RUNNING ON EMPTY

It’s now the norm to navigate the world in private bubbles – headphones in, strangers at bay. So Isobel Lewis decided to run with just her thoughts for a year and she was transformed

Of all the habits I’ve adopted in the name of improving my mental wellbeing, running without headphones is easily the one that elicits the most horrified responses. From all the “God, that’s brave”s and “oh, I could never”s, you’d think I was taking daily ice baths or reinjecting my own platelets as part of some expensive rejuvenating facial treatment.

I find jogging in silence relatively easy now, yet I always feel the need to stress that it’s taken work to get to the point where I can run to my own thoughts and heavy panting alone. For 15 months, I’ve been slowly weaning myself off a habit of wearing headphones whenever I’m on my own, after realising that the constant soundtrack playing in my ears had left me disconnected from both my own feelings and the world around me.

There will be people, I’m sure, reading this and thinking: “So?” And fair enough. Maybe you don’t own headphones or earbuds; perhaps you reserve them for trains, planes, and those commutes when you’re simply too tired to even pretend to read the book performatively stashed in your bag. I was not one of those people. Silence? Never heard of her. I rose in the morning to the radio and was lulled to sleep by the soothing vocal fry of my favourite podcasters. In public, in particular, there was always a soundtrack to my life. It wasn’t something I really thought about. I just knew that if I was out and about on my own, an album, podcast or audiobook was likely blasting in my ears.