The one very important piece of the healthy living puzzle that we can't forget about

Do you think it’d be possible to set aside just 20 minutes in your busy schedule? And, no, I don’t mean 12 minutes to read this post. I’m asking you to take an honest look at your schedule and see where you can allocate 20 minutes during any part of your day to do something healthy for yourself.  
 
To help you answer this question, do me a favor real quick. If you have a smartphone, take a look at your average daily screen time. Do you think 20 of those minutes can be reduced, in exchange for something considerably more beneficial to your health? Right now you might be saying to yourself, okay, fine…maybe I have some time to do something else. But I don’t have the energy…

What if I told you that spending only 20 minutes outside has been shown to boost energy? On an anecdotal level, I experience this effect regularly. Whenever I begin feeling sleepy at my desk, rather than grab that third cup of coffee, I slip outside for a bit. It doesn’t have to be for long and I’m not talking about any sort of high intensity activity here either. Upon my return I always feel as refreshed and energized as a cup of coffee, and often times, even more so. The boost in circulation is real.

What is Ecotherapy?
 
Research has shown that just being in a green space and sometimes even just seeing greenery can improve well-being. A study published in the International Journal of Environmental Health Research shows that spending only 20 minutes outside in a park can improve your mood. More interestingly, the effects occurred regardless of whether people were simply sitting in the park or moving around.  The calming effect came directly from their immediate green surroundings.
 
Sometimes I wonder why we spend so much time ensuring that zoo animals live in their natural habitats and then spend such little time considering whether our own habitats are natural to us. We know that animals fare much better when they live in spaces that mimic their natural habitats. But what if our own species were no different?

For almost all of the time that humans have been roaming this beautiful planet of ours, we’ve spent the majority of it outside in nature. Only relatively recently have we found ourselves surrounded by concrete jungles. And many of us are feeling the effects of this, whether knowingly or unknowingly.
 
Without even being consciously aware of this need to reconnect with nature, many of us have this underlying craving to live life at a slower pace. Just Google “how to escape the rat race” and you’ll get almost 26 million results!  Reconnecting with nature’s slower pace becomes especially important when we start seeing signs of burnout in ourselves. Burnout is the predictable consequence of constantly having to navigate through a fast-paced crazy world. Ecotherapy is all about getting back in tune with the natural world. It’s a form of healing. Even better, at its most basic level, it’s highly effective and it isn’t very complicated or expensive to practice.
 
This is an introductory post to many more to come about a newly emerging field called ecotherapy. Given its mental, emotional, physical and spiritual benefits, to leave ecotherapy out of a discussion on health, wellness and getting fit would be a disservice to anyone who is seeking a healthier lifestyle. On the most basic level, Ecotherapy is about reconnecting with the natural world in order to find balance and harmony. This is not just tree-hugging hippie-dippie stuff either. It’s based on real science and research.

Nature Rx, with no side effects
Imagine that when you visit your doctors they tell you that rather than giving you a prescription to lower your blood pressure or to improve your mood, they want you to try sometime else first. They ask you to set aside time each day to be in nature. They ask you to go for daily walks outside to see if you can improve your A1C on your own. There are absolutely no side effects, it’s totally free and you’ll never need to worry about getting any refills. And you might just enjoy it. Would you consider it?
 
Of course, I’m not suggesting here that you lace up your shoes and throw your pills out the window! I’m suggesting that we equip ourselves with just one more harmless tool to mitigate the effects of some of the most common diseases of the modern world.
 
How nature helps me
I can personally vouch for nature’s powerful calming effects because I’ve experienced them firsthand. I’ve had some pretty stressful jobs, ever since I was old enough to join the workforce. I worked in customer service for 13 years and have now worked as a nurse since 2013. As you can imagine, in order to maintain my sanity, time to decompress has been critical for me to function at my best with these types of jobs!
 
In just about every job I’ve had, I knew the outdoor grounds better than I knew the inside of the break room. The weather never made a difference. In fact, sometimes the ugly weather matched my mood and I felt even more aligned with nature on those days. I always find a heavy rainfall to be quite cathartic actually. 
 
