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A short walk

Get up and walk for a few minutes, indoors or out. Walking reliably nudges mood up a little, though most studies used walks of 10 minutes or more.

Short answer

Stand up and walk for a few minutes at a comfortable pace. Walking tends to leave people a little more awake and a little more positive, even when they expect it to be boring. The research is fairly consistent, but most studies used walks of 10 minutes or longer, so a 3-minute walk is a smaller dose of the same thing.

How to do it

  1. Stand up now. Don’t wait until you feel like it. The research suggests the feeling comes after the walking, not before.
  2. Walk at a pace that feels easy to brisk. You should be able to talk. This isn’t a workout.
  3. Go anywhere. A corridor, the stairs, round the block, to the far kitchen for water. Outdoors is a bonus (see Stepping outside), not a requirement.
  4. Leave your phone in your pocket if you can. Look around instead.
  5. Walk for at least 3 minutes. If you have 10, use them. That’s closer to what most studies tested.

If you can’t walk, any light movement that gets you out of your chair counts as a similar idea: standing, stretching, climbing a flight of stairs.

When to use it

  • When you feel flat or sluggish in the afternoon.
  • When you’ve been staring at the same problem for too long.
  • After a tense conversation, when your body is still keyed up.
  • When you notice you’ve been sitting for a couple of hours.

It’s a mood nudge, not a fix for a bad week. For building regular exercise into your life, see Movement and liftgood.now.

Evidence

In four experiments, short walks of 10 to 15 minutes moved people toward feeling more energetic and more positive. Afterwards they settled into feeling calmer. The pattern held in the lab and outdoors [1].

A set of three experiments found that walking, even as a side activity people didn’t know was the point of the study, lifted positive mood. It did so even when people were told to expect something dull, and the result held after ruling out posture and experimenter effects [2].

Bigger reviews back up the general idea. A 2024 meta-analysis of 103 studies with 4,671 people found that general mood improved after a single bout of exercise, by a small-to-moderate amount. These were before-and-after comparisons, and results varied a lot between studies [3]. A meta-analysis of 36 randomized trials found a single bout of exercise reduced anxiety compared with control conditions, but only by a small amount [4].

Rated Some. The effect of a bout of activity on mood is well studied and fairly consistent. It’s rated one step down because the effects are small, many studies lack a proper comparison group, and very short walks of under 5 minutes have barely been tested on their own.

Try this week

Pick a time when you usually slump, like mid-afternoon. Every day this week, stand up at that time and walk for at least 3 minutes before you sit back down. Note whether you feel any different when you return.

Sources

  1. [1]Ekkekakis P, Hall EE, VanLanduyt LM, Petruzzello SJ (2000). Walking in (affective) circles: can short walks enhance affect?. Journal of Behavioral Medicine. Intervention study
  2. [2]Miller JC, Krizan Z (2016). Walking facilitates positive affect (even when expecting the opposite). Emotion. Intervention study
  3. [3]Weinstein AA, van Aert RCM, Donovan K, et al. (2024). Affective Responses to Acute Exercise: A Meta-Analysis of the Potential Beneficial Effects of a Single Bout of Exercise on General Mood, Anxiety, and Depressive Symptoms. Psychosomatic Medicine. Systematic review / meta-analysis
  4. [4]Ensari I, Greenlee TA, Motl RW, Petruzzello SJ (2015). Meta-analysis of acute exercise effects on state anxiety: an update of randomized controlled trials over the past 25 years. Depression and Anxiety. Systematic review / meta-analysis

Topics: Movement, Walking, Mood, Energy, Stress

Sources checked 4 October 2026. Spot a mistake? Tell us.