Journaling While Walking: Why It Works and How to Do It

Journaling while walking means talking through what’s on your mind as you walk and recording it, instead of writing it up later. Hit record at the door, keep your phone in your pocket, use earbuds with a mic, and just talk. In a Stanford study, people’s creative output was about 60% higher walking than sitting.

By Chenxi

I live in Stratford, in east London, right next to Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. One afternoon I spent over an hour walking there and started thinking out loud, the way you do when nobody’s around. A few half-formed sentences untangled something I’d been stuck on for weeks. Then I got home, sat down to write it up, and couldn’t remember exactly how I’d said it. The idea was roughly there. The words that made it click were gone.

So I started recording my walks. So far that’s 130 hours of audio, 513 entries and more than 300 places. This is everything I’ve learned about doing it well.

What is journaling while walking?

Journaling while walking is keeping a journal on the move: you walk, you think, and you capture those thoughts as you go rather than trying to remember them at a desk later.

There are two common ways to do it:

• Walk and talk. You record yourself speaking while you walk, usually with earbuds in and the phone in your pocket. The recording is the entry. This is what I do, and what most of this guide is about.
• Walk, then write. You walk without capturing anything, then sit down straight afterwards and write while it’s fresh. Some pen-and-paper journalers swear by this, and it works well if you love writing by hand.

The difference is what you keep. Walk-then-write keeps your summary of the walk. Walk-and-talk keeps the thinking itself, in the order it happened, in your own voice, before you’ve tidied it up. If you’ve ever had a good idea halfway round a loop and lost it by the time you got home, walk and talk is the fix.

A walking journal doesn’t have to be about anything in particular. Some of my entries are about work problems. Some are about a conversation I keep replaying. Plenty are just me describing the canal and the light. They all count.

Does walking help you think? What the research says

If thinking while walking feels easier to you, there’s actual research behind that feeling.

In 2014, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz at Stanford ran four experiments comparing people sitting with people walking, both on a treadmill facing a blank wall indoors and outside on campus. The results were published as “Give Your Ideas Some Legs” in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

What they found:

• Walking boosted creative, divergent thinking. On a classic task where you list as many uses as you can for an everyday object, 81% of participants did better while walking than sitting.
• The effect was large. According to the Stanford Report on the study, creative output went up by an average of 60% when people were walking.
• It didn’t matter where. Walking on a treadmill in front of a wall worked, as did walking outside. The walking itself seemed to be what mattered.
• It lingered briefly. People who walked and then sat down kept some of the boost for a short while afterwards.

The honest caveat: walking didn’t help with everything. On a test with one right answer (finding the single word that links three others), only 23% of participants improved while walking. Walking seems to help you generate ideas, not necessarily pick the best one.

That matches my experience exactly, and it’s the most useful rule I’ve found: walk to generate, sit to decide. The walk is where the raw material comes out. Deciding what to do with it can wait until you’re home.

Why talk instead of write on a walk

You can’t really write on a walk. You have to stop, get out a notebook or a phone, take your gloves off, type with your thumbs, and by the time you’ve finished the sentence the next thought has gone. It’s one of the most common complaints you see from people who think best on their feet: their mind is full of ideas on the walk, and most of them are forgotten by the time they get home.

Talking fixes that. Your hands stay free and your eyes stay up. You don’t break stride.

It also changes what you capture. When you type, you edit as you go: delete half a sentence, soften the harsh bit, drop the line that makes you look petty. When you talk, you can’t backspace. You say “I’m fine with it,” pause, and then “actually, no, I’m not,” and both stay on the record. That “actually” is often the most honest part.

And a recording keeps the way you said it. When something clicks mid-walk, you can go back and hear exactly how it clicked, not just a note saying that it did.

I wrote a longer piece on voice journaling vs writing if you want the full comparison. The short version is that they’re good at different things, and a walk is where talking wins.

How to journal while walking, step by step

This is the routine I’ve settled into after 513 entries. It’s deliberately simple.

1. Pick a familiar loop. You want a route you don’t have to think about. If you’re checking a map at every junction, your attention goes to navigation instead of your thoughts. A park loop, a canal path or your usual errand route all work.
2. Put in earbuds with a mic. AirPods or any Bluetooth or wired earbuds with a microphone let you talk at a normal volume with the phone in your pocket. If it’s windy, a small clip-on mic is a big upgrade; here’s my guide to choosing a mic for walking.
3. Start recording at the door. Hit record before you leave, put the phone in your pocket, and don’t look at it again. One recording for the whole walk is much better than starting and stopping for each thought.
4. Walk quietly for a minute. You don’t have to talk straight away. Let your pace settle. Then say the first thing that comes to mind, not the best thing. The first thing is usually what’s actually on your mind.
5. Let it ramble. Contradict yourself. Change topic halfway through a sentence. Go quiet for a few minutes. The only rule is not to edit. You’re capturing thinking, not performing it.
6. Say one summary sentence before you get home. Something like “So I think the real issue is…” or “The thing I want to remember from today is…”. It takes ten seconds, and it makes the entry much easier to come back to.
7. Stop recording at the door. The walk is the entry. Done.

A word on safety. Keep your eyes up and your attention on where you’re going. Pause your thinking, not just your feet, at crossings. Don’t look at your screen while you walk; that’s the whole point of keeping the phone in your pocket. If a topic is personal, save it for a quieter path where you won’t feel overheard.

What to talk about: walking journal prompts

Most days you won’t need a prompt; whatever is on your mind will come out once you start walking. But on the days you set off and your head is blank, these help. Pick one and see where it goes.

