“In society you will not find health, but in nature. Unless our feet at least stood in the midst of nature, all our faces would be pale and livid.”
Henry David Thoreau, A Natural History of Massachusetts
A growing body of research shows that spending time in nature elevates our mood, reduces stress, enhances creativity, restores our powers of attention, and even improves cardiovascular health and the functioning of our immune system.
“There is growing . . . empirical evidence to show that exposure to nature brings substantial mental health benefits.”
Dr. Jo Barton et al., Green Exercise and Green Care
Such findings confirm what lovers of nature have always intuitively known. In this video, we draw from the insights of the 19th-century American philosopher Henry David Thoreau and show how spending time in nature serves as an antidote to the psychological and spiritual sickness that plagues modern society.
“I cannot preserve my health and spirits unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and fields absolutely free from all worldly engagements…Ah dear nature…I come to it as a hungry man to a crust of bread.”
Henry David Thoreau, Journals
There is a growing recognition that we live in a spiritually impoverished age. Many of us have lost a sense of the sacred and no longer experience the world as infused with the divine. What is often overlooked, however, is that we don’t need to attend church or pledge allegiance to an organized religion to re-awaken our spiritual faculties. Spending time in nature can help accomplish this end as the natural world is the ultimate temple of the divine.
“Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity…Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and through her, God.”
Henry David Thoreau, Journals
Unlike organized religions, the temple of nature does not demand adherence to any dogma, the acceptance of any moral code, or belief in any particular god. Even if we are an atheist, the grandeur, beauty, and complexity of the natural world can inspire a profound awe and wonder in us that gives rise to peak or spiritual experiences. Or as Thoreau wrote in his Journal:
“I have come forth to this hill at sunset to see the forms of the mountains in the horizon—to behold and commune with something grander than man.…alone in distant woods or fields, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, I suppose that this is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer…I suppose that what in other men is religion is in me love of nature.”
Henry David Thoreau, Journals
Another benefit of spending time in nature is that it offers refuge from the suffocating tentacles of the modern state, the propaganda of mainstream media, the negativity and hostility that pervade social media, and the trivialities that consume so much of social life. When immersed in the beauty of nature we enter a reality far more expansive, liberating, and joyful, than the banal, corrupt and often depressing worlds of politics and modern-day society. Or as Thoreau observed in his Journal:
“I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.”
Henry David Thoreau, Journals
Nature also restores our capacity to focus, which in modern life is being eroded by constant stimulation and distraction. Emails, notifications, screens, apps, and social-media feeds deliberately designed to capture and hold our attention pull our minds in many directions throughout the day. One study found that the average American worker remains focused on a single task for only about three minutes before becoming distracted.
“…we are now developing “an attentional pathogenic culture”—an environment in which sustained and deep focus is extremely hard for all of us, and you have to swim upstream to achieve it.”
Joel Nigg, Quoted in Stolen Focus by Johann Hari
The phenomena of nature evoke what psychologists call “soft fascination”, which counteracts the negative effects produced by constant distraction and overstimulation. Clouds drifting across the sky, birdsong, flowing water, and leaves moving in the wind capture our attention without demanding intense concentration. Nor do natural phenomena force us to rapidly switch our attention from one stimulus to another or constantly tune out competing distractions – both of which tax the cognitive systems that sustain concentration. By engaging the mind in a soft and undemanding way, nature gives our attentional faculties a chance to rest and recover.
One influential study demonstrating nature’s restorative effects on attention was published in 2008. It found that participants’ memory and attention improved by 20 percent after a short walk through a natural environment, while a comparable walk through an urban setting produced no such benefit. Subsequent research suggests that longer periods immersed in nature produce even greater benefits for attention and cognitive functioning. Thoreau recognized this restorative power of nature more than a century before psychologists attempted to demonstrate it scientifically. For him, the natural world was medicine for the mind:
“This stillness, solitude, wildness of nature is a kind of thoroughwort, or boneset, to my intellect. This is what I go out to seek.”
Henry David Thoreau, Journals
Nature also teaches us important lessons about life and serves as a source of self-knowledge, for the movements and rhythms of our inner world often mirror those of the natural world. For example, we pass through psychological seasons that resemble the seasons of nature.
“The seasons and all their changes are in me.”
Henry David Thoreau, Journals
The most difficult of these inner seasons are the winters of life – periods of despair, exhaustion, or stagnation in which our vitality diminishes and we may even lose the will to live. Yet just as winter is a season of dormancy in which seeds rest beneath the soil, trees conserve their energy, and tightly sealed buds preserve the beginnings of new growth, an inner winter can be a period in which vitality retreats into the depths of the psyche in preparation for renewal.
“To us snow and cold seem a mere delaying of the spring. How far we are from understanding the value of these things in the economy of Nature!”
Henry David Thoreau, Journals
Recognizing this parallel can help us endure our own psychological winters with greater patience. For just as nature requires the dormancy of winter before the renewal of spring, the darker seasons of our own lives may also serve a similar regenerative purpose. Or as Thoreau wrote:
“If rivers come out of their icy prison thus bright and immortal, shall not I too resume my spring life with joy and hope?…Shall a man not have his spring as well as the plants?”
Henry David Thoreau, Journals
Katherine May echoes this insight in her bestselling book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. As she writes:
“Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider…. However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful…Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible…that’s where the transformation occurs…We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”
Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat
Studies have shown that we need not venture deep into the wilderness to experience the benefits of nature. If we live in an urban environment, a daily walk through a park filled with trees and greenery can enhance our well-being. And we shouldn’t overlook the fact that even in poor weather, time spent in nature is still beneficial. In a study conducted by Mark Berman at the University of Chicago, participants who took a walk in nature on a cold and blustery winter day performed better on tests of creativity, short-term memory, and attention, despite not particularly enjoying the experience.
Spending time in nature is a low cost, high benefit way to improve our life. And in an age when most of us are glued to screens for a good portion of the day, it is now more important than ever to connect to the natural world and allow its restorative powers to rejuvenate our mind. “The more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.”, observed the psychologist Richard Louv. Or as Thoreau wrote:
“All nature is doing her best each moment to make us well—she exists for no other end. Do not resist her…We must go out and re-ally ourselves to Nature every day. We must make root, send out some little fibre at least, even every winter day. I am sensible that I am imbibing health when I open my mouth to the wind. Staying in the house breeds a sort of insanity always. Every house is in this sense a hospital.”
Henry David Thoreau, Journals
