14 Aug To Get Out of Your Head, Get Out of Your House
Spending time outside, preferably in nature, has been shown to be good for our health and wellbeing.
Being outside in nature can reduce distress, such as anxiety and depression, and also boost positive emotions, such as happiness and awe!
Given that we’re also typically moving when outside, it’s also good for our physical health and fitness so read on to learn more from Arthur C Brooks and the Atlantic …
One hundred and sixty years ago, in this magazine, Henry David Thoreau lamented that humankind was losing contact with nature. “Here is this vast, savage, hovering mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard,” he wrote, “and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man.”
From the June 1862 issue: Walking
The situation is undoubtedly worse today; after all, the percentage of Americans working outdoors fell from 90 percent at the beginning of the 19th century to less than 20 percent at the close of the 20th century. We show the same pattern in our pursuit of leisure: According to the Outdoor Foundation, Americans went on 1 billion fewer outings in nature in 2018 compared with 2008. Today, 85 percent of adults say they spent more time outside when they were kids than children do today.
Perhaps you know intuitively that this is bad news for happiness and health in general. But you might not have connected a lack of contact with nature with stress and anxiety in your own life. If you are falling away from nature, you are almost certainly lowering your well-being and increasing your unhappiness. The remaining weeks of summer are a perfect opportunity to turn things around and get a fresh start in the fresh air.
The trend away from nature over the past few centuries, and especially the past few decades, has straightforward explanations. To begin with, the world’s population has urbanized, so nature is less at hand. According to U.S. census data, 6.1 percent of the American population resided in urban areas in 1800; in 2000, 79 percent did. Second, no matter where we live, technology is displacing the outdoors in our attention: A 2017 study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives noted that screen time is rising rapidly for all age groups—adults averaged 10 hours and 39 minutes a day in 2016—even as hunting, fishing, camping, and children’s outdoor play have declined substantially.
Maybe this all sounds eerily familiar to you. Perhaps you are an urbanite with an indoor job, tied to your devices all day and night—and besides walking from your house to the car or train, you haven’t spent serious time in nature in months or even years. If so, you are probably suffering some noticeable malaise, such as stress, anxiety, or even depression. In one study from 2015, researchers assigned people to walk in either nature or an urban setting for 50 minutes. The nature walkers had lower anxiety, better mood, and better working memory. They were also much less likely to agree with statements such as “I often reflect on episodes of my life that I should no longer concern myself with.”
… keep reading the full & original article HERE