“The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative” by Florence Williams
Paperback, 289 pages
Published February 2018 by W.W. Norton & Company
ISBN-10 : 0393242714 | ISBN-13 : 978-0393242713
Date Finished: October 1, 2016
How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
Find it at BookShop.org or Amazon
I received an advanced copy of this book back in 2016 and devoured it in a couple of days.
My Notes:
“Thirty-six percent of people check their cell phones while having sex. Seventy percent of people sleep with their phone.”
Here’s what the data shows: People are least happy at work or while sick in bed, and most happy when they’re with friends or lovers. Their moods often reflect the weather.
As one of MacKerron’s papers concludes: “On average, study participants are significantly and substantially happier outdoors in all green or natural habitat types than they are in urban environments.”
What (the app) Mappiness reveals—our epidemic dislocation from the outdoors—is an indictment not only of the structures and habits of modern society, but of our self-understanding.
“People may avoid nearby nature because a chronic disconnection from nature causes them to underestimate its hedonic benefits.”
So, we do things that make us tetchy, like check our phones 1,500 times a week.
American and British children spend half as much time outdoors as their parents did.
This book explores the science behind what poets and philosophers have known for eons: places matter. Aristotle believed walks in the open air clarified the mind. Darwin, Tesla and Einstein walked in gardens and groves to help them think. Teddy Roosevelt, one of the most hyper productive presidents of all time, would escape for months to the open country. On some level they all fought a tendency to be “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people” as hiker-philosopher John Muir put it in 1901.
Our nervous systems are built to resonate with set points derived from the natural world. Science is now bearing out what the Romantics knew to be true.
So why now? Probably because we’re losing our connection to nature more dramatically than ever before. Thanks to a confluence of demographics and technology, we’ve pivoted further away from nature than any generation before us.
I yearned for the mountains. My mind had trouble focusing. I couldn’t finish thoughts. I couldn’t make decisions and I wasn’t keen to get out of bed. I was perhaps, at least in part, suffering from what journalist Louv calls nature deficit disorder.
I personally like Oscar Wilde’s broad definition: “a place where birds fly around uncooked.”
Homo sapiens officially became an urban species sometime in 2008. That’s when the World Health Organization reported that for the first time more people throughout the world live in urban areas than rural ones.
Yet we think of nature as a luxury, not a necessity. We don’t recognize how much it elevates us, both personally and politically. That, ultimately, is the aspiration of this book: to find the best science behind our nature-primed neurons and to share it.
As a journalist who writes frequently about the environment, I often end up writing about the way environment hurts our health from flame retardants getting into human tissue to air pollution’s effects on the developing brain. It was both a pleasure and a revelation to consider how, instead, our surroundings can also help prevent physical and mental problems and align us with the World Health Organization’s definition of health: “a complete state of physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmary.”
PART ONE Looking for Nature Neurons
IN Japan… it’s gotten to the point where they’ve coined a term, karoshi—death from overwork. The phenomena was identified during the 1980s bubble economy when workers their prime started dropping dead, and the concept reverberated into the future and throughout the developing world: civilization can kill us.
I spent too much time sitting inside. I maintain multiple social media platforms that attenuate my ability to focus, think and self-reflect.
A couple months after I moved, I told my new doctor I was feeling depressed. She did what general practitioners everywhere are doing and set me off with a script for Zoloft.
Moving on, I tried to grasp the distress crowds favorite darling, meditation. The science is very convincing that it changes your brain in ways that make you smarter and kinder and generally less ruffled by life. The problem is, as with antidepressants, meditation doesn't work for many of us.
If there's one man who can demonstrate how forest therapy works, it's Yoshifumi Miyazaki. A physical anthropologist vice director of the Center for environment, health and field sciences at Chiba university on the outskirts of Tokyo, he believes that because humans evolved in nature, it's where we feel most comfortable, even if we don't always know it.
One powerful example: snake! Are visual cortex picks up snake patterns and movements more quickly than other kinds of patterns. It's likely that snakes even drove the evolution of our highly sensitive depth perception.
Primate too involved in places seething with venomous snakes have better vision than primates who didn't evolve in those places.
The biophilia hypothesis posits that peaceful and nurturing elements of nature helped us regain equanimity, cognitive clarity, empathy and hope.
Throughout our evolution, we've spent 99.9% of our time in nature. Our physiology is adapted to it. During every day life, a feeling of comfort can be achieved if our rhythms are synchronized with those of the environment.
By contrast, Muir wrote of time not in the wilderness, “I am degenerating into a machine for making money.”
.. found that leisure forest walks, compared to urban walks, deliver a 12 percent decrease in cortisol levels. But that wasn’t all; they recorded a 7 percent decrease in sympathetic nerve activity, a 1.4 percent decrease in blood pressure, and a 6 percent decrease in heart rate… also better moods and lower anxiety.
We suffer the consequences: a long trail of research dating back to the 1930s shows people who produce chronically high cortisol levels and high blood pressure are more prone to heart disease, metabolic disease, dementia and depression.
