Feeling blue? Take a hike!

It turns out that a walk on the wild side may be an invigorating, healthful antidote to brooding. Just the news I’ve been waiting for (and suspecting) ever since sitting down at my desk this morning.

A walk in the park may soothe the mind and, in the process, change the workings of our brains in ways that improve our mental health, according to an interesting new study of the physical effects on the brain of visiting nature… (Source: New York Times)

Gregory Bratman, a Stanford University graduate student, and his band of blues-busters “decided to closely scrutinize what effect a walk might have on a person’s tendency to brood.” It looks like the early science is positive if subtly persuasive. But no harm in walking the blues away until evidence to the contrary presents, right? For me walking — especially calm, solitary, semi- (or totally) aimless walking — is the best of the best tonics when I slip into “morbid rumination”…

Brooding, which is known among cognitive scientists as morbid rumination, is a mental state familiar to most of us, in which we can’t seem to stop chewing over the ways in which things are wrong with ourselves and our lives. This broken-record fretting is not healthy or helpful. (Source: New York Times)

Call it the blues. Call it brooding. Call it morbid rumination. But whatever you call it, it’s unhealthy and totally 100% unhelpful. It’s a rusty, risky trap. Steer clear, and take a walk!