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.
