We all we love to ride a bike. The bicycle is a means for urban travel, the bicycle allows us to go on discovery and adventure, the bicycle is a style of travel and vacation. But what happens every time we get on the saddle and we start pedaling, to go to work or to pick up the children from school, to face the toughest climbs, whiz through the woods with the MTB or simply train, work hard and basically keep fit? Well, what happens inside us has a lot to do with happiness, and the idea we have of happiness.
Because riding a bicycle has to do with happiness
And if so far that intuitive, instinctive, perceived good humor but not describable, he had no real motivations that could be explained in psychological, scientific or mental terms, but now a series of researches explains why riding a bicycle has a lot to do with happiness.
Cyclists have higher levels of mood
One of these researches was conducted in 2014 by the American universities of Clemson and Pennsylvania: using the parameters of the American Time Use Survey collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, American researchers were able to determining the mood of people as they travel on different means of transport. And well, yes, those who ride a bicycle are on average and indisputably happier.
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And this higher level of happiness has not only to do with movement – yes, exercise puts a good mood – it has also to do with get involved personally: sitting in the car, or on public transport, is a condition of passivity, while getting on a bicycle and pedaling is also a way of affirming that you know how to put yourself to the test.
It has the unique virtue of yielding a rate of speed as great as that of the horse, nearly as great as that attained by steam power, and yet it imposes upon the consciousness the fact that it is entirely self-propulsion.
The New York Times, 1896
Cycling stimulates brain activity
The happiness given by cycling it also has to do with our brain activity: the combination of movement, speed and coordination required to pedal and ride a bicycle have beneficial effects on the development of our brain, as demonstrated by theDr. Jay L. Alberts experimenta neuroscientist at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute in Ohio who found significant improvements in brain activity in Parkinson’s disease patients who cycled regularly.
Indeed, it would be the apparent carelessness with which we pedal and move in space a free up energy and space for new thoughts: a type of mindfulness that reconnects us with our deepest self and elevates us to higher states of psychophysical well-being.
> Read also: Giulia and Damian, from London to Hong Kong by bicycle
People are like bicycles: they can only keep their balance if they keep moving.
Albert Einstein
The cities with the most cyclists are also the happiest
It is no coincidence if then the cities with the highest rates of cycling are also those with the highest perceived levels of happiness: Copenhagen for example, and all of Denmark, where one in three people regularly use their bicycle to go to work or school and where 66% of over 6,000 people interviewed declared themselves really happy with the way they move around inside the city (the average of other similar surveys, for example the one conducted by Statistics Canada, stops at 25%)
> Read also: Model Copenhagen: the bike friendly city
This is exactly what Robert Penn also claims, who gave up his career as a lawyer to travel the world by bike and wrote the book It’s All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels: what matters is the pace induced by cycling, it’s meditative, and it’s pure bliss. Does anyone feel like they are wrong?
> Read also: 6 benefits of cycling for women
Photo by Alesia Kazantseva on Unsplash
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