Pick one color before your next walk, and watch how fast your phone disappears into your pocket.
Quick Take
- A simple walking exercise called a “color walk” asks people to pick one color and spot it everywhere around them.
- Licensed counselor Cheryl Fisher says the practice pulls attention away from phones and onto the real world.
- Separate eye-tracking research shows that directing visual attention during a walk can lower anxiety and boost the feeling of being restored.
- The idea traces back to a Stanford exercise called “Color Walking,” first laid out in 2011.
What A Color Walk Actually Looks Like
The exercise is simple enough for anyone to try on their next walk around the block. Pick a color. Then look for it everywhere, on mailboxes, car doors, flower petals, store signs. Fisher, a licensed clinical professional counselor, told TIME the hunt “encourages focused attention” and gives people a reason to look up from their phone. The goal isn’t speed. It’s noticing.
Fisher’s method asks walkers to pause at each matching object instead of rushing to the next one. That pause matters. It forces a kind of slow-motion scanning of the world, the opposite of the quick phone-scroll most people default to while walking. One participant described the practice as a way to get out of their head, slow down, and simply be present in their body.
Where The Science Actually Points
The strongest research behind this trend doesn’t test color hunting directly. It tests something close: directed visual attention during a walk. A Bangor University study tracked 117 urban walkers wearing eye-tracking glasses during a 45-minute route. Those told to focus on greenery, rather than gray buildings, reported lower anxiety and a stronger sense of mental restoration afterward.
That distinction matters for anyone weighing how seriously to take this trend. Directing attention toward nature during a walk has real, measured backing. Searching for a single color has not been tested the same way. The benefit may come from the walking itself, the break from a screen, or the act of paying close attention, not the color search specifically.
A Decades-Old Idea Gets A New Name
Color walking isn’t actually new. Stanford’s Humanities Center published instructions for the practice back in 2011, telling participants to “let color be your guide” and become sensitized to the colors around them. The core instruction hasn’t changed much since: notice which colors jump out first, which ones creep in slowly, and build a kind of color story as you move through your neighborhood.
What has changed is the backdrop. Smartphones now compete for every spare second of attention, including the minutes people used to spend simply looking around while walking. A color hunt gives the brain a specific, low-stakes job to do instead of checking notifications. That alone may explain much of its appeal, regardless of which color gets picked.
Why The Claims Deserve A Clear-Eyed Read
None of this means color walking is useless. It means the evidence for it is borrowed, not built from scratch. The practitioner quotes and personal accounts behind the trend are genuine, but they aren’t the same as a controlled study measuring anxiety or mood before and after a color hunt specifically. Readers should treat it as a reasonable, low-cost habit worth trying, not a proven treatment.
Common sense still applies here. Walking outside, away from a screen, while paying close attention to your surroundings has long been linked to feeling calmer. Giving that walk a simple game, like hunting for the color red, is an easy way to make the habit stick. It costs nothing, requires no equipment, and fits into a lunch break or a dog walk.
Sources:
time.com, khan.co.kr, newindianexpress.com, healthshots.com
