Easy Mode: Taking a Walk
- tompkinsgr
- Jul 22
- 6 min read
Consider Pete — a fictionalized client informed by my work with clients with ADHD.
Pete is an avid surfer. When he surfs three or more days in a week, he's in a much better mood. He feels on top of things. He can focus. His executive functioning hums along as if he has no executive functioning challenges. He barely seems ADHD.
Then he severely sprains his ankle and can't surf for weeks.
His mood plummets. He feels overwhelmed by managing life's details. His executive functioning falters.
I've seen this pattern repeat with a variety of clients. Many of the folks I work with are highly active — surfers, mountain bikers, athletes — and those are usually the clients functioning relatively well in life. Take the activity away, and the ADHD comes roaring back.
When I look at my own biography, the same pattern is everywhere. Before first grade I was outside playing in the woods, riding my bike everywhere, swimming. A pretty happy, healthy kid. Then first grade came. I had to sit inside in a chair, bored out of my mind, punished and shamed for being disruptive or not paying attention. I started eating junk food for the stimulation. No longer so happy and healthy. Miserable in middle school. Then I made the junior varsity basketball team, played through high school, added tennis, trained in the off-seasons — and I could focus better in school. I became a better student. Every period of my life when I was active and outdoors, my functioning and quality of life went up. Every period I wasn't, they dropped.
The most recent example: the half-year ordeal with Cyclical Vomiting Syndrome I mentioned in earlier posts. During that stretch, I was a lot less active and playing a lot more video games. In the last couple of months I've made hiking a priority — about fifteen hours a week now, plus walking the dog twice a day. I'm much happier, and my executive functioning is working pretty well. It's glaringly obvious that fifteen hours a week of hiking is much better for me than the same fifteen hours of gaming.
So yes, I'm going to write about how great walking in nature is for the ADHD brain. I know I'm biased. But there's plenty of evidence backing me up.
The Easy Mode angle
Quick recap if you're new here. Easy Mode is the design principle I keep circling in this series: when you're choosing what to do, weight the cost of starting as heavily as the payoff. A brilliant intervention with a high barrier to entry loses, over and over, to a good-enough one you'll actually start.
Surfing, mountain biking, skateboarding, martial arts, organized sports — these are fantastic, close to full-spectrum interventions for the ADHD brain and nervous system. When the pull toward them is there, go for it. But what do you do when there's no surf? When you can't get to the slopes? When the trail is too muddy to ride on?
Every requirement an activity adds — gear, conditions, a schedule, a working ankle — adds friction. Enough friction and maybe nothing happens, and maybe you engage in a dopamine depleting activity instead (like scrolling). Pretty soon you're doom scrolling and as my son says, "you become a dopamine-less husk". Which is too easy! Too low friction! This is not the Easy Mode we're talking about. We're talking about approaching healthy, productive, generative, creative projects, tasks and activities in a way that is low friction and easy enough that we remain emotionally regulated and optimally functioning.
Walking is one of the most simple and easy such healthy activities. It strips the requirements to almost nothing. No equipment, no skill to acquire, no slot to book, no risk of looking foolish. You open your front door and you're already doing it. And you can modulate the difficulty on the fly: walk faster or longer to turn it up, slow down to turn it down. It's the easiest, most accessible full-spectrum intervention there is.
The Full Spectrum
By "Full Spectrum" I mean that the activities noted above work to support the ADHD nervous system, endocrine system, and brain in a variety of ways (maybe all the ways) that have been shown to be effective in the literature. The research on movement and ADHD keeps circling four overlapping mechanisms, and the surprise is how many of them a plain walk outdoors touches at once.
The chemistry. ADHD runs on under-fueled attention and reward circuits — networks chronically short on dopamine and norepinephrine, the same neurotransmitters stimulant medication targets. A single bout of aerobic movement releases exactly those chemicals; researchers describe the effect as similar to psychostimulants. And you don't need to be sprinting. Some of the evidence actually favors low-to-moderate intensity for inhibitory control. The pace that soothes rather than taxes is doing real neurochemical work.
The restoration. Attention Restoration Theory — the Kaplans' framework — holds that the effortful, directed attention we burn all day gets fatigued, and that natural settings engage attention gently and automatically, letting the depleted system recharge. Kuo and Faber Taylor's survey of over 400 children with ADHD found the same activity reduced symptoms more in green space than indoors — and the greener the setting, the sharper the attention. As little as twenty minutes outdoors has significant benefits.
The reset. A 2024 randomized trial used EEG to show that nature walks shifted frontal brain activity and improved mood, while urban walks placed measurably higher demands on executive attention. Nature walks raise vagal tone, lower cortisol, and can quiet the amygdala. For a nervous system that tends to idle in fight-or-flight, this downshift may matter as much as the attention boost.
The coordination. Walking looks like doing nothing, but it's a continuous act of balance and cross-body rhythm. The cerebellum — now understood as a hub for attention and planning, not just movement — is one of the most consistently implicated regions in ADHD, and every micro-adjustment on uneven ground is a small rep for it. Meanwhile the gait itself is cross-lateral, left arm swinging with right leg, both hemispheres kept talking. And here's the piece I suspect matters most clinically: rhythmic, bilateral movement is regulating. Walking automatically helps process, move, and express emotion. Executive function isn't summoned by effort when you're activated; it becomes available once you're regulated. The walk does the regulating first, and the focus follows.
Stack the four and you get "full spectrum." Yes, all athletics do this. So do activities like skate boarding, surfing, bike riding, etc. These are all great. If you're doing these almost every day, you're good. My experience, that of my clients, and research suggests that engaging in such activities every day is desirable. The benefits will be felt throughout that day and they will accumulate over time.
Yes, it's boring. That might be the feature.
If you suggest to a surfer that they go for a hike when there's no surf, they will probably be less than enthused (I have noticed). Compared to surfing, walking is boring.
I understand the sentiment. And yet: it still works. And I've started to suspect the boredom isn't a bug. A walk is a low-stakes opportunity to be with the feelings we usually out-run — a chance to practice tolerating the very state the ADHD nervous system organizes its whole life around avoiding. David Goggins grinds through boredom with hours of daily running, the hard way; I respect that path. But maybe ten to fifteen hours of walking a week gets you good-enough benefits without the torture chamber.
There's a lot more to say about boredom — I think it's the Ultimate Boss for the ADHD brain, and befriending it might be the deepest skill in this whole series. That's for a future post. For now, I encourage you to experiment with walking, thinking of it as a kind of full spectrum treatment. Or maybe on the days when you can't get out for a bike ride or play pick up basketball, or any other such activity, try walking. Greener is better, but a tree-lined street beats the treadmill and both beat the couch. See if it works.
Comments