I walked and ran without headphones for a year – the results blew my mind

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.

Around me, others mirrored my experience. The packed commuter trains and buses I’d travel on were full of people also existing in their own audio bubbles with their AirPods firmly in. There was nothing implicitly sinister about this – I think we’d all rather this than hear music blasted out loud on public transport for all to begrudgingly absorb. Headphones can be a useful tool for people with sensory issues, too, and even if that’s not a problem for you, there are some days when you do just want to keep yourself to yourself. It felt like an innocent action. That wearing headphones could be hampering my social skills didn’t really cross my mind.

To be honest, I don’t think it’s something many heavy-duty headphone users have considered. But perhaps we should. Anna Waletzko, a senior behavioural analyst at Canvas8, tells me that for many, headphones are a “barrier” between “themselves and the outside world” that can lead to social isolation. “It used to be that you take headphones off when socialising, right?” she says. “Many have observed that younger generations in particular are setting clearer boundaries, and by wearing headphones, they are signalling that they do not wish to engage with strangers.” Whether worn in or over the ear, this tech has become a visual marker with the same effect as a “do not approach” sign, even if the wearer is actually very open to a good, old-fashioned, real-world interaction.

This was the position I’d found myself in. For someone who actually enjoys chatting with strangers, a haziness settled over my senses the second I plugged in and turned the sound up. And I wore headphones a lot – not just on public transport, but in cafés, restaurants and shops too. Sometimes there wasn’t even music playing, but I still kept them in. The effect was the same. At best, I was unresponsive when I had my Bluetooth-powered earbuds in, but that’s a generous read: it was just plain rude of me. Or, as Waletzko puts it: “If you’re wearing headphones and can’t fully engage in a conversation or even tell if the other person is truly present, it rather defeats the purpose of meaningful interaction, doesn’t it?”

This revelation came after decreasing my headphone use, as opposed to being the prompt that kickstarted it. Rather, I realised I needed to stop wearing my headphones all the time because it was having a significant impact on my mental health. There came a point a few years ago where negative thoughts would come into my head, and I would tune them out by tuning in. But the more I got used to this constant inward cacophony, I found that I struggled to really think at all when I had my headphones on. Subsisting on an audio diet of high BPM Charli XCX tracks and fast-talking American podcasters, my poor overstimulated brain didn’t stand a chance.

Connecting my earbuds as soon as I left the front door was basically muscle memory at this point – I knew I wasn’t going to do it unless I actively made it a goal. So in January 2024, I set myself a basic resolution: to go for a walk, once a week, without headphones. Initially, I spent these outings bobbing along with an oh-so-casual smugness. Why hadn’t I done this before? It was so easy! It took a while for my real mental soundtrack to kick in, and when it did, my own thoughts felt alien. Without the muffling effect I was used to, my brain would drift onto a subject I’d been avoiding, and – uh oh! – I had to deal with it. There was no option to skip the track or race through them at 1.5x speed here.

For the first time in a long time, however, I had the brain space to really work through my emotions. With practice, I came to have my best revelations on these specially designated walks. Out in the world more generally, I would leave my headphones stowed away in my bag too; I actually read on the Tube, rather than opening my book to use it as a stand for my phone. And just as I felt responsive to the world around me again and able to really feel my feelings, it became clear from the other side that headphone users were extremely hard to interact with. I was always reading articles about how people just don’t talk to each other anymore, yet few seemed to suggest that constantly wearing headphones could be aggravating this issue.

Obviously, even the biggest extroverts have days when they want to be left alone in public. Totally fine. But speaking to my friends, I learnt that it’s universally agreed upon that millennials and Gen Z are tired of online interactions and want to form more connections, romantic or platonic, IRL. At the same time, here we are, using the one item that implicitly tells the world we don’t want to be spoken to. We crave romcom-style, organic meet-cutes, from a shared smile with a rush-hour crush to the electric moment your hand brushes a stranger’s when you both reach for the same veggie sausages in Tesco. (OK, maybe that one’s just me.) Yet even if those situations were to occur, would we act on them? Knowing doing so would require us to remove our own headphones and signal to the other person to do the same? Unfathomable.

Fast-forward nearly a year, and I still opt to go bare-eared in public more often than not. Fleeting as they may be, the moments of connection in each day are more plentiful and, as cheesy as it sounds, can truly turn them from bad to good. Running without headphones, admittedly, was not so easy. It wasn’t even intentional. But when I left my pair of wireless headphones on the train to Manchester last autumn, I decided to wait until the Black Friday sales to replace them; not wanting to ruin my training schedule, I had to suck it up and jog in silence. Here, I could frankly do with the distraction, but knowing there was no other option, I soon began to really enjoy it. If walking in silence allowed me the focus to work through my feelings, this was that experience, supercharged. My pace improved, and the likelihood of me being knocked into the canal by a passing bike drastically decreased. Wins all round, really.

I understand why running in silence seems like a mental exercise too far for many, but I think using headphones less frequently could do most of us a world of good. Nobody is saying you can’t enjoy your artfully curated playlists or form an intense parasocial relationship with your favourite podcast hosts – least of all me. But when I reach for my headphones, I check in: do I actually want to listen to something, or am I just doing this because it’s what I’m used to? If it’s the former, then play away – because you want to, not because the alternative sounds scary.