The coronavirus pandemic has made walking an easy and attainable way to continue exercising, and figures from Transport for London indicate that 31 percent of people in London are choosing to walk instead of using another mode in the past year. Over half of people surveyed also said they are going out for more walks and walking longer, even in the lockdowns that have been experienced in Great Britain.
Tom Edwards of the BBC has written how he has rediscovered walking as a mental stress reliever as well as a way to get physical exercise.
Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian takes it one “step” further, bluntly writing about the fact that when you walk outside with another person there is ” no news to exchange, there’s nowhere for conversation to go but to the true state of our lives and psyches.”
Work at the University College of London on a Covid Social Study tracks how the pandemic has impacted social and emotional lives. The study surprisingly found that more than half of respondents saw no change in their relationships with others, while 15 percent said their social relationships had actually improved.
Twenty-two percent thought their relationships were worse.
What appears to be a commonality is people that have been able to keep some routine in walking or doing familiar activities on a daily basis. While early studies were showing that dog owners seem to benefit from having a pet for social reasons, they also are required to take that animal out regularly for walks, building in a comfortable, repetitive routine.
Other people have been “fake commuting” for coffee every day to come back to “start” their work day. That’s a phenomenon I wrote about last year, where Dalhousie University’s Dr. Sylvain Charlebois first noted that there is a psychological reason that people are leaving home to pick up a coffee whether by foot, bike or vehicle.
As Dr. Charlebois notes, people don’t just get up in the morning and sit to work at the home office station, and leaving to get coffee elsewhere creates a regularity and a “commute” to the home office.
“Which means that even though people aren’t necessarily going to work, physically, or going to some place, people are still basically driving around or busing around to get their morning fix…A lot of people are struggling to physically distance themselves from their work.”
Adrienne Matei in The Guardian calles Fake Commuting “Faux Commuting”. There are studies showing the benefits of separating work and home life, especially when they are in the same space. The British National Bureau of Economic Research found that during pandemic lockdown people working remotely actually worked on the job nearly an hour more than they did in the actual site specific office. The faux commute allows for people to choose when they get outside, and how they will go, be it by walking or or another mode.
These fake commutes and interventions to get physically away from home create work and home life transitions, and can help well-being and sleep quality, assisting to clear minds to get adequate rest. Many of the habits that we’ve seen as helpful to manage in the office are directly transferable to working from home, and research shows that many of us are adapting to walking and regularly getting outside as part of the pandemic “normal”. As Ms Matei writes, getting outside and walking routinely even for a coffee creates “healthy, boundary-creating elements that may have felt like a meager silver lining around a dark cloud of drudgery and stress to many.”
Here’s a very short YouTube video of a fake commuter using his apartment to simulate the ride on rapid transit to work.
image:grace&frankie
