The Invitation
Think about the first time you saw a mountain range, or a sand dune on the west side of Michigan, or seeing the ocean for the first time, or seeing Fall colors on the trees…or, what you feel like when you take a walk in the woods, or walk by a river…or when you hear the birds sing…or when you watch a plant grow at home. All these things are pretty amazing and they can help us sense something that's very powerful and sometimes something new, and they give us a sense of life, of ourselves, of each other, of what it means to be human, and what it means to be on this planet.
What is it about nature that makes many of us feel calmer, more relaxed, more grounded, more centered? How can we help connect the dots to show how nature can help our mental health?
Roots and reach, and sometimes I think about roots and branches -- roots keep us grounded. They tend to be there all the time. Branches are new things that grow, that may change year to year. So, I think the combination of that, especially when we think about our psychological lives, our health, and our well-being, is really meaningful to me.
This is what I am doing this year to support and extend MBGNA efforts for the integration of mental health and nature. In many ways, this is a natural, easy, and perfect integration. But it's taken current society a while to realize this. We've become more urbanized, busy, technological, and segmented, and have lost, in some ways, our connection to nature.
I want to make this connection more visible for the greater good of emotional wellness and to have it be more accessible. The integration between nature and mental health really has always been there and has been there for thousands of years in many different cultures of the world. So that's not new. What is relatively new is that we as humans, as healthcare providers, are catching up to see that we can do things to accentuate this connection and use this connection for increased health and well-being.
Mental health is something that's defined and experienced from the inside out and nature can provide us with a means of connecting to our inner landscapes, reenergizing us in new and different ways when our world becomes a little too rational, a little too sterile, a little too busy, moving just from one thing to the next.
I'm a psychologist and was trained how to do therapy and help support people at various stages in their life and growth. I think, though, that the connection between nature and mental health has always been there. I remember as a kid not thinking in those terms, but really enjoying this connection. And for me, it's very real and very present.
During the pandemic, I, like many of us, tended to take walks outside in our neighborhood, and we visited probably 10 city parks on a routine basis, and just rotated walking there. And that was amazingly comforting in a time that was actually pretty scary, at least at the beginning of the pandemic. And many other people were doing the same thing, and we’d wave from a distance, and it just felt good.
I think what is special is that nature helps us see things, see life, see ourselves, at times in slightly different or new ways. For example, when we observe a frozen river, we see it looks like nothing is happening. But then, at some point, we realize that the water is moving underneath. So maybe if we went on a walk in the winter and we saw this, we might see that even if we as human beings feel frozen or stuck, we can realize that we as human beings are always growing and changing. And I think that's the heart of what has been so meaningful in my career – understanding and helping us grow and change. Yes, therapy exists to help people feel better. But more importantly than feeling better, I think, therapy helps us grow and change and be who we are and connect with various parts of ourselves that maybe have been hidden or silenced or just haven't had a chance to grow yet.
The other thing I've been thinking about is being outside in the woods isn't for everyone, or even available to everyone. So, I'd invite us to expand our conception of what nature is. Sometimes we only think it's at a park in the woods with trees and so forth. But the concept of nature can also be urban parks, or plants inside of our apartments. We can also watch videos, look at photos, and I've even seen some early efforts around having nature incorporated into virtual reality headsets. Maybe just “seeing nature” is helpful.
A growing area is also nature therapy. It's a specific therapeutic approach that some practitioners do. There are some wonderful practitioners in the Ann Arbor area that are incorporating and practicing nature therapy. One thing I'd like to do this year is help create pathways for clinicians who want to utilize our wonderful spaces at the Botanical Gardens and the Arboretum in multiple ways -- either a therapist with a client, or having a client do things on their own. I would love to see that take off and have that be more of what is possible for our community.
What About Research?
The beauty of research is not just to describe but to explain and then use findings for the greater good, for the betterment of, in this case, mental health.
Research strongly shows that nature exposure has numerous benefits for mental health, including, just to name a few, reduced stress, reduced anxiety, reduced depression, improved mood, and enhanced cognitive functioning. Studies indicate that spending time in natural environments can lead to feelings of joy, calm, and creativity, and some studies are showing it can improve sleep quality. And in the physical health realm, exposure to green spaces has been shown to lower stress hormones, blood pressure, heart rate, and things like that. A few other findings show that exposure to green spaces can help restore attention and focus, especially after periods of what's called cognitive fatigue.
Research has shown that taking a five or ten-minute break from working to look at a park, a courtyard, or even a rooftop garden can help improve our concentration and reduce fatigue. Another significant finding is that nature can help us get outside of ourselves, and help us to realize, “wow, there's more to life than what I was thinking or what I was feeling”. There's even a study that found that young children were more empathic, cooperative, and understanding of each other after a nature trip, which is good in and of itself, but there is one study comparing young kids going on a nature field trip versus a museum. While both nature trips and museum visits helped, nature had a stronger effect.
