Walking has become a trend. Suddenly everyone tells you ten thousand steps solve everything - heart, weight, blood pressure, sleep. Except there is one item on that list a walk does NOT solve if you walk the way most people walk: phone in hand, headphones in, an unfinished sentence from work spinning in your head. The legs make progress, the head stays at the office.

The Spanish pharmacist known as Boticaria García has a name for the other way: the parasympathetic walk. It is not about calories and not about step count. It is about giving the body a few minutes to come out of constant alert mode. The formula, as she puts it, is short: "one of my favourite things, without question, is the parasympathetic walk - a calm walk in a familiar place, in company if possible, so that acetylcholine, the messenger of calm, is released."

The term comes from the parasympathetic nervous system, the part of the body responsible for rest, recovery and relaxation. Unlike the alarm mode that keeps you ready to react to a problem, this system helps the body return to calm. So far nothing new for medicine - but there is a difference between knowing it and doing it, and the difference is called a phone.

The rules are banal and that is exactly why they are hard. Choose a calm, familiar route so the brain does not have to track where you turn. Walk at a comfortable pace, no watch and no counting. Leave the phone - replying to messages, checking WhatsApp and scrolling keep the brain locked on the very worries you are trying to step away from. Listen to sounds, look at the light, the colour, the smell. Repeat a few times a week.

On why she recommends company, the pharmacist offers an image anyone gets first time: "That walk sends the brain the signal that no lion is chasing you, that everything is calm. And if you are with someone, it tells it: 'Listen, if the lion comes, there are two of us... let it get ready.'" The metaphor is not just for laughs - a run of studies links social connection to better emotional state and greater capacity to handle stress.

Above all, this is aimed at women in perimenopause and menopause. As oestrogen falls come hot flushes, waking at night, greater exhaustion and a constant sense of running on empty. "If we stay on the sofa, we may end up feeling even more exhausted," the pharmacist says - which runs against every instinct when you are tired, and is precisely why it has to be said out loud.

Nobody claims a walk replaces strength training, balanced food or good sleep. Nor does it replace a doctor. If anxiety is interfering with your daily life, if there are panic attacks, long-term insomnia or signs of depression, this is not the solution - that calls for a specialist. This is a supplement, and one that costs nothing.

Which pushes me to one question: how many walks in our cities are actual walks, and how many are the working day continued in a different posture? We go around the block, but we carry the office with us in our pocket.