Why I Extended the Walk when doing walk and talk therapy

The case for longer Walk & Talk therapy sessions - and what a longer walk makes room for

For a lot of my clients, the regular hour - or a steady ninety minutes - is exactly what they need. We head off in the same direction, taking the same or a similar path. We follow a similar rhythm, and that brings with it a predictability that becomes its own kind of safety - even when the weather changes and the seasons alter the view. It feels important to say that first, because nothing that follows is meant to suggest longer is inherently better, or that the standard session is a lesser version of the ‘real’ work. For a lot of people, on a lot of weeks, it’s exactly what they need, and it’s what I’d recommend.

This summer, I’ve noticed a distinct shift in my calendar. More clients have come to me asking for extended sessions - a half day, a full day, sometimes two. These clients have come from different parts of the country, and from overseas, because they wanted to work on something specific and needed the space to do so, in a location that worked for them. Physical space, and the less restricted space of time, were what they were looking for.

The shape of what they needed has varied.

One client wanted a linear walk along the Norfolk Coast Path - starting in one location and finishing somewhere else. Over two days, the walking itself was doing the work of a journey. Another wanted the opposite: a long, varied route through the Langdale valleys, the terrain changing constantly and nothing about it a straight line. Both were extended sessions. Neither looked much like the other.

Different shapes, but the same thing in common - enough time for something to happen that simply doesn’t fit inside an hour.

There’s a moment in almost every Walk and Talk session - usually somewhere past the halfway point, often when we’ve both stopped noticing our feet - where something shifts. The pace settles. The sentences get longer, then shorter, then honest. Something that’s been circling for the first half hour finally lands.

For years, that moment has sat right at the edge of even a generous session. I’d watch someone arrive at exactly the place they needed to be - voice dropping, guard down, the real thing finally surfacing - right as we were turning back towards where the car was parked. Put simply, some work needs more road than an hour, or even ninety minutes, can give.

So when clients started coming to me asking for something longer, I said yes. It’s something I’ve been offering, but not promoting, for over a year - and the longer I’ve sat with why those extended sessions work as well as they do, the more I’ve come to think it isn’t really about the extra hours. It’s about what only becomes available once there’s enough time that the clock stops being relevant.

The fifty-minute hour was built for a different room

Talking therapy inherited its standard length from a model designed for two chairs, four walls, and a clock both people can see. Fifty minutes is enough time to arrive, circle the thing that matters, and touch something deeper before you have to leave it behind. For much of the time, it works reasonably well indoors, where the environment is neutral and the only variable is the conversation. An hour can work well outdoors too, on a familiar route, at a familiar pace.

But there’s a specific kind of work - the kind that’s brought people to me this summer wanting a couple of days along the Norfolk coast, or moving through the Langdales - where a bounded hour works far less well. That’s not just conversation. It’s regulating a nervous system, processing years of accumulated tension, and allowing the landscape to do some of the work alongside you. None of that runs on a fifty-minute clock. Sometimes it hasn’t even started by minute fifty.

I didn’t come to offering extended sessions as a marketing decision or a point of difference. Nor do they replace the steady, weekly rhythm that many men still need most. But for the clients this summer has brought me, I kept noticing how much became available once a session stopped being bounded by a return-by time at all.

Space, before anything else

An extended session isn’t necessarily ‘more talking.’ Often it’s more space for decompression and regulation before the talking even starts. Most men arrive carrying a weight. They might have been carrying it for weeks or months, but often they’ve been carrying it for years. That weight has an emotional and physical residue, and that residue needs to drain before anything deeper can happen - draining takes longer than we tend to allow for.

Give that decompression room to happen, and something else opens up alongside it: an emotional space that doesn’t feel like it’s being observed. Walking side by side rather than sitting face to face removes any feeling of interrogation from the exchange. That’s really important when working with men. There’s nowhere to feel cornered, nothing to perform for, no need to hold an expression steady while someone reads it. The landscape becomes a third presence in the conversation - something to look at, gesture toward, fall quiet in front of when a sentence runs out - and that changes what men are willing to say, and how quickly they’re willing to say it.

I’d go further: for a lot of men, especially those who’ve spent years being told, implicitly or otherwise, that vulnerability is something to manage rather than express, the absence of direct eye contact isn’t a limitation of Walk and Talk work. It’s a mechanism that makes it work more effectively.

Flow, and why rushing it kills it

Once that settling has happened, something closer to a flow state can take over. The rhythm of walking - steady, repetitive, physically engaged but not necessarily demanding - helps loosen the grip that overthinking has on a lot of men. It’s the same reason good ideas turn up once we’re fully absorbed in something else entirely - that’s often when the real work happens. Bilateral, rhythmic movement seems to unlock a different mode of processing than sitting still and being asked direct questions ever does. It’s part of why somatic approaches lean so heavily on movement rather than pure verbal excavation - the body processes at its own pace, and that pace is rarely fast.

The trouble is, flow state doesn’t arrive on schedule. It can take thirty, forty, even fifty minutes of unhurried walking before someone drops into it properly - and the standard hour is often already over by the time they do. Cutting a walk short at that point isn’t just inconvenient. It’s closing the door right as someone finally worked out how to open it.

Co-regulation, on the move

There’s co-regulation too - one nervous system settling another through shared pace and unforced proximity. That’s slow, cumulative work. It doesn’t switch on because a session’s started. It builds across miles rather than minutes, in the same way trust builds - not through a single disclosure but through sustained, unremarkable, repeated proximity.

A rushed walk barely gives it time to begin. An extended one lets it actually take hold, and once it has, everything else - the flow state, the willingness to speak plainly, the sense of being safe enough to stop managing how you come across - becomes considerably more accessible.

The environment is doing some of the work too

Whether it’s on the fellside, by the water, or experiencing the changing weather, time in nature has a well-documented effect on stress and rumination. These aren’t backdrop to the session - they’re an active participant in it. Longer sessions mean more opportunity for exposure to that effect. I’m not the only thing doing the work on these walks. I’ve talked about the impact of the outdoors and of blue spaces elsewhere, and it’s a subject I’ll keep coming back to.

This is not a new idea

None of this is new. Freud used to walk patients close to the university grounds in Vienna. Then, in August 1910, in the middle of a personal crisis, Gustav Mahler travelled to Leiden to meet Freud, who was there on his own summer holiday and recovering from exhaustion. With no office nearby, they walked the canals of Leiden for four hours instead. Years later, Freud recounted that he came away struck by how quickly Mahler grasped ideas during that single afternoon that usually took people far longer to reach.

Freud wasn’t trying to invent a new approach that day. He simply used what he had - time, movement, a landscape - and it worked well enough that he mentioned it to his student Marie Bonaparte in 1925, and again in a letter to Theodor Reik in 1935.

I bring it up not because I’m drawing on some grand lineage, but because it’s a useful reminder: the idea that depth can sometimes come from time and movement rather than four walls and a clock isn’t a modern reframe. It predates the fifty-minute hour by decades.

Why I keep doing it this way

None of this replaces the steady, regular rhythm many of my clients need. But for the clients this summer has brought me - the ones asking for a coastal journey, or a longer walk through the Howgill or Lakeland fells - the extra time has given them the space to process, and let the work land.

Give the process room, and it works. That’s really the whole argument - everything else in this piece is just an attempt to explain why.

I’ll leave you with this:

Have you ever noticed how a conversation changes when you’re on a long walk or drive? What was the impact it had on you, and on the person you were talking with?