TAKE A WALK, GO TOUCH SOME GRASS
Charles Dickens fought his depression by walking through London at night. One October he set out at 2 in the morning and walked 30 miles, all the way to his country home in Kent. In 1860 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 150 years to catch up. Dickens called his bad spells "spectres." They came back every time he started a new novel and sometimes hung on for months. His mood would fall apart, his sleep would collapse, and the only thing that pulled him out was walking. He explained his method in an essay called "Night Walks," published on July 21, 1860 in his weekly magazine All the Year Round. He had tried fighting his insomnia from bed and lost. So he changed the plan. The fix, he wrote, was "getting up directly after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise." A worried mind cannot fix itself by worrying more in bed. You have to get up and move. Most nights he walked 12 to 20 miles. A friend called it "viole...
