111. The healing power of nature

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Speaker 1: Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in the world, you know the deal. Welcome back for another episode. Today, we are going to take a deep look into what psychology has to say about the healing power of nature. Nature, the outdoors, time spent by the beach, ingreenery, the forest. They are such an incredibly profound sense of joy and peace for so many good reasons. It relieves stress, It allows us to step away from our monotonous routines. It actively rewires our brain in such a positive way, and the research and benefits are honestly endless, and we're going to talk about all of them because I think it is so profound, and the impact that nature can have on our psychological well being does not get the recognition it deserves. However, as a generation, I think we have become more and more detached from this natural urge and instinct, from our drive towards kind of the wilderness. Technology and social media in particular, consume so much of our time. We are spending more time indoors than any other generation, most of us living in huge cities, and we've become very severed from this innate need. I've even noticed that in my own life. You know, there are so many days that I just don't go outdoors, and that makes me feel so stagnant and unhealthy and just really detached from what I know. My brain needs this like very deep need, and the consequences of that are becoming so apparent, not just personally and anecdotally, but we're seeing increasing problems with attention, overall, life satisfaction, social skills connection. It's even created these new terms like nature deficit disorder, showing us that this alienation from our natural environment is really creating a lot of problems. So today I want to discuss the studies and the science behind the healing power of nature and how to implement that in our lives. We're going to look at all the evidence, especially from this new discipline of ecopsychology, but also some of the origins of this understanding, from the idea of forest bathing in Japan, forest schools in Scandinavia, and some really amazing techniques and just general philosophies and understanding from some indigenous cultures in Australia and New Zealand. What I find particularly fascinating is probably not the word maybe a little bit disturbing, is that Western psychology in particular is often really dismissive of how nature can be integrated into our treatment for mental health symptoms and conditions, and it just kind of pathologizes us. We're so preoccupied with finding a label for things and with pharmaceuticals, which definitely have their place, but I think that we've really lost touch with that holistic perspective. So I also really want to kind of explore how we can integrate exposure to nature into our daily routine, from the big things to the daily rituals, and the impact that we might just see on our lifestyle and our emotional and mental health and sense of fulfillment. It's a huge episode. There is so much to cover, and some of them my favorite psychology of the day is coming from this new discipline, so I really cannot wait to share it. Also, if you are not yet subscribed to my Patreon, please make sure to go and follow me over there, you'll get access to bonus content, new episodes, episode transcripts, studies, a newsletter, so many good things. So I really appreciate the support so many of you have already showed me. Without further Ado, let's discuss the healing power of nature and all of the science and psychology supporting our need to reconnect. I'm so excited. I cannot stress this enough. If you're feeling a bit lost, a bit disconnected from yourself, this is essential listening. So without further Ado, let's get into it. I think every single one of us has this intuitive understand that nature is an incredibly vital ingredient for our wellbeing, one that we have become very much detached from due to this increasingly technology based society. Just you know, fifty, even forty thirty years ago, we lived in a completely different world in which the outdoors and nature they were our entertainment. They were a deeply valuable part of our everyday lives, when our attention was not constantly being pulled a million different directions by social media and smart watches and office screens. There's been this massive societal and environmental pivot that our generation, those in our twenties have experienced and are continuing to kind of witness. Someone said this to me the other day, and it kind of like stopped me because I'd never thought about it. But we are perhaps the last group of people who experienced at least some of our childhood or our lives without screens. We can still remember running down to the local park after school, riding our bikes around, climbing trees, playing in the mud, all of these really crucial elements of play that relied on nature as the stimuli, not something inorganic. And I think although we've only just started to see what this shift is doing to young kids and this new generation, innately we know that time spent outdoors is never time wasted, and that we feel better when we experience nature compared to the alternatives of spending hours and hours scrolling on our phones. That's something that has changed, and for the first time in humanity's history, we are spending more time indoors. We have a very limited diversity of experiences. The other shift that I think is important here is that we're seeing that by twenty fifty, maybe early, it's been projected by scientists, by researchers that two thirds of humanity will be living in either cities or urban areas. We are becoming more and more severed from those evolutionary roots. And this has even inspired this new term that I was speaking about before, nature deficit disorder, the idea, and it was really only introduced back in two thousand and five, so less than twenty years ago. It claims that humans we're spending less time outdoors and this is resulting in a sense of really deep alienation and a wide range of behavioral problems, especially amongst children. And I will say it's not a diagnosable medical condition as of yet, but there is this expanding body of scientific evidence