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Areas › Your body › Moving your body
Indoors, most of what you look at wants something from you. Outdoors, leaves moving, water, birds, the light changing, all of it holds you without asking you to concentrate. People often notice their thinking slowing down to the pace of what is around them. You do not have to do anything with it, which is exactly the point.
It is God who has given you the earth for a dwelling place and the heavens for a canopy (Quran 40:64). Being under the open sky is described as the ordinary human place to be, not an indulgence.
غافر
ٱللَّهُ ٱلَّذِي جَعَلَ لَكُمُ ٱلۡأَرۡضَ قَرَارࣰ ا وَٱلسَّمَآءَ بِنَآءࣰ وَصَوَّرَكُمۡ فَأَحۡسَنَ صُوَرَكُمۡ وَرَزَقَكُم مِّنَ ٱلطَّيِّبَٰتِۚ ذَٰلِكُمُ ٱللَّهُ رَبُّكُمۡۖ فَتَبَارَكَ ٱللَّهُ رَبُّ ٱلۡعَٰلَمِينَ
It is God who has given you the earth for a dwelling place and the heavens for a canopy. He shaped you, formed you well, and provided you with good things. Such is God your Lord, so glory be to Him, the Lord of the Worlds
Qur’an 40:64read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Pulling together the stronger meta-analyses, physical activity had a small to moderate effect on depression and anxiety in adults with no clinical diagnosis, so this is not only for people who are unwell. That research measured activity rather than the setting it happened in. The claim about where you are is a smaller and less tested one than the claim about moving at all.
Rebar AL, Stanton R, Geard D, Short C, Duncan MJ, Vandelanotte C. (2015). A meta-meta-analysis of the effect of physical activity on depression and anxiety in non-clinical adult populations.. Health psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The effortful sort of attention gets a break when something else is holding you gently.
Bolt the movement onto something you would want to do anyway. A game with a friend, a walk to somewhere with good coffee at the end, a route past the river.
Move earlier in the day if you can. Whatever it gives you is then available for the hours that follow, and the day has fewer chances to swallow it.
Clumsy is not a description you can work with. Balance, core strength, shifting your weight, big movements, small ones, catching a ball, keeping a beat: those you can look at one at a time.