Does what you think about while you exercise matter?

Yes, and more than most of us were ever told. Exercise raises your brain's ability to change itself, which is one of the best arguments for doing it. But that ability is neutral. It doesn't sort your thoughts into the good ones and the bad ones before it goes to work. It deepens whatever is already running. So the forty minutes you spend walking while you quietly catalogue everything your body can't do anymore is not empty time. You're strengthening your body and rehearsing a story about it in the same hour, and both of those are being learned.

The morning I walked to the Rocky theme

After my husband leaves for work I go for a mile walk. Some days I listen to music.

Last week I put on the theme from Rocky, and I imagined myself running up those steps in Philadelphia and taking a victory lap at the top. I felt vibrant and strong. A real bad ass.

The reality was not quite the same. I had climbed a fairly steep hill without undue stress. That was close enough for me.

But not every day goes like that. Some days I don't want to walk and I make myself do it anyway. On those mornings I might have the music playing and not hear a note of it, because I'm busy grumbling about how tired I feel and wishing it were over.

Same hill. Same body. Same forty minutes. Two completely different hours.

I used to think the difference was just mood, and that mood was beside the point as long as I got the walk in. I don't think that anymore.

Neuroplasticity is neutral

Richard Davidson founded the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he has spent his career studying what happens in the brain when people train their attention.

He grants freely that vigorous aerobic exercise is the best-supported thing we have for raising neuroplasticity, which is the brain's ability to reorganize and change itself. That part is good news and most of us have heard some version of it.

Then he says the part that stopped me.

Neuroplasticity is neutral. More of it is not automatically better.

Your brain doesn't check whether what you're rehearsing is good for you before it goes to work. It deepens what's there. Raise your capacity to change while your mind runs a loop about your knees, your age, and everything on the list you haven't finished, and you have made that loop a little easier to run next time.

The exercise is still good for you. The blood pressure, the bones, the sleep, the mood, all of it is real and none of it is undone by a bad attitude. That isn't what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the hour has a passenger, and most of us never noticed we were carrying one.

A quieter way the aging default gets in

I write often about the aging default, the inherited story that decline is simply what happens now and there's nothing to be done about it. Usually I describe how that story arrives from outside us. The doctor's aside. The birthday card joke. The advertisement selling you a cream.

This gives me a quieter route in, and it's one nobody warned us about.

It comes in while we're doing the healthy thing.

Think how many women in their sixties and seventies are walking, lifting, swimming, showing up faithfully, and spending the whole time taking inventory of what has gone wrong. I've done it. My hand is raised. There were whole seasons when the only thing I noticed on a walk was what hurt.

I'm not going to tell you that grumbling on a walk is aging you. That's a bigger claim than anyone can support, and I'd rather be honest with you than dramatic. What I will say is that rehearsal is how anything gets learned, and that we're rehearsing something whether we chose it or not.

What the research can and can't tell us

I want to be careful here, because this is a field where people overpromise and I'd rather you trust me over the long run.

There is no study showing that a cheerful walk adds years to your life. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

What we do have is a body of work showing that trained mental states change measurable things in the body. In one study, eight weeks of compassion meditation was associated with a lower inflammatory response to stress, measured by a marker called IL-6. That was a modest study, and it was about meditation rather than exercise. I offer it as evidence that the direction is real, not as proof of what happens on your particular walk.

So the honest summary is this. What you practice with your attention isn't weightless. It has effects in the body that show up on instruments. How large those effects are over a whole life, nobody can tell you yet.

That's enough for me to change what I do on a Tuesday morning. It may be enough for you too. And if you're wondering whether this is just positive thinking, I wrote about that question on its own, because it deserves a real answer rather than a brush-off.

One minute, and no extra time

What I like about this is that it doesn't ask for anything you don't already have. No new habit. No extra thirty minutes you were never going to find.

While you're putting your shoes on, or in the first minute of moving, do one thing on purpose.

And if the walk itself is the part you can't find time for, one honest minute of movement counts too. This works the same way inside a minute as it does inside an hour.

Notice that what you're doing is not only for you.

Davidson calls taking care of your own health a radical act of generosity, and I had to sit with that for a while. I've thought positive things before a walk plenty of times. They were all about me. My mood, my focus, my heart, my brain. Extending it outward had honestly never occurred to me.

Your vitality reaches people. The grandchild who gets a grandmother with energy in her. The husband who gets a wife who isn't depleted by four o'clock. The friend who calls and finds someone actually able to listen. Whatever you are for the people you love, you are more of it when you're well.

That's the whole practice. One minute, before or during. Not a mantra and not a technique. Just aiming the hour on purpose instead of letting it aim itself.

There's a subtraction too, and it may matter as much as the addition. Take the news off your walk. Whatever is playing while your capacity to change is elevated is what's getting practiced, and the fear and grief of the whole world is a heavy thing to be learning while you're trying to get well.

What I do now

I still have mornings when I don't want to walk. That hasn't changed and I doubt it will.

What changed is that I no longer let the hour run itself. I put on something that makes me feel like a woman climbing a hill on purpose. I remind myself, plainly, that this vitality isn't only mine to enjoy. And on the days I catch myself three-quarters up that hill running an old complaint, I don't scold myself about it. I just come back.

Coming back is the practice. Not getting it right.

You aren't behind and you aren't doing this wrong. You've simply been handed one more thing you get to choose, inside an hour you were already spending.

You were moving your body all along, and none of that was wasted. The hour just had an empty seat in it, and you get to say who rides along.

Kristin Milan

Coach and author for women in the third act of life, holding faith and consciousness in the same hand. Master's in Social Work, degree in Psychology, HeartMath trained, and nearly five decades engaged with the science of change. She writes about outgrowing the aging default and coming home to a wholeness you already belong to. Meet Kristin