that suggests that a nature deficit disorder contributes to to a diminished use of our senses, attention difficulties, greater problems with emotional regulation, and also just a lack of natural curiosity. These researchers, particularly the person who created this time, what they're suggesting is that this experience, this trend is really weakening our ecological literacy and that children in this generation we are caring less and less about the natural world, which is super problematic when we consider things like climate change, where we need people to care, We need people to want to protect these spaces. But these problems are also linked more broadly to what health experts call an epidemic of inactivity. Our lives are endoors, they are contained, and we are very much missing out on how much healing nature can and provide us. This understanding actually has a lot of scientific backing, so much so that researchers have created an entirely new discipline called ecopsychology to examine this very universal experience. So ecopsychology is interested in understanding how we can increase the connection between individuals and the natural environment for the purpose of treating certain mental health conditions or promoting connection, remedying alienation. Whilst I think typically we see conventional psychology as being really focused on the connection between humans and our mind and our behavior, ecopsychology is focused on the emotional bond and the connection between humans and the earth. The essential idea is that we have become detached from our evolutionary roots, and by restoring our connection with our minds with nature, we can psychologically almost heal some of the modern day things that are impacting a lot of people. You know, our external environment becomes a lot more industrialized and clinical. That's a big concern because our brains are still attuned to the ways of nature through centuries and centuries of evolution, and by depriving it of that source of stimulation and energy, we're kind of limiting what aspects and areas of our brain that we can use, what our brain is actually capable of. This idea has several fundamental principles ecopsychology in general, and I think they're incredibly powerful. So I'm going to list a few here before we jump into the actual research, because I actually think a lot of us innately believe this. So here are some of the principles. Firstly, there is this synergetic interplay between the planet, between Earth and our personal well baing the core of our mind is ecologically conscious. The goal of ecopsychology is to awaken that inherent sense of environmental reciprocity that lies between us and the natural environment. And Finally, the ecological ego matures towards a sense of ethical responsibility with the planet, and that's something we want to cultivate. I think it's really interesting, if not quite frustrating. Like I said, that this discipline doesn't really get the attention and the love and the credit it deserves. I think because of this very detached clinical approach to psychology that has dominated the field for many, many years, we have become increasingly focused on pharmaceutical interventions and treatment of symptoms rather than a holistic approach to our emotional and mental wellbeing. I'm not discrediting that at all. I really hope that it's not taken out of context. I definitely personally have benefited and will continue to benefit from medical interventions for my mental health, but I think our discussions should be a lot more nuanced and inclusive of different options and different sources of healing. Luckily for us, more and more research is being devoted to this, so I want to cover some of the major studies. One of the biggest ones was conducted in the UK, and they conducted this study of around twenty thousand people, and they found that people who spent two hours a week in green spaces that could literally just be your local park, they were substantially more likely to report good health and psychological well being than those who don't, and the cutoff was literally two hours. Anything less than that we didn't start to see the same benefits. Similarly, all these psychiatric unit researchers. They've been finding that being in nature it has reduced feelings of isolation, it's promoted a sense of calmness, and it's even lifted the mood amongst their patients who are undergoing treatment for various psychiatric disorders. Actually, in one of the possibly the earliest actually observations on this, this was like two hundred years ago, back in eighteen twelve, this physician he worked with mental health patients, and he found that his patients who had to pay for their treatment by doing yard work on the hospital grounds, so they were outside for at least three to four hours, essentially doing manual labor in nature to pay for their treatment, they actually recovered faster than the wealthier patients who could afford the cost of treatment and who kind of just walked around inside and stayed inside for much of the day. That really flips what we would typically see. It's also worth noting this is an observation, this isn't a study, but it is kind of back to up by more of those experimental conditions and experimental research that has come out in recent years. One in twenty nineteen at the University of Chicago, these two researchers examined the influence of a local green environments on people in cities and large communities, large concrete communities, and they found that green spaces near schools really promote cognitive development in children, even just seeing greenery they don't even have to be in it promotes this sense of well being and emotional and cognitive development that's been backed up. They did this incredibly. I think it is possibly one of the largest longitudinal studies ever conducted. These researchers in Denmark. They examined data from more than nine hundred thousand, yes, close to a million, nine hundred thousand children born between nineteen eighty five in two thousand and three, and they found that those kids who lived in neighborhoods with more green space had a reduced risks of many psychiatric disorders later in life, including depression, mood disorders, schizophrenia, eating disorders. I will say one of the