The renewed interest of late represents a convergence of ideas and events: the relentless march of obesity, depression and anxiety (even in affluent communities and despite more medication), the growing academic and cultural unease with our widening breach from the outdoors.
To find out, Li brought a group of middle-aged Tokyo businessman into the woods in 2008. For three days, it's been a couple of hours each morning hiking. At the end, blood test showed their natural killer cells had increased 40%. Moreover, the boost lasted for seven days. A month later, their NK count was still 15% higher than when they started.
Since 2002, studies have attributed healthful properties to soil compounds like actinomycetes—which the human nose can detect at concentrations of 10 parts per trillion—and of course we harvest mod spores to make critical antibiotics like penicillin. Dirt can heal:
Sleeping with vaporized stem oil from hinoki cypress trees, resulted in 20 percent increase NK cells 20 percent. and reported less fatigue while control group no change.
What else to you suggest, Li? If you have time for a vacation don’t go to a city, go to a natural area. Try to go one weekend a month. Visit parks at least once a week. Gardening is good. On urban walks, try to walk under trees, not across fields. Go to a quite place. Near water is also good.”
… even on a snowy blustery day the effects of nature worked.
(published in PLoS ONE) blew the researchers away: a 50 percent improvement in creativity after just a few days in nature.
Among his dozen of influential studies are those showing that exercise causes new brain cells to grow especially in areas related to memory, executive function and spatial perception.
Kramer’s studies helped change the way the profession and society think. They are what scientists dream of.
“Tech is leading us in a negative direction and nature may prevent that.”
Paul Archly was warming up. “Thirty-six percent of people check their cell phones while having sex. Seventy percent of people sleep with their phone.”
Strayer: “The average person looks at their phone 150 times a day. The average teen sends 3,000 text messages a month.”
It wallops us. As Stanford neuroscientists Daniel Levity points out in The Organized Mind, our brains processing speed is surprisingly slow, about 120 bits per second. For perspective, it takes 60 bits per second just to understand one person speaking to us.
The key point, because it’s perhaps what we’ve lost by giving up our connection to the night skies, the bracing air and the companionate chorus of birds.
In other worlds, the world of office towers, traffic lanes and email isn’t ideally suited to our brains’ perceptual and cognitive systems.
One of the compelling theories about nature is that it acts like an advanced drug, a sort of smart pill that works selectively on the default network in the way new estrogen therapy makes bones stronger by targeting some estrogen receptors in the body bu not others that might increase cancer risk.
Studies show that when people walk in nature, they obsess over negative thoughts much less than when they walk in a city.
Woody Allen, “I love nature, I just don’t want to get any of it on me.”
How much of the benefits of nature are really because of what’s in nature versus silly leaving behind the bad stuff of cities and workplaces?
Between N and S Korea there is a surprisingly biologically rich Demilitarized Zone, 160-mile long, 2.5 mile wide buffer.
Maybe it was the translation, but things seemed to be bleeding out of the realm of quantifiable science and into a squigglier place.
S. Korea. Flying out of poverty and through a series of dictatorships to become one of the wealthiest democracies on the planet, the nation now boasts the fourteenth-strongest economy in the world.
“shin to bul ee,” which means “body and soil are one.” Not soul, but soil.
The data on the healing power of the forests kept rolling in. Among the things in Korean researches were finding: immune-boosting killer T cells of women with breast cancer increased after a two-week forest visit and stayed elevated for fourteen days; people who exercised in nature (as opposed to the city) achieved better fitness and were more likely to keep exercising; and unmarried pregnant woman in the forest prenatal classes significantly reduced their symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Scents immediately enter the primal brain, where the amygdala is waiting to command a fight-or-flight response. The emotional amygdala is highly wired to the hippocampus, where memories are stored. A keen sense of smell was critical as we sought food and water in scarce environments.
It’s well known that women living together in dorm rooms are able to synchronize their menstrual cycles; the reason is they are nasally detecting each other’s pheromones.
Svante Paabo is the Swedish paleogeneticist famous for sequencing the genome of Neanderthals and discovering that they interbred with early Asiatic humans (the result: all modern humans, except for Africans).
Women can smell better than men. It’s also enhanced when they are pregnant. It’s an evolutionary advantage. They can tell which baby is theirs by the smell.
Scientists have shown that the hippocampi (the hippocampus is an important brain region for memory) of London cabdrivers grow as they learn to map the city. Our individual brains are adapting to handle modern life, even from one year to the next, but that reflects flexibility, not evolution. In the mismatch between our current lives and our current brains, the primary victim is our paleolithic nervous system. No wonder, then, that when something smells really great we get happy. It's as though we've momentarily stepped through the wardrobe.
Certainly we are not the sensory animals we used to be, and neither are the animals we’ve domesticated. Wolves outperform dogs in tests of general intelligence. Are we self domesticating? Harvard Richard Wrangham makes the case that humans are becoming less aggressive as we’ve evolved into larger social groups.