Watching the natural world go by at its own slow pace just somehow also forces me to slow down internally. It reminds me that whatever the challenges I’m facing that day, the world will go on regardless. No matter what choices I make, the earth keeps spinning. The birds keep chirping. The trees keep growing. It’s a sense of timelessness that I feel. When looking out into the expanse of nature, my problems quickly become relatively trivial (I get this same feeling when I’m looking outside an airplane window). In a world so big, my problems become miniscule. They’re put in perspective.
 
Nature is a place to seek solace, comfort, solitude and serenity when our noisy human-world becomes too stimulating and overwhelming. It’s a place where you aren’t judged. Animals are just doing their thing. They don’t care what you’re wearing, they don’t care that you don’t have the latest smartphone. It’s one place where you can truly be yourself, whoever that may be. But aside from my subjective experience, there are also some real health benefits to spending time outside.

Health benefits of being in green spaces
One time I had a very anxious patient on an inpatient psychiatric unit. He was so anxious that his blood pressure had risen to concerning levels. His doctor quickly ordered yet another fast-acting blood pressure lowering medication. This was now the third medication we were trying. And his blood pressure still didn’t budge. It was actually slighter higher several hours later. He was noticeably hyperventilating. He was growing increasingly agitated and working himself into more of a frenzy with each passing minute. The beeping of the blood pressure machine and the frequency of us having to squeeze that annoying cuff onto his arm was only irritating him further.
 
I had another idea. I had nothing left to lose by trying this because it seemed like nothing else was working. Fortunately this patient and I had very good rapport and he trusted me. I brought him to the back of our unit, where there were huge windows overlooking nothing but greenery for miles. It was a quiet nook and we were on the 6th floor, high up enough to have some pretty nice views. I sat him down and had him do some deep breathing exercises while he gazed out above the canopy of trees. I told him to think nothing except for the words, “everything is going to be okay”. He totally got his breathing under control. His restlessness vanished. He seemed content to stay in that nook for a while, just taking in the scenery.
 
I retook his blood pressure about half an hour later. Lo and behold, his systolic reading (the top number) had dropped 20 points!! It was a breakthrough moment for the both of us. In his case, the intervention we needed all along had to take place first in his mind and not just in his heart, with all those meds. He really showed me how powerful the mind/body/nature connection was.
 
Benefits of being in nature

• Lowers heart rate
• Lowers blood pressure
• Reduces stress hormones
• Improves sense of well-being
• Keeps you in the present moment
• Reduces anger
• Relaxes muscles
• Improves circulation

 
Very simple ways to reconnect with nature:

• Meditating or deep breathing either in a green space or with a view of a green space
• Gardening
• Playing with your pets
• Exercising outdoors: i.e. walking, cycling, jogging, outdoor yoga
• Joining a volunteer cleanup group around your neighborhood
• Nurturing your indoor plants

 
How to start
In order for anything to become a part of your daily life, the habit has to take hold. And then it has to stick.  If you start by telling yourself that every single day you are going to walk 3 miles, my bet is you’re going to quit by the end of the first week. Instead, start with whatever is realistic for your current schedule. But do prioritize it. We only make time for that which we see value in. You have the time. But you won’t have the time if you don’t believe how important this is.  Believe me when I say that you have nothing to lose, and everything to gain by taking this first step.
 
Tip: If you want to bring some of the soothing benefits of nature inside with you, you can always do what I do and keep nature sounds running inside. I run nature sounds in the background when I’m reading, meditating, sleeping, doing the dishes, etc. I find some great ones on YouTube (Calmed by Nature, Cat Trumpet are two of my favorites!) Nature soundtracks are soothing and they are extremely popular for a reason!
 
Takeaway
When you love something you want to shout it from the rooftops. You want to share it with the world. And you hope that everyone around you will appreciate it the same way that you do. This is how I feel when I get started on the subject of nature and its powerful effects on the mind, body and soul.
 
But I know that experience is subjective. Some experiences just have to be had in order for them to be fully appreciated. Or in the case with experiencing nature, it has to be felt firsthand in order to really benefit from its full effects. I promise you that once you feel how it can affect you when you’re feeling super stressed or maybe just feeling kind of down, over time it will become key in your coping skills arsenal. Reawaken your connection with nature and you might just find the solace that you’ve been seeking.
 
Be on the lookout for future posts from AndiamoFit about earthing and grounding, forest bathing, terpenes and many more ways to incorporate nature into your health and wellness routines!