I Went Hiking for Four Days. Here's What I Learnt.
A personal note before you read: I occasionally write from my own experience rather than purely from a clinical perspective. I do this deliberately. Psychologists are human beings, not blank screens, and I think there's value in that being visible sometimes. What follows is one of those pieces.
I've been hiking all of my life. There are photos of me as a toddler, rugged up and rosy-cheeked, somewhere in the green hinterlands of Devon with my dad. Since then I've walked in parts of the Americas, Asia, and through many parts of Australia. It's one of the few things that has followed me through every chapter of my life, consistent in a way that not many other things have not been.
A few weeks ago I completed four days on the Cape to Cape Track in Western Australia's south west, from Dunsborough down to Augusta. It's a stunning stretch of coastline and bush, 135 kilometres of soft sand, rocky limestone outcrops, dense bushland, and open headlands where the Indian Ocean comes at you sideways. I changed plans partway through and compressed three days of walking into two, which meant 34 kilometres on one day and 40 on the next, carrying a 14 kilogram pack that eventually wore through the skin on my hip. Two weeks later, the bruise is still there.
This is not a story about achievement. I want to be clear about that upfront, because I have a strong aversion to the kind of narrative where someone does something physically demanding and then frames it as proof of their exceptional character. That's not what I took from it.
What I took from it was something quieter and, I think, more useful.
What Happens to the Brain Out There
My brain is, by its nature, busy. I suspect many people reading this will recognise what I mean. Thoughts moving quickly, tangentially, one thing pulling into another, the low hum of processing that doesn't fully switch off. It's not distressing, it's just how I'm wired. But it's relentless.
Hiking does something to this that I haven't found replicated anywhere else.
The first hour or two of a long day on the track is focused in a particular way. Not quiet exactly, but less scattered. My thinking narrows and deepens rather than spreading. On this last hike I found myself thinking carefully about some of my clients, holding their presentations differently, seeing angles I hadn't seen in the consulting room. I thought about my children. My relationships. Things I'd been carrying without quite examining them. At one point I cried, touching something I hadn't realised was sitting so close to the surface. At another point I laughed out loud at a realisation, completely alone on a stretch of beach, which felt both absurd and entirely right.
I talk to myself a fair bit out there. At one point on this hike I caught myself talking to myself about talking to myself, which struck me as a reasonable summary of what it means to be a psychologist.
As the hours accumulate something shifts. The thinking loosens. I fixate on looking for snakes. I notice the light on the water. I make up songs with no particular logic to them. I feel something that I can only describe as a very uncomplicated gratitude that moves from one thing to the next, the kind that doesn't require any particular reason, just a body moving through a landscape that is indifferent to everything you've been worried about.
The Part Nobody Talks About
Here's what the hiking content on the internet tends to leave out.
There is a point, usually somewhere in hour four or five of a long day or a few days in, where the physical discomfort starts to dominate. A rub becomes a blister. A muscle twinge becomes a persistent ache. The pack settles into the same spot on your shoulders with a weight that feels like it's compounding by the kilometre.
And then, quietly, the thoughts come.
Can I actually do this? What if I can't? What if something gives out? I've got how far still to go? What was I thinking, changing the plan like this?
These thoughts, and the anxiety they carry, are not fundamentally different from the thoughts I hear from clients every day. The geography is different. The stakes are different. But the structure is identical. A challenge presents itself. The mind immediately begins calculating the probability of failure. It rehearses the worst case. It questions capability. It suggests, with considerable authority, that stopping might be the wiser choice.
And here is what I want to say about that, as directly as I can.
The thoughts were not the truth.
I kept walking. Not because I silenced the thoughts, not because I reframed them into something more positive, not because I defused from them using any of the therapeutic techniques I use with clients every day. I kept walking simply because I kept walking. One foot, then the next. The question of whether I could do it got answered not by thinking but by doing. The body showed the mind something the mind could not have accepted as argument.
What This Has to Do with Depression
I work with a lot of people who are living with depression. And one of the most insidious things about depression is what it says with such quiet certainty.
You can't. There's no point. You don't have the energy. It won't help. Give up.
These aren't dramatic announcements. They arrive softly, as though they're simply stating obvious facts. And because the person hearing them is depleted, because the illness itself drains the resources you'd normally use to question your own thinking, they tend to be believed.
Therapy offers many tools for working with these thoughts. We challenge them, examine the evidence, reframe them, practise defusing from them so they lose some of their hold. These are valuable approaches and I use them daily.
But sometimes, and I say this carefully because I don't want to oversimplify something that is genuinely serious, sometimes the most important thing is not to think your way through. It's to move through. To do the next small thing without waiting for belief to arrive first. To put one foot in front of the last and not stop, and discover on the other side of that action something the mind refused to accept in advance.
The capability was always there. It just couldn't be argued into existence. It had to be walked into existence.
I'm not suggesting someone in the depths of a depressive episode should go and hike forty kilometres. I am suggesting that the principle, starting before you feel ready, acting in the absence of belief, letting the body teach the mind what the mind won't accept as theory, is one of the most important things I know about how people move through difficulty.
On Being Alone in a Large Space
There is something I want to say about solitude, because I think we are not particularly good at it as a culture, and I think this costs us something.
For four days I was largely alone. Not isolated, not cut off from the world by circumstance, but choosing to be mostly without the devices and noise and demands that fill most of my waking hours. Self-imposed solitude is a different thing entirely from loneliness. It has a quality of restoration that I find difficult to articulate but very easy to feel.
The research on this is reasonably clear. Time in nature, even modest amounts, is associated with reduced cortisol, improved mood, lower anxiety, and better cognitive function. A well-cited series of studies in a now well known Stanford study demonstrated that walking in natural environments reduced rumination and activity in the neural circuits associated with negative self-referential thinking, changes that weren't seen in people who walked in urban environments for the same duration.
But beyond the research, there is something about being in a space that is genuinely vast, where the ocean is enormous and indifferent, where the bush goes on beyond what you can see, where your problems are exactly the same size as they were when you arrived but the space around them is incomparably larger. This doesn't make the problems trivial. It puts them in proportion. There is a difference.
You don't need four days or the Cape to Cape Track for any of this. You need some time without your phone, outside, moving. Even an hour. Even half an hour. The evidence supports it and, more to the point, most people who try it notice it working even if they can't explain exactly why.
What I Came Home With
I came home with a bruised hip, tight calves, and a blister that is taking its time to heal. I also came home with something harder to name but easier to feel. A kind of recalibration. A quieter relationship with the things that had been loud before I left.
I am capable of more than I thought. But more than that, and this is the part I want to leave you with: I didn't know that until I was on the other side of it. The doubt was real the whole way through. The capability and the doubt coexisted, and what determined the outcome wasn't the absence of doubt. It was the decision to keep moving in spite of it.
That's available to most of us, in some form, most of the time. We just have to start before we feel ready.