Something you’re stuck on

• What’s the decision I keep putting off, and what am I actually waiting for?
• If a friend described this problem to me, what would I tell them?
• What would I try if I knew it might not work?
• What’s the part of this I haven’t said out loud yet?
• What would “good enough” look like here?

What’s around you

• Describe what you can see right now, as if to someone who’s never been here.
• What’s changed on this route since the last time you walked it?
• What sounds can you hear, and which one did you notice first?
• Is there anything here that reminds you of somewhere else?

Looking back on the week

• What happened this week that I’ll still remember in a year?
• What took more energy than it should have?
• Who did I enjoy talking to, and why?
• What did I say I’d do that I haven’t done yet?
• What do I want next week to feel like?

How long should a walking journal entry be?

As long as the walk. That’s the simplest answer, and the one that works best for me. When the recording starts at the door and stops at the door, you never have to decide how long an entry should be.

For what it’s worth, my 130 hours across 513 entries works out at roughly 15 minutes per entry on average. Some are three minutes on the way to the shop. Some are a 90-minute loop round the park.

The one thing not to do is cut a good thought short because of the tool. Long recordings are where generic voice memo apps can get fragile: an incoming call, a photo or the battery running out can interrupt a long session. If that happens to you, it’s a tool problem, not a journaling problem.

What to do with your recordings afterwards

Recording is the habit. Coming back is where it pays off.

• Replay the good bits. You don’t need to listen to every minute. When you remember a walk where something clicked, go back and hear it. Place holds memory: if your recordings sit alongside your route and the photos you took, an old entry feels less like notes and more like being back there.
• Transcribe if you want to search. A transcript is optional, but it makes entries quicker to skim and lets you find a word months later. The audio is still the part that keeps how you said it.
• Do a weekly sit-down skim. Once a week, at a desk, scroll through the week’s entries and pull out anything worth acting on. This is the “sit to decide” half: the walks generate, and the skim chooses.
• Don’t worry about the rest. Most entries will never be listened to again, and that’s fine. Saying the thing out loud already did most of the work.

Tools: what you need (and don’t)

Honestly, you can start today with the voice memo app already on your phone. Earbuds in, record, walk, talk. If you only ever do it on short walks, that may be all you need. (Here’s how a walking journal differs from voice memos.)

A dedicated tool starts to help when your walks get longer, when you want entries organised by date and place, or when you want your photos and route kept with the audio. I’ve written an honest comparison of the best voice journal apps for iPhone, including ones I didn’t make.

The one I did make is Yuho, which I built after losing that idea in the park. It’s a private voice diary for iPhone, designed for long, hands-free walk-and-talk recordings: start it at the door and keep your phone in your pocket. Your voice, route and the photos you take in the app are saved together as one entry. Lock the screen and it keeps recording; a call pauses it, and it picks up again in the same recording afterwards. Your recordings, transcripts and photos are stored on your iPhone, not in the cloud. Transcription is optional: it auto-detects the language, or you can choose Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French or German. When you choose AI transcription or a recap, the audio or text is sent securely for processing and the result comes back to your phone. The core features are free. If you want a walking voice journal app built specifically for this, that’s what it’s for.

FAQ

Does walking really help you think?

For generating ideas, the evidence is good. In Oppezzo and Schwartz’s 2014 Stanford study, creative output was about 60% higher on average while people walked than while they sat, and 81% of participants improved on a divergent-thinking task. Walking helped much less with problems that have one right answer: only 23% improved on that test. Walk to generate ideas; sit down to choose between them.

Is it weird talking to yourself while walking?

Less than you’d think. With earbuds in, talking out loud looks like a phone call, and nobody gives it a second glance. Keep to a normal speaking volume, and save the more personal topics for quieter paths or parks, where you won’t feel overheard. After the first few walks it stops feeling strange.

How long should a walking journal entry be?

As long as the thought needs. That can be three minutes or the whole walk. The simplest approach is to start recording when you leave and stop when you get home, so the entry is the walk. Don’t cut a good thought short to fit a tool; if your recorder struggles with long sessions, that’s a tool problem, not a journaling problem.

What equipment do I need for a walking journal?

Just a phone. Earbuds with a built-in mic, like AirPods, let you keep the phone in your pocket and talk normally. If it’s windy or you want cleaner audio, a small clip-on wireless mic helps. The phone’s own mic also works well if you don’t mind holding it a little closer, and it picks up more of the sound around you. See the microphone guide.

How do I record my thoughts while walking without stopping?

Start one recording before you leave, put the phone away, and talk to your earbuds. Don’t stop and start for each thought; long pauses are fine, and you can skip silence when you listen back. Stopping to unlock the phone for every idea is what breaks the flow, so make the recording last the whole walk.

Should I transcribe my walking journal?

It’s optional. A transcript makes entries quicker to skim and lets you search for a word months later. The audio keeps your tone and the way you said something, which a transcript loses. Many people keep both: the transcript to find an entry, the audio to hear it again.

What’s the difference between a walking journal and voice memos?

A voice memo is a recording. A walking journal is a habit of keeping those recordings as dated entries, ideally with where you were and what you saw, so you can come back to them. You can start a walking journal with Voice Memos; a dedicated app helps once you want the date, route and photos kept together. More on walking journals vs voice memos.

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Go for a walk and say the thing you wouldn’t write down. If you want a tool built for it, get Yuho on the App Store.

Sources

• Oppezzo, M. & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 1142–1152. doi.org/10.1037/a0036577 · PubMed 24749966
• Wong, M. (2014, 24 April). Stanford study finds walking improves creativity. Stanford Report. news.stanford.edu