things that really I think conflates with that finding, or maybe is an extraneous variable, is the influence of wealth. You know, people who make more money can afford to buy homes with backyards or in really affluent suburbs where they have well maintained public parks. And obviously, as we say in psychology, correlation is not causation, and we are by no means suggesting that a hike is going to cure someone's major mood disorder, but it is something to note, and I think it's part of that larger tapestry of evidence. We've also seen that people assigned to public housing units in neighborhood with more green space showed better attentional functioning than those assigned to units with less access to natural environments, and just being exposed to nature it really improves things like our working memory. Whilst exposure to urban environments, particularly through childhood to adulthood, is linked to attention deficits, maybe even at the extreme, and this is very much at the extreme things like ADHD, it may also go way deeper than that. It just provides a general sense of well being that also helps to reduce things like crime and aggression. Back in twenty fifteen, also in the UK, they're really pushing a lot of this research at the moment. They conducted a study on two thousand people and they found that more exposure to the natural environment translated into more community cohesion and substantially lower crime rates. Once again, we have to think about the other rbles there, things like wealth. But all of these findings are just combining to show that nature is an integral part of our wellbeing, of our physical health, of our mental health, of our emotional health, that we don't only neglect, but the environments that we now live in are neglecting for us. The reason I wanted to provide so many examples is because I want to kind of show the diversity of the impacts. It's not just about our psychological wellbeing, but it's about sense of community, it's about physical health, it's about loneliness. The list is like honestly endless. This is just like a minor cross section of all that is going into kind of pushing the field of ecopsychology along. However, the idea that nature has these innate healing properties is by no means a new one. It has a really rich and diverse history. It spans across the world Japan and Finland, Australia, Italy, especially in a lot of indigenous cultures. Perhaps that's another reason why it's sometimes discredited. Western medicine is very much plagued by what we would call biological reductionism. It's always looking for some internal pathological origin of a lot of our problems rather than looking externally to what's happening in our environment that might be making us feel this way. And for many, many years, there has been this amazing amount of knowledge in a lot of indigenous and non Western cultures that has been claiming that, that has been saying that. So what I really want to focus on next is what are some of these historical and cultural links that have been made between exposure to nature and well being. Why is nature so powerful? What is actually happening in our brains and our bodies to promote these outcomes? And of course, in this increasingly digitalized world, in this industrialized world, how do we integrate these practices into our very busy lives. I know it's very easy for me to kind of stand up on this podium or my soapbox and be like, we need to spend more time in nature. But I know a lot of us are like that is so unrealistic. So let's talk through how we can actually do that. It's a lot easier than we think. So all of that and more in just a second. One of the best examples of a modern day in nature therapy or practice is called forest bathing or shinrin yuruku in Japanese. This idea emerged in Japan in the early nineteen eighties and the purpose was to literally take time to bathe in nature. It's not about exercise, it's not about kind of count your calories or get fit or hiking or jogging, but connecting with nature through all of our senses through sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell, and by doing this kind of opening those pathways back up to the natural world. It's actually become a vital part of preventive healthcare in Japan. Some doctors will literally prescribe forest bathing to burn out office workers, and the government has actually invested in this. They've done a series as studies and they found that this practice improved sleep quality, mood, reduce stress levels. There's a really good book on this very practice. It's called Forest Bathing, How Trees Can Help You Find Health and Happiness. A friend gave it to me last year, maybe a couple of years ago, and it's really incredible. It's really quite profound seeing how I guess what we can bring to our lives and how we can elevate our experiences with nature. There's also this idea in ancient China of chi which is the vital connection between humans and the earth, and that connection has formed a big part of the naturopathy movement in the nineteenth century. Other countries and cultures have very similar ideas or practices for promoting a spiritual and psychological reconnection with nature. In a lot of Scandinavian countries they have these things called forest schools. In Australia we call them bush schools, and essentially the premise is that learning should take place in a natural setting where children are able to explore and discover, away from screens and away from kind of some of those traditional learning practices. It's also called woodland or free range learning, like free range chickens, and the idea came about in the nineteen nineties amongst this small group of Danish educators that although their schools may not have an actual classroom, they could provide a better learning experience. I think, if you've always been raised in a really conventional idea of what schooling should be, this may seem like kind of bizarre, maybe a bit abstract, But I remember spending so much time in nature. As a child, me and my sisters and my cousins, we would go and explore the bush with my granddad and we would plant flowers and make mud patties and swim in the creek. I remember those memories so clearly. They're like a massive part of my identity. But you know what I