Take a Walk

August 7, 2026

The oldest practice there is, and why it works on the days nothing else does

Tobia Bradley, CDC  ·  Certified Divorce Coach  ·  Ashby Jones & Associates, LLC

You already know this one. That’s exactly why I want to talk about it.

Go for a walk is the advice everybody offers and almost nobody takes. It sounds far too small for what you’re actually carrying, and some part of you hears it as have you tried not being sad. So you nod politely, and you don’t go.

Stay with me anyway. It works, and there are reasons it works that nobody ever bothers to tell you.

The email has been open for two hours.

You’ve written three versions of a reply and deleted all of them. Your shoulders are up somewhere near your ears. The same four sentences have been circling since breakfast, his, or your attorney’s, or the ones you wish you’d said in the driveway.

Nothing has happened all morning. And you’re exhausted.

If you’ve read The Sixty-Second Sky, you know I love a practice that asks almost nothing of you. This one is its sister. That one asks for a minute. This one asks for a few more — and gives back something the minute can’t.

Put your shoes on.

One | Twenty Minutes and No Destination

Here it is, in full: go outside and walk for twenty minutes. No destination. No phone in your hand. Nothing in your ears.

That’s the whole thing. You are not exercising. You are not getting steps. You are not running an errand and calling it a walk. You’re going to leave your house, move your body forward through the world for twenty minutes, and come back.

If twenty is too many, walk ten. If ten is too many, walk to the end of the street and turn around. The version that helps is the one you’ll actually do.

What’s actually happening

There’s real substance underneath this, which is part of why I keep coming back to it.

Walking is one of the most reliably supported things we know of for a low, anxious, churning mind. Not because it fixes your circumstances, it doesn’t touch them, but because of what it does to a body running on stress chemistry. When you’ve been in high alert for weeks, those stress hormones don’t have anywhere to go. You were built to move while you felt this way. Sitting still with it is the unnatural part.

Then there’s the rhythm. Left, right, left, slow, steady, symmetrical. That kind of repetitive movement tends to quiet rumination in a way that trying to stop thinking about it never does. You cannot talk yourself out of a loop. You can sometimes walk yourself out of one.

And there’s something that happens to your thinking out there. Researchers who study this have found that people generate noticeably more and better ideas while walking than while sitting and the effect carries on for a while after they sit back down. Which means the walk isn’t time away from the problem. It’s often where the answer finally shows up, about eleven minutes in, when you weren’t chasing it.

What it feels like

Here’s the part I want you to pay attention to, because it matters more than the science.

The first five minutes are the worst. I want you to know that going in, so you don’t quit. Your mind will be as loud out there as it was in the chair, maybe louder, and you’ll feel foolish. Keep walking.

Somewhere around the seventh or eighth minute, something loosens. It’s usually not dramatic. You just notice you’ve stopped composing the reply. You hear your own feet. There’s air moving against your arms, and it has a temperature, and you register the temperature. A dog two yards over is extremely interested in you. Somebody’s cooking something with onions in it.

And the world keeps arriving, houses, a mailbox, a crack in the sidewalk, a kid’s bike dropped in a yard, all of it streaming past you, none of it having anything whatsoever to do with your case.

Your breathing takes itself over somewhere in there. You didn’t manage it. It just went back to doing what it knows.

Out here, you’re not a case. You’re a person on a sidewalk.

That’s the perspective this one has to offer, and it’s a different gift than the sun gives you.

For the past several weeks you have been a file. A petitioner or a respondent. A party. A set of financial disclosures and a custody schedule and a story people are telling about you at dinner. That identity has been following you from room to room in your own house.

It does not follow you out here. The woman walking past you with her groceries doesn’t know any of it. Neither does the dog. For twenty minutes you get to be nobody in particular, and I have watched what a relief that is on people’s faces when they come back.

You’ll pick the file back up when you walk in the door. That’s fine. You’ll pick it up with your shoulders down.

Two | Walk the Same Loop Every Time

This one is for the heavy days, and it’s small.

Pick one route and never choose again.

Around your block. The perimeter of the church parking lot. Out to the third mailbox and back. Whatever it is, let it be the same every single time, so that going for a walk requires exactly one decision: shoes on and not a second one.

Here’s why I bother telling you this. You are making an enormous number of decisions right now, most of them consequential, many of them under pressure, and that capacity is finite. It runs out. By evening you can be too depleted to decide what to eat, let alone where to walk, and so the thing that would have helped you quietly doesn’t happen.

Don’t let your relief require a decision. Take the choosing out of it entirely.

You are allowed to make one thing in your life require nothing of you.

Three | Walk It Before You Send It

And this one is practical, so I’ll be plain about it.

When his email lands, the one that makes your face go hot, do not reply. Put your shoes on and take the loop first.

I’m not asking you to be the bigger person. I’m not asking you to let it go. I’m telling you that the reply you write in that first hot hour is not your best one, and in a family court case, the things you send in writing have a way of coming back with a number on them.

So walk. Then come home and write it. You’ll find that some of what you were going to say has fallen off along the way, and what’s left is sharper and stronger for it. Nothing true will be lost in twenty minutes. Only the part that was going to cost you.

If it’s genuinely urgent, it can wait twenty minutes. Almost nothing in a divorce is a twenty-minute emergency, no matter how it’s written to sound.

Start small

If you take one thing from this, take the first one, and take it tomorrow.

Sometime before the day gets away from you, put your shoes on and go to the end of the street. No phone. No plan. Turn around when you feel like turning around.

You’re not solving anything. You’re just reminding a body that has been braced for a long time that it still knows how to move through the world and that the world is still out there, going about its business, with plenty of room in it for you.

That’s enough for today.

A gentle note: a walk is a small kindness, not a substitute for real support. If the heavy days are stacking up faster than the steady ones, please talk to someone, a therapist, your doctor, a friend who shows up. And nothing here is legal advice; questions about your case, your rights, or anything you’re about to put in writing belong with your attorney.

With love, Tobia

Tobia Bradley, CDC  ·  Certified Divorce Coach

ASHBY JONES & ASSOCIATES, LLC

Lexington  |  Columbia  |  Charleston  ·  ashbyjoneslaw.com