It’s Wild
If you’re out of synch with nature, it’s impossible to be well.
And if you’re truly well, it’s impossible to be out of synch with nature.
Spending time with nature comes with myriad benefits. Another way of looking at it is that not spending time with nature comes with myriad problems.
Because away from nature, your fight-or-flight system is activated. Your heart rate is higher. Your blood pressure is higher. And you have more epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol flowing through your body. All of this makes you sick.
In a sense, when you’re away from nature, you’re a foreigner in a foreign land.
We humans didn’t evolve under fluorescent lights in climate-controlled homes, offices, and cars with things beeping at us all the time.
That’s why it feels so good to be in the woods. Or by the ocean. Or even in a city park.
Being with nature is being home:
“Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.”
—Gretel Ehrlich
“The goal is to discover your nature, and nature helps you do it.”
—Maxime Lagace
As such, being with nature doesn’t merely get you out of fight-or-flight mode for a little while. If you allow it to, it’ll help you live with truly profound wellness.
It will change how you eat. How you move your body. How you sleep. How you rest. How you work. How you relate.
Because nature is your nature.
Nature isn’t something you visit; it’s something you are.
As such, being with nature brings you back to yourself. And when you’re truly with yourself, the only thing that makes sense is to live as yourself.
You’ve been conditioned to live at a pace that’s completely incompatible with the natural world.
You’ve been conditioned to tolerate a schedule that’s completely incompatible with the natural world.
You’ve been conditioned to swim in a world of junk food, junk entertainment, and junk interactions.
You’ve been conditioned to live in a world in which type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia, chronic neuromusculoskeletal pain, anxiety, depression, and related ailments are completely normalized.
Don’t worry: They’ve got pills for all of that, and they only cost tens of thousands of dollars a year in medical-insurance premiums.
You know as well as I do that living well enables you to play a whole ‘nother game.
And spending time with nature is a great catalyst for doing so.
Because:
“Wilderness is not just a space in which we live but a space which lives within us.”
—Anonymous
About Jason Gootman
Jason Gootman is a Mayo Clinic Certified Wellness Coach and National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach as well as a certified nutritionist and certified exercise physiologist. Jason helps people reverse and prevent type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other ailments with evidence-based approaches to nutrition, exercise, stress reduction, holistic wellness, and, most importantly, lasting behavior improvement and positive habit formation. As part of this work, Jason often helps people lose weight and keep it off, in part by helping them overcome the common challenges of yo-yo dieting and emotional eating. Jason helps people go from knowing what to do and having good intentions to consistently taking great care of themselves in ways that help them add years to their lives and life to their years.