Think of the last real conversation you had with someone you love.

Not the logistics. Not the checking-in. Not the passing exchange about what needs to be done or what is happening at the weekend. A real conversation. The kind that leaves you feeling as though you know each other again, or perhaps for the first time.

Where were you?

If you are like most people, you were probably not sitting at a table looking at each other. You were walking. Moving through the world together, side by side, going somewhere or nowhere in particular, and the words arrived in a way they rarely do when you are face to face.

This is not a coincidence. It is biology.

What happens when we walk side by side

Psychologists have known for some time that side-by-side conversation is neurologically different from face-to-face conversation. When we sit across from someone and speak about something that matters, we are also managing eye contact, facial expression, and the vulnerability of being seen responding in real time. For many people, that visibility creates a subtle but real inhibition. We edit. We soften. We wait.

Walking removes most of that. The forward momentum, the shared gaze at the path ahead, the rhythm of movement that occupies just enough of the conscious mind to quiet the part that overthinks: these create conditions in which people say things they have been carrying for months, sometimes years. Research from Stanford University has found that walking increases creative thinking by as much as 81 percent. The more intimate finding is that movement loosens something in us emotionally as well as cognitively. It makes us braver, more honest, and more open to hearing things that are difficult.

This is why therapists walk with their clients. It is why a teenager who will not look up from their phone at dinner will sometimes, on a long enough walk, tell you everything.

The people we mean to spend more time with

There is a particular kind of tenderness in thinking about the people in our lives who are always there but somehow always at a slight distance. The parent who is ageing faster than we are ready for. The grown child who has become their own person so completely that we are not sure where we fit anymore. The sibling who knows the whole of our history but not enough of our present.

These relationships do not usually suffer from a lack of love. They suffer from a lack of the right conditions. The dinner table has too much history. The phone call has too little texture. The special occasion carries too much expectation for anyone to be entirely themselves inside it.

A walk asks for none of that. It creates the conditions for honesty without the theatre of confrontation. It allows silence to be companionable rather than loaded. And it lets people be together without performing togetherness.

On showing up fully

Showing up for the people we love takes energy. Not the performative energy of occasions and obligations, but the quiet, sustained energy of presence. Of actually being there, listening, staying with the hard parts of a conversation rather than retreating from them.

That kind of presence is easier when the body is well supported. B vitamins, particularly B6, B12, and folate, play a central role in how we manage stress, regulate mood, and sustain the mental clarity that real connection requires. Our Vitamin B Complex was formulated with exactly this kind of everyday energy in mind. Not the energy of doing more, but the energy of being more fully where you already are.

The walk, as always, is where it begins. The rest is what you bring to it.

An invitation for this May

Mental Health Awareness Week falls on the 11th to the 17th of May this year. Its theme, as ever, is the importance of connection. Of reaching out. Of not letting the people who matter most to us slip quietly into the distance while we attend to everything else.

Think of one person in your family, someone you love and perhaps have not been close enough to recently. Invite them for a walk. Not a meal, not a call, not a plan that requires dates and diaries and good intentions. A walk. An hour, a path, and the two of you moving through May together.

See what gets said.

We think it might surprise you.

Sources

Stanford University. Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2014. stanford.edu

Mental Health Foundation. Mental Health Awareness Week 2025. mentalhealth.org.uk