27: There’s A Walk For That with Harriet Thomas - Episode 2727: There’s A Walk For That with Harriet Thomas - Episode 27
UK Health Radio Podcast
Harriet Thomas explains her four-step gratitude walk, showing how simple daily walking can calm the nervous system and reshape responses to life’s ups and downs. She shares personal stories, practical prompts and nature-based exercises to help bring more ease and appreciation into everyday life.
30:12•12 Apr 2026
Four Steps To A Gratitude Walk With Harriet Thomas
Episode Overview
- Harriet explains a four-step gratitude walk that starts with noticing three things you can see, hear, smell and touch that you appreciate.
- She highlights how walking rhythm and nature help shift the body from fight-or-flight into a calmer state linked with lower heart rate and blood pressure.
- Simple focal points like breath, feet, and supportive relationships are suggested for those who struggle to feel grateful during hard times.
- Harriet shares how seeking gratitude within painful experiences, such as her mum’s dementia, created more moments of joy and connection.
- The final step invites people to feel grateful for future goals as if they’re already real, making those dreams feel possible and actionable.
“With breath there's hope. With breath there's opportunity. With breath there's a chance.”
What drives someone to seek a calmer mind in the middle of everyday chaos? In this episode of UK Health Radio’s "There’s A Walk For That", Harriet Thomas shows how a simple walk can shift stress, mood, and even long‑held habits of thinking. Harriet isn’t a doctor or fitness guru; she’s someone who found that daily walking eased years of back pain and lifted her spirits.
Here, she shares her four-step "gratitude walk" – a gentle, practical framework that turns an ordinary stroll into a reset for your nervous system. As she puts it, "With breath there's hope. With breath there's opportunity. With breath there's a chance." You’ll hear how she uses different types of walks – the "stress buster", "circuit breaker" and "connector" walks – depending on what she needs that day.
The focus this time is on gratitude: starting with sensory awareness in a local park, moving into appreciation for the "good stuff" in life, then daring to look for gratitude in the hard things, like her mum’s dementia diagnosis.
Harriet explains how that shift helped her move from grief to seeking "where can we have fun together, share loving moments, laugh, and smile?" She even plays with the idea of being grateful for litter, because it brings her community together for local clean-ups, and finishes by inviting you to thank the things you long for as if they’ve already happened – like her dream of walking across the world.
The style is warm, honest and slightly playful (yes, she does suggest smelling earth with a stick), making this especially appealing if you’re looking for low-pressure ways to support mental and physical health. If you’re curious whether a pair of feet and a patch of green could help you feel calmer and more hopeful, this might be the walk you’ve been waiting for.
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