Findings like these open up possibilities for how we might use this connection between nature and mental health that we just haven't thought of before. The finding of empathy and how nature may help that feels especially salient right now. Anything that we can do to help us be with each other and understand each other in this very politically polarized time will be helpful.
Another important area of research shows that nature has really helped buffer the effects of loneliness and social isolation. There are several studies that have shown this across different contexts. Loneliness and social isolation are very close companions to a lot of our mental health issues, like anxiety, depression, and so forth.
We don't need another study that says nature helps me feel less isolated or less anxious - we know that already. I do think what we need is research that gets more specific: What kind of benefits are we seeing? For whom? For what symptoms? That kind of specificity could help match clinical interventions with nature-based prescriptions more effectively.
Finally, a growing area for future research is how being in nature affects our multicultural wisdom and our spirituality. I think there are connections between nature, being multicultural, tapping into our spirituality and how these things not only fit together, but maybe how they can help each other with spirituality being defined as anything that helps us realize that there's something bigger than ourselves, it's not tied to a particular religion, but a sense of something bigger, something outside of ourselves, a higher presence.
How Can Nature Help with “Climate Anxiety”?
One thing is to recognize our individual window of tolerance for things like climate anxiety and climate change. This means noticing how much news we actually need. Because we all can get inundated as we scroll and see the headlines or the reports from the UN or what our government is doing or not doing, and we can just get sucked up into that for hours. And generally, for most of us, that's not healthy, yet some of us need a little bit of news in order to keep engaged.
There’s not one answer for everyone, but I like thinking about this window of tolerance. I don't want to be hyper aroused, but I don't want to be under aroused. Of course, that window can vary between people, and even shift within ourselves over time.
The second thing is to find community. Maybe it sounds too basic, but sometimes I think we underestimate the power of community, of being with people who can travel with us on this journey, people who are similar to us, people who are different than us, people who can be supportive. Maybe we can work together, do some actions together, or just talk it out. Being connected to community and nature is a pretty powerful combination.
The third thing is remembering to create time to be in nature, however, that's defined for you. To remind us of the little and big things that nature gives us, and that it's worth putting our efforts into this, whether it's a single action of picking up trash when you're on a walk all the way up to, policy levels, helping our politicians create policies that protect our Earth. And, there's a whole bunch of things in between.
That leads to my fourth idea, and that is taking leadership and action, however that's defined for each person. We can take big or small actions, we could do it by ourselves or we could do it with others as a group, we can do it one time or have it be part of our daily life. Psychologically speaking, taking action or leadership helps restore a sense of control over an issue that often feels overwhelming and out of our control.
I think that the last thing is remembering that actions do make a positive difference. There is research and other community findings showing that our actions do make a difference, and so remembering that, accentuating that, and supporting that is helpful. Climate change and anxiety is not going to go away. I have it, we all have it, and at the same time, I think it's possible to manage this, to learn some new ways to exist with this phenomenon. So I don't think the goal is to get rid of it and to have no anxiety, but rather doing some version of the above to help us stay engaged and make things better.
What are some things MBGNA is going to do?
Our first priority is to increase accessibility in little and big ways – on our website, wayfinding, maps, signs to dedicated areas, videos, and guidance that is publicly and easily available to makes things a little more accessible to a greater population, whether that's younger kids, college students, adults, older adults, different populations, just making the connections a little more visible for people.
Many of our readers know about NatureRx, a national initiative with a UM manifestation. The NatureRx feature in the Wolverine App, developed here at Michigan, builds on findings from other universities and our own unique landscape. It’s a wonderful tool and approach to experience our campus with intentionality. I'd love to help expand that further throughout the year. I think there's a real hunger for more of this that would be fun just to get out there.
The second main area is to develop certain areas and landscapes within the Botanical Gardens or the Arboretum properties intentionally with emotional health in mind; to create, if you will, some stations dedicated specifically for reflection. Nichols Arboretum, for instance, is right across from the hospitals. Matthaei Botanical Gardens has wonderful trails, areas with water, and there's even a labyrinth in one area. So, how can we take this concept and intentionally create a space that helps with anxiety, with depression, with grief?
The third thing is to accentuate the connections between MBGNA and our campus and community mental health providers. We really want to support practitioners doing nature therapy, and we also want to create things that practitioners may suggest to their clients as they're working with them, or for people to do on their own, so really focusing on the connection between clinical treatment and nature.
The fourth area is to create a steady stream of research to better inform all of these efforts. There are already some great examples on campus from people who are interested in this, so we want to foster connections for other people doing research and focus exclusively on mental health and nature.
