You are going out anyway. A short instruction in your ear, like finding the oldest thing on the block, makes the same walk do more for your attention and mood. That is the whole idea behind Strides. Here is the research, and where it stops.
Most of what I build at Mindtrek rests on one question: does a walk get better when a voice talks you through it? The practical version is simpler. You are going out anyway. Does one small instruction, like finding the oldest thing on the block, change what the walk does for your attention and mood? I wanted the answer to be yes, which is exactly why I went looking for the studies that might say no.
The study I keep coming back to was run at the University of Michigan. 117 adults were split into two groups for a two-week outdoor walking program. One group simply walked. The other was given short engagement strategies to use on the way: notice things you have never noticed, imagine the route as a stranger would see it, pay attention to how your body is moving. The strategy group reported larger gains in attention and less frustration, and the gain was clearest for people who walked the least, which describes most city walkers. The study did not rate how green each route was, so it cannot say whether the instruction matters more on a gray street. The author's guess was that it could, because a street gives attention less to hold onto.
An instruction also has a cost. In a 2022 study, 215 people were sent outside for 20 minutes with one of four briefs: mindful attention, directed noticing, deliberate mind wandering, or no instruction at all. Connection to nature and mood were the same across the groups, and on the attention test afterwards the uninstructed group did best. The authors read this as the instructions using up attention when the point was to rest it. The lesson I take is that a voice should be sparse, and that silence has to be part of the design.
A voice also changes how a walk feels from the inside. In an outdoor study, 24 people walked about 200 meters at their own pace while listening to brief mindfulness instructions, then did the same walk unguided. The guided walk was rated more pleasant and more absorbing, and recordings of brain activity lined up with those reports. It is a small group and one short walk. It is still the clearest picture I know of what a voice does to attention in real time.
At the heavier end, a Dutch team ran a program for people with burnout and stress complaints in which every session happened on foot in nature. Clients reported fewer burnout and stress complaints after the program, and some of the improvement was already visible at the midpoint. When clients of walk-and-talk sessions were interviewed about the experience, they described it as easier to speak side by side than face to face, less confining than a room, and said the movement itself helped them process what came up.
One more, because it is about founders. In a 2021 study, entrepreneurs listened to a short guided loving-kindness meditation and were then measured on fear of failure. The guided practice reduced fear of failure, by raising self-compassion. The study was seated, indoors, and about founders. I include it because it shows that a few minutes of the right voice can move something most people assume is fixed.
A Stride is a short guided walk in the Mindtrek app, built on the findings above. Each one has a single intention. The voice turns your attention outward, to what is in front of you, more often than inward. The prompts are short and spaced, with silence between them, because the mind-wandering research says the gaps are where the work happens. Every prompt comes with a reason, because people follow an instruction they understand. And it is a walk, so the voice reacts to the fact that you are moving. A meditation plays whether you move or not, a coach reacts.
The Michigan and park studies measured their effects on walks, and the walk is where a voice does the most, because the body is moving and the scene keeps changing. If walking is off the table, the instruction to look outward still does real work. The founder study was seated. So was the awe research on the rafting trips. A chair by a window, a balcony or a bench gives you the surroundings and the prompt, without the steps.
The Michigan study says yes for a simple instruction that points outward. The 2022 park study says a voice can get in the way when it asks for too much. My reading is that a sparse instruction helps and a constant one costs you attention. If you already walk with full attention and come back clearer, you can skip the voice. Most of us cannot.
Keep working with them. A Stride is a walking practice with a beginning, a shape and an end. It sits alongside whatever support you already have, and it never asks you to choose.
Music can lift mood, and a podcast can make a walk pass faster. Neither points your attention at the surroundings, which is what the instructed groups in these studies had. Different tool, different job.
If you want the longer version of this, The Room at the End of the Island is a 45-minute guided walk on Roosevelt Island. For the short version, Strides are in the Mindtrek app, and the first three are free.
On the science: every study here is real. The underlined phrases link straight to the papers, and the full list is below. The summaries and takeaways are my own reading, simplified to be useful rather than complete.
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