15 Ways to Make Walking Less Boring
If you're not unmotivated but bored, the fix is different. Fifteen things that actually change how a walk feels — sorted by how much effort they take.
There's a useful distinction most walking advice misses: being unmotivated and being bored are different problems with different fixes.
If you can't get out the door, that's motivation — start here instead. If you get out the door fine but the twenty minutes feel like forty, that's boredom, and boredom is an attention problem. Fixing it means changing what occupies your attention, not walking harder.
Fifteen things that work, roughly in order of effort required.
Almost no effort
1. Save one podcast or audiobook exclusively for walking
The most effective single change most people can make, and it works through a slightly sneaky mechanism: if the only time you're allowed to hear the next episode is while walking, you start wanting to walk. The walk stops being the price of the entertainment and becomes the occasion for it.
Serialised things work best — anything with a cliffhanger. Standalone episodes are easier to abandon.
2. Take your phone calls on foot
The call was happening either way. Family calls, catch-ups, anything that doesn't need a screen or notes. Twenty minutes of walking appears out of nowhere and the call is usually better for it — people talk more easily side-by-side or in motion than sitting still.
3. Change the route
Novelty is precisely what your attention is hunting for, and an unfamiliar street supplies it for free. You don't need many routes — three or four in rotation does most of the work of having twenty.
Cheapest version: walk your usual loop in the opposite direction. It looks like a different place, which is a slightly ridiculous fact about human perception that you may as well exploit.
4. Walk to somewhere, not just around
Walks with a job feel entirely different from walks for their own sake. Post a letter. Buy one specific thing. Return the library book. Look at a building site.
The destination doesn't have to matter. It just has to exist — it converts "exercise" into "an errand," and errands don't need motivating.
5. Stop looking at the numbers
Step counters and treadmill displays both make time pass more slowly, reliably and measurably. Checking your progress is the single most efficient way to make a walk feel longer.
Put the phone away. Cover the console. Check at the end.
A bit of effort
6. Give yourself something to look for
Pick a category and collect it: interesting doors, cats in windows, particular trees, old signage, houses you'd live in. It sounds twee and it works, because it converts passive scenery into an active search, and search is engaging in a way that looking isn't.
Photography does the same job with a built-in record.
7. Vary the pace instead of the distance
Same route, different rhythm: walk briskly to the next lamppost, easy to the one after. Suddenly the route has a structure.
This also happens to matter physiologically — UK Biobank data suggests stepping intensity carries independent weight, with a peak 30-minute cadence around 112 steps per minute associated with the largest risk reductions.
8. Add hills
The most under-used variable. A route with elevation is more interesting, more demanding, and better exercise, and it turns a flat twenty minutes into something with shape.
9. Walk with someone
Obvious, but the mechanism is worth naming: a walk with another person has a social obligation attached, so skipping it costs something. It also stops being exercise and becomes catching up.
The version that works best is a standing arrangement — same person, same time, every week — because then it's a commitment rather than a plan you both have to make.
10. Walk somewhere genuinely different once a week
A park, a canal, a beach, a nature reserve, an unfamiliar neighbourhood. Not every day — the daily walk should stay frictionless and local. But one properly different walk a week resets your tolerance for the boring ones.
Structural changes
11. Give the walk a game
This is what the entire category of step-based walking games exists for, and it works better than it sounds because of when the reward arrives.
Health benefits are real and land in about thirty years. Boredom is happening now. A game supplies something that responds today — in EggVentures your steps hatch and evolve a creature in the background, pulled from Apple Health or Health Connect, so the walk you were taking anyway produces visible progress rather than just a number.
The useful part for boredom specifically is that it gives the walk a bookend structure: open it for twenty seconds before you leave to collect the habitat coins that accumulated while it was closed, claim the daily warmup, and send your companion on an expedition sized to your walk. Then the phone goes away — nothing happens during the walk, deliberately — and there's a resolved expedition waiting when you get back.
A walk with a beginning and an end feels shorter than an undifferentiated block of time. That's most of what's going on here.
Comparison of the options, including the ones that need GPS and the ones that don't.
12. Start a long-distance virtual challenge
Advance along a real route — the Camino, Route 66, a national trail — using your everyday steps, with milestones along the way and often a physical medal at the end. Works well for people who need a finish line to aim at, and works on a treadmill.
13. Learn something on foot
Language audio, a lecture series, a course. Walking is close to ideal for audio learning: enough physical engagement to stop you fidgeting, not enough to compete for attention.
14. Make one walk a week completely empty
Counter-intuitive after thirteen entries about filling the time, and important.
Walking produces a specific mental state — alert but unfocused — which is where most problem-solving and insight actually happens. Fill every walk with podcasts and you never get there.
So: one walk a week with nothing. No audio, no phone, no destination. Most people find it's the one they end up protecting.
15. Change when you walk
If evening walks feel like a chore at the end of a used-up day, try morning. If mornings feel rushed, try after dinner — which also happens to be the most metabolically valuable time to walk.
The same route at 7am and 7pm are genuinely different walks. Light, noise, who else is out.
Picking
You don't need fifteen. Pick two — one from the almost-no-effort list to start immediately, and one structural change to make the habit hold.
If you're bored specifically because you walk indoors or on a treadmill, walking games that work indoors is aimed at exactly that. If novelty is what you're chasing more generally, walking with ADHD covers why some brains need it more than others.
Frequently asked questions
Why do I find walking so boring?
Usually because it's under-stimulating rather than unpleasant — the same route, the same pace, nothing changing, and no defined end point. Boredom is an attention problem, not a fitness one, which is why the fixes are about what occupies your attention rather than about walking harder.
Is it bad to listen to podcasts while walking?
Not at all, and for most people it's the single most effective change they can make. The one caveat is that a permanently occupied mind loses the diffuse-attention state where thinking and problem-solving happen — so it's worth leaving some walks empty.
How do I stop getting bored on a treadmill?
Cover the display, use audio rather than visual entertainment, and vary the incline rather than the speed. Watching a timer or step counter makes time pass measurably more slowly, which is the opposite of what you want.
Does changing my route actually help?
Yes, more than people expect. Novelty is what your attention is looking for, and an unfamiliar street supplies it for free. A rotation of three or four routes does most of the work of having many.
Your next walk could hatch something
EggVentures turns the steps you already take into pets that hatch, grow, and evolve — no GPS staring, no battles. Open it for twenty seconds before you head out, and there's a payoff waiting when you get back.