Obsessive step counts are ruining walking

Vox

2 days ago

According to my phone, I've been averaging about 6,600 steps a day so far this year. My meager effort pales in comparison to the 15,000, 20,000, or even 30,000 steps I see influencers on my feed bragging about regularly.
To be clear: There is nothing wrong with walking — it's a free and low-impact exercise that, compared to running, has greater mass appeal. Americans are overwhelmingly sedentary, spending an average of 9.5 hours a day seated, and anything that inspires people to move more is good news. But quantifying your every step, tracking every ounce of protein ingested, or hours slept can border on obsessive. The current cultural fixation on nutrition and fitness also speaks to a shift toward beauty standards that once again idealize thinness. Mix that with American hustle culture, and you have a recipe for turning a low-key activity into a compulsion.
'This all comes down to how much our culture values productivity above everything else,' says Keith Diaz, an associate professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. 'It's just another metric that we measure ourselves by.'
From leisure to optimization
Walking is perhaps one of the most functional and accessible forms of movement: It gets you where you want to go, and you don't need any special equipment to do it. The vast majority of people walk at some point during their day without having to think too much about it. It makes sense, then, that walking has come in and out of fashion as a form of exercise throughout history. In the late 1800s, leisure walking became a popular sport. A century later, at the height of the fitness boom in the 1980s, walking got a rebrand and a refresh, thanks to a book called Heavyhands touting the benefits of walking with weights. 'That became,' says Danielle Friedman, the author of Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped The World, 'a way to make walking not seem weak.'
To achieve a textbook hot girl walk, you must walk four miles while expressing gratitude and envisioning your goals.
The pandemic was a major boon for walking. With gyms and fitness studios closed and cabin fever setting in, many took to strolling as a way to get moving out of the house. Walking was gentler and less punishing than the high-intensity fitness trends of the early 2000s, Friedman says. 'The pendulum swung a little bit more toward just appreciating movement for movement's sake,' she says. But as social media caught on — the original 'hot girl walk' clip was posted on TikTok in January 2021 — walks became more performative. Walking now had a purpose. To achieve a textbook hot girl walk, for instance, you must walk four miles while expressing gratitude and envisioning your goals. Over time, the step counts ballooned.
Keeping careful track of your mileage also has a long history. The first modern pedometer was designed in 1965 in Japan. Called the manpo-kei, or 10,000 steps meter, this simple act of marketing helped cement the 10,000-step threshold as a benchmark that one should strive to hit for good health and well-being.
The science doesn't quite back up the marketing. Recent research has found that among women in their 70s, as few as 4,400 steps a day is related to lower mortality, compared to 2,700 steps or less. Those who walked more had even less risk for early mortality, but those benefits tapered off at more than about 7,500 steps. Another study of middle-aged adults found that those who took 8,000 steps were less likely to die early from heart disease and cancer compared to those who only took 4,000 steps. Again, the benefits plateaued after 8,000 steps. Similar findings suggest that 7,000 steps was the magic number (the studies, it should be noted, were observational and could not prove causation.) If you're walking for health, 7,000 to 8,000 steps, however, seems like a pretty good bet.
These days, everyone's got a step counter in their pocket or on their wrist. Health tracking apps on phones and wearables like the Apple Watch, Oura, Fitbit, and Whoop have made it much easier to account for every single step. Health-related tracking can be extremely motivating when it comes to behavior change. When you have specific health or fitness goals, tracking is a good way to measure success. 'You have a target and you have a means to measure it,' Diaz says, 'which is great.'
At the same time, you should want to engage in that activity because you like it and not because your watch or an influencer is telling you to move. Unless you're intrinsically motivated to achieve that goal — I walk because I like the way it feels — tracking can veer into compulsion. Once you've hit a benchmark of 10,000 or 15,000 or 20,000 steps, you may feel compelled to meet, or exceed, it every day or else fall into a shame and anxiety spiral. 'When the Fitbit first came out,' Diaz says, 'I used it for a couple weeks, and I just had to put it away because I couldn't do it anymore. If I didn't hit 10,000 steps in a day, it'd be nine o'clock at night and…I'd be circling my little, tiny living room for 20 minutes just to get my steps to where I need them to be. I'm sitting there, like how is this healthy in any way, shape, or form that I'm obsessing over a number?'
Although quantifying an activity increases how often you do it, you start to enjoy it less.
Soon, something that previously brought you enjoyment can start to feel like work. Although quantifying an activity (like counting steps or the number of pages read) increases how often you do it, you start to enjoy it less, a 2016 study found. This change can happen within a few days of tracking, the study's author Jordan Etkin, a professor of marketing at Duke University, says.
When participants were able to see their results, they would continue the activity. But when they weren't shown their data, they lost the motivation to continue. 'The reasons for doing the activity shift from being because you like it or find some other value in it,' Etkin says, 'to being because it gives you this sense of accomplishment and productivity. When you don't get that anymore, because you're not tracking how many of these things you're doing, it's less valuable to you.'
Instead of just moving for movement's sake, perpetual tracking assigns status and morality to basic bodily functions. Hitting a certain step count is 'good' and having a low readiness score is 'bad.' The number acts as a marker of wellness. These days, the ideal embodiment of that wellness has pivoted back toward thinness. No longer is a step just a step or a gram of protein a bit of nourishment — it's all in service of optimization of a skinnier, healthier self. People who track their health want every step to count, to matter, Etkin says. If it isn't being documented, it may as well not have happened. 'That introduces new dynamics into how people decide what and whether and when to do things,' she says, 'based on whether it's going to be recorded.'
A healthy balance
By no means should you stop walking if it improves your mental and physical health. But if the pressure of hitting a specific target every day causes anxiety or you're unable to forgo walking for a day, you may need to reconsider your relationship with your goals. This is 'because you're obsessing over this outward signal, and it becomes this unhealthy striving for perfectionism,' Diaz says. People can start to ignore their body's cues for rest and push themselves to injury.
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In order to maintain a more flexible outlook on your goals, Diaz suggests setting a range target — maybe 8,000 to 12,000 steps a day — or weekly benchmarks. If you know you're going to be moving a lot on the weekend, you won't be so fixated on a weekday where your step count is lower.