don't remember. I do not remember a single thing about my primary school classroom, not a single thing. I think the only thing I can remember is like the class pets that we had, and like standardized testing. I'm not saying that I didn't learn important things during that time, but a lot of that could have been elevated, and I probably would have benefited from a more integrated classroom experience that combined the outdoors, which luckily I was already getting in like my leisure time thanks to my parents, but combined that with some of those wild and natural experiences. And I feel really bad for kids who don't get that. I think they really miss out on some of that natural curiosity. I've also been contemplating this idea a lot in terms of my future children. Maybe that's an idea we should do on the show. Like I don't know what it was, but I entered my like mid twenties and was like, couldn't stop thinking about children. We need to talk about that, actually, But sidebar, I've been thinking a lot in terms of the kids that I want to raise someday, and I would want my children to be a little bit wild, to always be a little bit dirty and a little bit messy. I think there is so much of this recent science that shows how valuable those early experiences and that spiritual and psychological connection with nature, how profound and powerful that could be. And so when I think about how I would want to raise perhaps future children, future versions of me, I kind of reflect on what that says about my priorities right now and how I can reflect that in my own life. I will say this idea has existed for a long time, and a lot of indigenous cultures have known what Western medicine and psychology is only just figuring out, and they've known it for thousands and thousands of years. In Australia, our first nations people specifically Aboriginal and torrestright islander people, who are the oldest known civilization on Earth. They have such a deep idea of country and connection to the land, and I think this connection is difficult for non indigenous people to grasp something we can learn a lot from because these groups, these cultures have long known about it and use the healing properties of nature. There was a really fascinating article that I read when researching this idea, and it discusses this concept of barefoot healing or earthing that allows us to feel present in nature and acknowledge the interconnectedness between us and kind of every living thing. And the Maori people of New Zealand, I know that they also have kind of a similar philosophy and connection to the land. So many cultures, so many societies have known about this. So why is it that this practice could prove so valuable for this current generation. How do we adopt this kind of learning and understanding? What are the psychological explanations that can be offered for these deep shifts that we see in our emotional state and see in our mental well being. To answer that, we need to look at the neural and lobal structures of the brain and how our brain has evolved to ad to our environment. Specifically, the role of this new brain when we think about the activities that were crucial for our survival and therefore have the greatest role in the evolution of our brains. These are around things like foraging and hunting, and both activities obviously occurred in a natural environment. I want to focus mainly on foraging here. We used to spend our days searching for food, for useful resources, for berries, for sustenance. What that involved was a really complex cognitive process, constant exposure to new stimuli, a rich environment, and choice options and cost benefit analysis problem solving. Crucially, what this also meant is that when we were doing this, we were using different parts of our brain and building different synaptic connections that created a larger and more cognitively complex structure that is our current brain at this point of evolution. As we started really I guess, old humans, ancient humans, whatever you want to call them, As they started building these neural networks, as they started exploring more and problem solving more, we saw this idea of the new brain. We saw this new brain begin to develop, and that is what truly made us human. That is where we see our identity form, our personality, our social skills, and all of that has evolved within an environment of natural fulfillment. Therefore, the more and more detached we come from these surroundings, the more and more we see those negative mental consequences that we've discussed, Our modern day environment does not stimulate this same activity or cognitive thrill. When we're trying to navigate our concrete cities. We're doing monotonous daily tasks, Flashing screens that constant spike in dopamine, and listen by social media. All of that requires the kind of attention that is incredibly procedural and automatic. It doesn't take much from us cognitively or emotionally, or when we think about the comparison between, say, the use of social media and natural scavenging, social media is designed to hijack our reward system and to give us a very immediate dopamine hit that is highly addictive because it doesn't require much effort, but it also gives us less satisfaction when we compare that to activities where we are actively curious about our environment and in a process of discovery, that creates a slower release of dopamine that is more fulfilling, and that slow release effect also means that it lasts for longer. I have a very particular vitual towards screens because we have consistently seen that more and more ours and daily exposure to laptops to phones, it's associated with lower psychological well being because it is so limited, same colors, same apps, same daily activities. In a natural environment, however, we pay attention more broadly and in a way that is rewarding, which leads to a far more relaxed body and a relaxed mind. It's also been found that exposure to nature reduces cortisol levels. Cortisol is the hormone that is responsible for our stress response, and when our levels of cortisol are elevated for a long time, we see things like increased illnesses, increased sickness, increased blood pressure. So putting ourselves in nature also reduces our likelihood of developing