01/28/2026
The paradox of healing. Your body gets MORE of all the good chemistry and all the benefits when you’re NOT counting steps, focused on gait or eye patterns, using it to calm your nervous system or to detox your lymph, lose weight or try to get anything at all from not just your walks but all the healthy activities you do.
The focus on results or outcomes paired with a walk or even a salad can actually create more of what you’re fighting when you’ve got a lot to heal and push you further away from the anticipated benefit.
It’s called the paradox of healing, similar to the pleasure paradox or the paradox of hedonism.
You want to get lost in the living of your life. Do it all because you enjoy it. You’re just walking because you love it, you want to see everything, you want to be whoever you are with. It’s a romance and not a routine. Two very different chemical profiles (and medicine).
The benefit or happiness you’re seeking is found in the joy of the meaningful activity. The second you expect something from it, you start biochemically shifting away from the full dose of what you wanted. Seeking results, seeking pleasure actually pushes you further from the biochemistry of happiness or that internal, energy filled feeling of goodness that truly heals. Wanting or even needing to get something from the walk decreases the benefit the walk would naturally give you.
This is true for everything, from connection to food.
Over intellectualizing your life in order “to heal” actually decreases the medicine. Intellectualizing your life decreases it less. Forgetting it has a benefit while you’re doing it ENHANCES IT.
To get the full dose, quit trying to get something.
Build a life you genuinely love to live.
Forget you’re doing any of it to heal.
Then watch what happens.
Your life is your medicine.
The truth of it.
A walk just to walk or to look at flowers or enjoy your pets or loved ones is chemically different than a walk to “heal,” “change,” or “correct” anything in your body.
You cannot ever remove your mind from the equation. That’s why they say intention matters. For everything.
So maybe learn a little less and live a little more. For your health. 🤍