Yesterday morning, my girlfriend and I took our dog for a walk around a local lagoon. It was a beautiful morning, and the water level in the lagoon was high after the recent rains. The still water reflected the sky above, and we saw two great egrets fishing among the reeds.
It was very peaceful, and as we walked, I was reminded of the proven benefits of walking in nature.
Most of us are familiar with the benefits of walking. As a form of low to moderate intensity cardio, walking is great exercise. It can lower blood pressure, improve heart health, burn fat, and reduce the risk of all-cause mortality.
Walking has also been one of the core practices of creative people throughout history. As walking tends to encourage the activation of the brain’s Default Mode Network, it’s associated with improved creativity and problem-solving.
However, walking in natural environments and green spaces confers additional benefits beyond those of just walking.
These benefits include reducing levels of the stress hormone cortisol, improving mood, attention, creativity, and other cognitive abilities, and enhancing the immune system.
For example, a 2018 study found that walking in nature reduced cortisol levels more than viewing nature scenes on a TV, and improved mood better than watching nature scenes or walking on a treadmill.
Attention Restoration Theory (ART) argues that natural environments (as opposed to urban environments) engage our attention in a modest, bottom-up fashion, allowing top-down directed attention a chance to recharge.
In a world where we’re constantly surrounded by screens and bombarded with incoming information, we need time in nature more than ever in order to give our brains and nervous systems a break. Walking in natural environments—whether city parks or old-growth forests—is one of the best remedies. This is why I offer walking sessions as an option to clients—we get to combine the benefits of therapy or coaching with the magic of walking in nature.
For most of human evolution, people spent hours walking in natural environments every day. It was our default way of being. Imagine how it would feel to live this way: if the current evidence holds up, we’d be calmer, healthier, more creative, and more focused.
But you don’t need hours of your day to experience the benefits of walking in nature. Even a ten minute walk in a city park can make a significant difference.
Productivity Book I Actually Enjoyed
I recently finished reading Feel-Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal, MD. This is one of the better (and certainly friendlier) productivity books I’ve come across—and I’ve read many, over the years. Ali’s whole approach, in this book, is about making productivity less punishing and more fun. It helps that Ali peppers his book with nerdy analogies from the likes of World of Warcraft and the Marvel universe, but he also backs up the strategies he shares with high-quality studies from the field of positive psychology. Overall, this makes for a solid, research-based place to start if you’re looking to get more done with less stress. One tool I’ve started experimenting with: playing Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings soundtrack music in the background while working.
Language Learning Podcast I’m Listening To:
Language Transfer is an unusual language-learning podcast that seems to be based on the Michel Thomas method of language pedagogy, also known as the “thinking method.” Check out the first episode (8 minutes) of the Spanish podcast if you’re interested in trying something very different from Duolingo or other memorization-based approaches.
Quote of the Week:
“In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence."
—Robert Lynd
That’s all for this week! As always, I appreciate your feedback on Mindful Mondays. What was your favorite thing I shared this week? What would you like to learn more about? Let me know by replying to this email or leaving a comment, below.
Thanks for reading,
Chris Cordry, LMFT
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