some of those chronic health problems as well. There's I've also been this study floating around social media recently which claims that seeing water improves our mental health. I will admit I was a bit skeptical because anytime I see psychological studies or conclusions online that don't have a source, half of the time they're not true. But surprisingly this one actually is. This study was published in the American Association of Advancement Science and It found that staring at the ocean actually changes our brain wave frequency and can put us in almost a mild meditative state. Water seems to have this specifically psychologically restorative effect. Maybe it's because of the sunlight less polluted air, but we know that it significantly improves our mood and our mental wellbeing. And finally, nature offers novelty. When we are used to our habitual patterns and daily routine, the scrolling the work commute, what we're missing out on is new experiences, and research shows that novelty triggers the release of dopemine in the brain as a reward, encouraging us to be more curious and to be more motivated. That may be the reason why we see this healing power of nature. It's the newness. It's the break from the usual that stimulates this ancient evolutionary need. So how do we integrate this, especially when our lives are so busy, and for those who are living in cities, we are in these highly developed environments. I think it's all about what you choose to prioritize. The easiest thing we can do is what is most convenient. You could spend your weekends watching TV, You could spend your weekends drinking, spending hours on your phone, or you can make the conscious decision to do what you know will be better for you psychologically in the long term. The choices really yours. You are the only one who gets to make that decision, and it's about deciding what kind of life you're prepared to live. Plan a weekend trip, a weekend hike with your friends. Make it an exciting activity to kind of look towards and carry you through the week. The other thing is to make like a bit of a bucket list of local nature spots, beaches, picnic locations, or just make the time to do normal activities in these locations, like exercising, catching up with friends rather than going to a bar, go to the local park. You're going to save money but also get that nature fix. I think it's all about slowly reprogramming those hijacked Dove Maine systems to be positioned towards the outdoors rather than indoor screen based activities. One thing I love doing is planning trips with a big group of friends that are based around nature. The best kind is a coast trip. Everyone loves a coast trip. Everyone loves a little beach holiday, and you'll also get the benefit of breaking up your usual environment with this natural, novel experience. I think it's not just about the big things, though, these very large time and energy commitments. In a lot of those studies that we've spoken about, they reference consistent, frequent exposure, and I know that can feel really hard in big cities or when you're super busy. I think that's the other problem I often found when I was working full time, was that when the sun rises at eight and it sets at four, and your daytime is consumed with work, how is it even possible to get that necessary outdoor time. It's all about the small habits, the daily rituals, finding a way to program nature into your everyday routine. We all eat lunch, to find a way to eat lunch outside. Walk to work in the mornings if you can, or just try and get up early for a nice stroll. Take ten minutes to just sit in the sun and feel the wind, hear the sounds, the sensation of it on your face, what it smells like, what sounds it's carrying. Or challenge yourself to just leave your house every day, even if it's just to walk down the Roade. Those small moments of exposure are cumulative, and I think better than doing nothing at all. I also want to take a quick moment here to shout out some of my favorite books and further resources on this topic, because if you have not noticed, I'm very obsessed with this concept and this entire idea of ecopsychology at the moment. I think it's so important, it's not spoken about enough and so valuable. Rewilding is also a really important idea in this space, and this amazing book called Rewilding the Urban Soul is incredible for understanding this. I'm also strangely a huge fan of Into the Wild. I maybe this doesn't sit here, but I think that this movie is incredible. Sometimes what we need is not nature itself, but that motivation to actually be present. And I don't know what it is about this film, but every time I watch it, I just have this urge to go and hike like the Pacific Cresttrail. It's a must watch. And finally, Losing Eden by Lucy Jones. If you love neuroscience, if you love psychology, this book is so profound and really really convincing. I really hope this episode has at the very least left you with something to contemplate. Hope that maybe you were on a little stroll while you were listening to this. If you are, send me a photo. We'll definitely repost it to my Instagram because that is so cool. But I just think that nature is such an amazing psychological tool and resource that we don't often use. So some food for thought, if you will. I really enjoyed this episode. I want to talk about this a lot more, so maybe we'll do a part two. We'll never know if you have an episode suggestion. As always, please feel free to follow me at that psychology podcast and follow along to see what's coming up. You can find our new merch you can just look at video content of my show whatever, whatever suits your fancy. Also, we have a Patreon now that I plugged at the beginning. It's just me doing this show, writing these episodes and creating this content, so any support that you can provide is really, really meaningful. You also get access to bonus content, so many good things, and as all, if you feel compelled to do so, please feel free to leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify wherever you're listening right now and share with a friend, you never know who it will benefit. So thank you so much for listening along, tagging along today with this episode. We will be back next week for another one.