Connections with the larger U-M
I think all these efforts can help us as a campus. We have signed on to the Okanagan Charter, for instance, which has embedded in it wellness, emotional health, community, stewardship of our lands and earth. And so I think instead of having that be just a document that sits on our computers, how could we live into this? We want to have everything we're doing here support the campus as a whole in this continuing movement towards wellness for faculty, staff and students.
A concept that's really catching on in healthcare and in wellness circles, both physical healthcare and mental healthcare, including here at UM, and that's the notion of what's called “social prescribing”. In short, it's a pretty simple and basic idea where we capture the healing power, the benefits of non-clinical things outside of treatment, but we capture the healing power in these aspects in our lives that help us, that help us feel better, either by themselves or in combination with treatment.
The areas that have been focused on with social prescription are arts, nature, and movement. It’s elegant in its simplicity. And I think those of us who are providers and practitioners, we very rarely learn this, whether we're in medical school or in becoming therapists. I think what social prescribing does for us is help us to internalize our journey to wellness. It's helping us to own our health and our health care, versus someone outside of us, telling us what to do, or saying, you should go do this. So if one gets a lot of meaning and power and healing and recovering out of music, then that becomes a prescription.
I would love people to think about what in your life gives you meaning or joy or connectedness? What could you experiment with that maybe you haven't that provides a lot of healing power, either on your own or working with a counselor or in a medical appointment? Things can be very therapeutic to us without being therapy.
There are some specific things that I think we can do, focusing on nature in particular, in this overriding concept. You don't always need to go five miles to a park to experience nature. We have a beautiful campus and town so instead of rushing from one class or meeting to the next, or checking email while walking (which, honestly, I do too), I invite us to use that time differently – look at the trees, look at the squirrels, look at the grass growing this time of year. Listen to the birds, listen to the wind, feel the sun on your face. All these are things that I think could provide benefits that are super easy to do, and we could do, like, ten times a day. I think it’s really important to just build this into our day to day lives.
The last thing I might offer is the power of seeing diversity in nature. We all know it's there, but sometimes we don't think about it in that way. Seeing this may help us to become more multicultural and make it easier to interact with people different than us, with empathy. Nature teaches us this and can be a vehicle for our own growth. Most cultures of the world are much more integrated with our natural world than a lot of Western societies. So in some ways, I think we're learning from other cultures in the world, or getting back to our roots as Western societies used to be much more integrated with nature.
The Invitation Revisited
So, returning to the initial invitation – with hopefully some new things to think about, with the table being set, the invitation is this – to keep in mind the value of focusing on the deep areas of our life – our health, our spirituality (however defined for you), our sense of multiculturalism – and how nature can help us grow as human navigating these realms. What can we take from all this? What can we learn? What can we offer ourselves and each other? How can we be with people who are different from us? How can we gain a sense of something bigger, higher, more important than us as individuals? I want to invite our readers (and listeners of the podcast) to really think about how these four areas can feed on each other. I want to plant seeds for all of us to identify specifically (because we're all different), how these four can fit together.
Here are two overall concepts to help in this invitation:
Noticing: noticing when we're in nature, noticing things that we see, noticing things in ourselves. What do I see? What do I feel? What connections are happening? Can I see things in a slightly different way? What signs of growth in Spring do I see? Do I see it myself? Just taking the time to notice, to reflect - whether it's by ourselves or with other people or with a counselor. Combining mindfulness, meditation, and nature is really powerful.
Grounding: the concept of grounding in nature is well documented – even though nature is super powerful and can be scary when it's a hurricane or a super big wind – even when all that is happening, nature is ultimately stabilizing. So a 20-minute walk, where we feel the ground, where we feel the air, the sunshine, helps us to remain grounded. And community, connecting with other people, connecting with our cultures, learning from other cultures, how they're connected to the earth and with nature, is just marvelous and full of wonder.
A Final Note
I know that many of us could do all this exploring on our own, yet if anyone needs a little more direction, there are some excellent books noted below. And, remember to reach out to your community. Talk with other people, with other groups. All these things can help prime the pump – we don't have to figure it all out on our own.
Book Recommendations
Nature Rx: Improving College-Student Mental Health. by Donald Rakow and Gregory Eells.
The Open-Air Life: Discover the Nordic Art of Friluftsliv and Embrace Nature Every Day. by Linda Åkeson McGurk.
Glimmers Journal. by Deb Dana.
The Nature Reset: A Practical Guide. by Kathleen McIntyre.
The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and more Creative. by Florence Williams.
Healing with Nature: Mindfulness and Somatic Practices to Heal from Trauma. by Rochelle Calvert, PhD
Grounded: How Connection with Nature Can Improve our Mental and Physical Wellbeing. by Ruth Allen.
Resilience: Connecting with Nature in a Time of Crisis. by Melanie Choukas-Bradley
