.

Walking gave me back something I didn’t know shift work had taken

I worked nights for years. Long stretches of them, across two decades in emergency nursing, then more in community care. Shift work does something particular to your body and your mind. It fragments sleep, disrupts your body clock, and quietly erodes your sense of when you are, let alone who you are. I didn’t notice how much it had cost me until I started walking regularly and began to feel a rhythm returning — not just to my days, but to my thinking.

There’s research showing that regular outdoor walking helps regulate the circadian rhythm, supports better sleep architecture, and improves cognitive function in older adults.

For someone who spent decades overriding her body’s natural signals, the simple act of walking outside in morning light at the same time each day has been genuinely restorative. Not just physically. Mentally.

I started taking this seriously when I took up ocean swimming at 50 and added the coastal walk as part of the same morning routine. Within a few months I was sleeping better and thinking more clearly than I had in years. My GP was pleased. I was gobsmacked.

It’s where I do my best thinking — and my best letting go

Some of my clearest insights have arrived on walks. Not deep philosophical revelations — more like the quiet settling of something that had been unresolved. I’ll leave the house with a problem I’ve been turning over for days, and somewhere between the headland and the return path, it either solves itself or stops feeling like a problem.

I’ve been writing personal essays for a few years now — about nursing, about the divorce, about starting over in my thirties with two kids and a mortgage and a life that needed rebuilding from scratch. A lot of what ends up on the page started as a thought that arrived on a walk. Walking seems to be where my subconscious does its best filing.

I’ve read enough about psychology and personal development — it’s what I listen to on those same walks, through my phone in my pocket — to know that this isn’t just me.

Walking has been shown to enhance creative thinking, with research from Stanford finding that people generate significantly more creative output while walking compared to sitting.

The outdoors piece adds another layer: nature exposure is consistently linked to improved mood, reduced rumination, and better attention.

My brain isn’t broken — it’s just honest about what it needs

I spent too many years of my life treating my own needs as optional. It’s a very nursing thing to do — put everyone else first and assume your own requirements can wait until there’s a gap. There never is a gap. You just run out of steam instead.

Learning to take my walks seriously, to protect them the way I’d protect an appointment with a patient, was part of a longer process of learning to take myself seriously. The same process that eventually helped me build a life I genuinely love — one full enough that I don’t need anyone at the centre of it to make it feel worthwhile.

If the gym works for you, use the gym. I’m not here to talk anyone out of anything. But if you’ve been quietly dragging yourself to a treadmill and wondering why it never quite shifts the weight you’re actually trying to shift — the mental kind, the emotional kind — it might be worth asking whether your brain is trying to tell you something.

Mine took sixty-three years and a kelpie cross to get through to me. But I’m listening now.

Conclusion: it’s not laziness — it’s self-knowledge

We’re sold a very particular idea of what exercise is supposed to look like. Intense, structured, measurable, ideally uncomfortable. And for some people, that’s exactly right. For me — for my brain, my nervous system, my specific flavour of needing the world to slow down — it’s a coastal path, a dog, and an hour of moving through changing light.

The science supports what my body figured out a long time ago. Rhythmic movement and natural scenery are genuinely powerful tools for mental clarity, emotional regulation, and cognitive health, especially as we age. That’s not a justification. It’s a recognition.

I’ve spent enough of my life explaining myself. These days I just go for the walk.