Dr. Matt Walker

If you are not into meditation or podcasts or sleep stories or whatever it is that you wish for, try taking yourself on a mental walk.

And it has to be a walk that you know very well.

So let's say that you walk your dog every day and you know there's a couple of walks that you take with your dog.

Do it in hyper detail.

So close your eyes, you go to the front door, you clip in the dog to the leash, you walk out, you go down the steps,

out to the driveway, then you take a right, but you always cross over and you look to the left and the right, because that's the place where traffic always comes.

You cross over and now you're walking up and there's that strange sort of set of garbage that's been outside of that house for a long time and you don't know why it hasn't been cleared.

And then you move.

That type of high fidelity detail

allows you to do what we said earlier, which is get your mind off itself.

And when you do that, again, typically you fall asleep faster.

And that's what she found.

It was a great, great study.

I really enjoyed that.

They should.

And I think it's certainly possible that when you're incorporating some aspects of the scene and the information is more sort of veridical and maybe sort of episodic declarative memory.

But when you're taking yourself for a mental walk, what is the fundamental premise of that?

It's a walk, it's motion, it's procedural memory.

And so maybe it's something to do about with being more attentive to becoming embodied.

Because when you're out walking and you're moving, it is a more embodied experience than just sitting there at your desk, which is mostly your head and very little your body.