The Manchester hiking communities helping people overcome anxiety and depression

If there’s anything good we can take away from the pandemic, it’s a fresh appreciation for nature and the great outdoors, and a reignited love of walking for pleasure.

When the global Covid-19 pandemic caused the nation to press the emergency stop button on the fast-paced and relentless treadmill of work and life, it brought many back to the simple joys of getting out for a walk — and all the benefits that come along with it. Out of lockdown, a number of hiking groups were born — seeing the trend grow in popularity among younger people too.

A lot of these communities formed online on platforms such as Instagram, where people have been scrolling in search of ‘their people’ and ‘tribe’ as they reached out to make human connections and share a commonality with one another. It just goes to show, no matter how much alone time we sometimes desire or need to recharge our batteries, humans really are a social species. 

Maybe we just need to know there’s others out there, going through similar experiences to us, and that even though we enter this world alone and leave it much the same way, we are all journeying through our individual paths of life alongside one another. Rather than dwelling on everyday stresses, hiking in nature allows us to stay present, focus on the task ahead, and ignites the senses.

Chris Jervis was assaulted one night while out in Liverpool in 2021. The ordeal caused him to suffer with severe anxiety, and even left him feeling suicidal. He’s currently signed off work due to the effects on his mental health and is with a working health coach. After speaking to doctors, he decided to get outdoors and start up a group hiking community.

“I got assaulted in Liverpool city centre and I started suffering with anxiety attacks around people,” he said. “The trauma gave me anxiety and depression. I ended up feeling suicidal from it as well. So, when I ended up speaking with a doctor, they were telling me about putting myself in situations I can come in and out of. So I started looking into group hikes.

“I started putting it out there for people to come on a group walk with me and then building up a little community that way. At first there were five or six people but then I would end up getting 40 people out on walks. Depending on how I felt on the day, I could dip in and out of the walk because I was in an open space.”

Chris spoke of some of the effects the traumatic experience had on him when he found himself in crowded places, saying: “Normally, if I would go into a shopping centre, I’d faint. I used to black out a lot because of the anxiety.” About the benefits of group walks for his mental wellbeing, he added: “I won’t walk on my own because I don’t like being in my head.

“The groups offer support. Everyone’s there for a reason. You’re in a safe space, you’ve got people around you, and if you want to talk, then they’re there. I find it easier opening up to some random stranger on a walk who I might not see again. It’s hard opening up to your friends or family sometimes.”

Chris says he now wants to ‘look into the mental health side of things’ and incorporate it into his walks. He was in care when he was younger and now wants to help get children — who’ve had bad experiences and suffered from trauma in their lives — into hiking outdoors, as he said: “I want to show them that there’s something better out there.”

Hannah Probyn, 30, lives in Manchester and found the lockdowns had a negative effect on her mental wellbeing due to working from home, being cooped up and not being able to ‘switch off’ from it all. She found Chris while searching online and decided to join him on his group walks. She said: “I’ve been hiking since I was little. My dad used to live in the Lake District, so my step mum used to take me and my brother out hiking, and I loved it, and enjoyed being outdoors.

“Then, during the pandemic, I started joining different groups on Instagram. A lot of them were putting up that they were doing group walks so I thought, ‘I’ll do that and go and join them’ — and it’s been great. I’ve met so many people. I can’t even begin to tell you how many groups I’m in now, it’s a bit ridiculous.

“My first massive group hike was with Chris and we did Striding Edge up to Hellvelyn. He was doing it for charity ticking off the Wainwrights, and on that walk I decided I’ll tick them off too. So, I met him through that and now we’ve stayed friends. I’ve hiked with him pretty much every weekend.”

The Wainwrights are a huge number of hills and fells around the Lake District that hikers like to ‘tick off’ their list. Alfred Wainwright — a British author and fellwalker — picked 214 hills that he thought had the nicest views and now it’s become a goal for hikers to complete.

Hannah enjoys joining different groups for walks but her biggest achievement is her solo walks, as she said: “I’m in some girls only groups and I’ve been hiking with them. I’ve also done quite a lot solo as well — which is sort of a big push for me.

“I’ve been to The Lakes, Wales, The Peak District — my mum hates it. My mum has images of me going missing on a mountain. A lot of them I’ve done in The Lakes more recently on my own. I think that sort of came from a place of not wanting to be alone with my own thoughts because I don’t always do very well with that. 

“But then I was like, ‘right, push yourself out of your comfort zone, do it’ and honestly, it’s mad how — when you’re in the mountains — everything else just seems so insignificant. If I’m at home on my own I feel like I should be doing something, or there’s something going on in my head. Whereas when I’m out on my own, I’m not really thinking about anything.”

When on a long solo trek, Hannah sometimes sleeps over in her car and carries on with the walk the following morning. “I just love it, people think I’m mad. I work in social media and my job is kind of a 24-hour job. In theory, 5 o’clock comes and you should just be able to switch off. But if you’re out, you can’t get any signal half the time so you’re not messing with your phone. And people know that they can’t contact me.

“I use my social media now as my diary, it’s my online photo album. I post things in chronological order for my own benefit. It’s so I can go back and look at it and I can see from say five years ago to now, I can see personal growth in it. I love that for myself. It makes me feel proud of myself.”

Michael Di Paola set up Fresh Walks, a networking while hiking community, a number of years ago. His experience pre-dates the pandemic but he says it was a much needed business rationale for the fast-paced lifestyle led by most office workers in this technological age.

He said: “If you rewind to eight or nine years ago, to say to people can you take a day out of work? Meet me at the train station in the morning, have a bit of breakfast, get on a train and head to the hills for the day — and justify that to yourself commercially — it needs a business rationale.

“The pandemic has changed things. People seem to have more flexible working now. With the lockdowns and people being cooped up, I think people started to tune in to the benefits of accessing nature, getting outdoors and just enjoying the freedom of it.

“For me, nothing has changed, I just think the pandemic has accelerated some of this work-life balance. Businesses were already tuning into the wellbeing of their people — this was already happening — but I think the last two or three years has almost put some fuel behind that and I think people are very much tuned into their own wellbeing now.”

“I think it really pays to disconnect and try and counter balance this feeling that we’ve all got. When I used to work in an office job 20 years ago, I’d finish at five o’clock and that was it. I’d be done for the day. But most people in office jobs these days are constantly contactable.

“More and more people are now working from home, so they don’t see other adults throughout the week maybe, so they crave this human contact, because we need that. I think a shared sense of achievement can also be taken from walking in groups and we can underestimate how positive that can be for our minds.

“There’s very few things in life now that force us to slow down, but hiking does.”

If you’re an urbanite finding yourself feeling irritable, unable to switch off and on an express train to burnout, why not get yourself out for a hike?

Escape the suffocating feeling of city life and head to the hills. There, you can feel the warm sun on your skin, the fresh breeze on your face, put things into perspective and ultimately feed your soul.