Why You Should Turn Your Walk Into a Color Hunt

—Courtesy of Kim Bernard The last time you went for a walk , you might have focused on your favorite podcast, a call to your sister, or the number of calories your Apple Watch said you were burning.

Meanwhile, on a walk around her neighborhood, Kim Bernard noticed everything that was yellow: “A manhole cover, a yellow rain jacket, a fire hydrant, the numbers on someone's mailbox,” recalls the Maine-based artist.

A “children at play” sign, part of a Pennsylvania license plate, and even a bucket of cat litter became part of the neighborhood’s palette.

Bernard was on a color walk , a simple scavenger hunt organized around intentionally noticing a certain color—and how much of it is hiding in your ordinary surroundings.

We asked experts why you should make the activity part of your routine and how it can brighten an otherwise ho-hum day.

Why a color walk can help you tune in About a year ago, Bridget Campbell, a content creator in Venice, Calif., realized she had become tethered to her phone.

Even as she moseyed along the Venice canals, she brainstormed business ideas instead of admiring the colorful homes and flowers along the water.

That’s when she decided to do a color walk , a concept she had stumbled upon on social media.

“It was a way to get out of my mind and come back into my body, slow down, and be present,” she says.

While an ordinary walk might leave her mind racing toward work, looking for a particular color gave it something else to do, effectively putting all that other mental chatter on mute.

That’s exactly why color walks work so well: They encourage focused attention, says Cheryl Fisher, a licensed clinical professional counselor in Annapolis, Md., and associate professor of clinical counseling at Alliant University.

She describes a “skim-scan-scroll world,” where it’s easy to move through your surroundings without really seeing them.

Searching for color gives you a reason to look up from your phone and pay attention to what’s in front of you.

It also gives people who don’t consider themselves particularly creative an easy place to start, says Mari Reisberg, a licensed professional counselor and creativity coach in Boulder, Colo.