Scientists have known for a long time that particulate matter from sources like diesel shortens life spans by causing cardiovascular and pulmonary problems.
Black carbon—the tiny particles spewed out in exhaust and other combustion reactions like fires and cookstoves—are blamed for 2.1 million premature deaths annually around the world.
A 2014 study estimated that trees in the United States remove 17.4 million tons of air pollution per year, providing 6.8 billion dollars in human health benefits.
Regardless of your income, the closer you live to these roads, the higher your risk of autism, stroke and cognitive decline in aging, although the exact reasons haven’t been teased out.
In 2010 a young South Korean man collapsed and died after playing fifty straight hours of StarCraft, prompting the government to ban some games between midnight and 6am for anyone under sixteen.
“Cities are a human zoo and I think schools are a human zoo too,” Park continues. “We cannot give up those systems, city and schools. The forest is the only exit we have for those humans who live in the human zoo.”
I was after alpha waves. When the electricity in the alpha wavelength dominates parts of the brain, it’s a sign that you are not hassled by small distractions, probably-solving or, my peeve, meal planning.
“Noise” is undated sound, and levels from human activity have been doubling about every thirty years, faster than population growth. Traffic on roads in the United States tripped between 1970 and 2007.
Human activities in general increase background noise levels by about 30 decibels. The official word for the human-made soundscape is the anthrophone.
By his count, the entire continental United States has fewer than a dozen sites where you can’t hear human-made noise for at least fifteen minutes at dawn.
In fascinating studies, people have been hooked up to electrocardiogram monitors while sleeping through plane, train and traffic noise. Whether or not they woke up, their sympathetic nervous systems reacted dramatically to the sounds, elevating their heart rates, bloop pressure and respiration.
.. this makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Sleeping or hibernating animals must still maintain their capacity to react to danger.
If as Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky points out, lots of mirostresses administer a slow drip over time add up to chronic stress, then even something as harmless as airplanes heard during sleep can accrue in the stress bank. pg 102
: for every 5-decibel increase in noise, reading scores dropped the equivalent of a two-month delay, so that kids were almost a year behind in neighborhoods that were 20 decibels louder (results were adjusted for income and other factors). There's something real to the phrase "you can't hear yourself thing."
Visitors hearing loud vehicle noise rate parks as 38 percent less scenic than those who don’t hear it. pg 106
"It is a curious thing to observe how almost all patients live with their faces turn to the light, exactly as plants always make their way toward the light." Oliver Sacks
"We analyze the polyp happens with computers and compare them to forests, Mayor it's actually the same, and "said Taylor.
So perhaps our comfort in nature it's not really about love for living things or the physical frisson of a good view – it's simply about fluent visual processing.
"How happy I am to be able to walk among the shrubs, the trees, the woods, the grass and the rocks! For the woods, the trees and the rocks give man the resonance he needs." Beethoven
Kahn concluded that humans can "adapt to the loss of actual nature," but "we will suffer physical and psychological costs."
The human eye is well designed to respond immediately to color. In our retinas, we have three color-sensing types of cone cells primed to pick up reds, blues & greens, and those comes enjoy a direct line to the brain's visual cortex, a spot of geography in the back of the head.
Red pops out at us because we have more cone cells dedicated to picking up this color, and in many cultures, red was the earliest color given a name after black and white.
When the poet Diane Ackerman writes craving the “visual opium” of a sunset, she is not being as metaphorical as she thinks. According to Valtchanov, nature makes us happy because of a neural mechanism in our ventral visual pathway that is tuned to a mid-level frequency range like a clear radio signal. When it finds it, happy molecules flow.
Sunlight on skin: It turns out that sunlight stimulates the release of of dopamine from the retina, which in turn appears to prevent the eyeball from growing too oblong. Indoor and outdoor light are totally different beasts. Even on overcast days, outdoor light is ten times brighter and covers vastly more of the light spectrum. Educators are scrambling to come up with solutions, including installing full-spectrum indoor lights and glass ceilings over classrooms.
I find the intellectual compulsion to break apart the pieces of nature and examine them one by one both interesting and troubling. I understand it’s the way science usually works.
The results were significant effects and linear dose response that followed predictions. Compared to sitting in the van, the volunteers did not feel psychotically restored” in the city, but they did in the park and forest. .. after just fifteen minutes.
Five hour a month recommendation. But the researchers also noted the dose-response relationship the more nature, the better you feel. five is minimum 10 you’ll reach a new level.
As we’ve seen in Part One, nature appears to have some immediate effects: a lower pulse rate and the beginnings of a parasympathetic nervous system response leading to feelings of peace and well-being.
These people may hate bugs, or the sky, or whatever, and no matter how biophilic their brains are supposed to be, they simply can’t relax in nature.
I was experiencing what the social scientists call the novelty effect, in which things that are new and fresh can make us feel good.
When we are out in nature, we are generally self-propelled, breathing in oxygen, liberating our lungs and our cardiac capillaries from their usual cramped, desk-hunched configurations, and arresting, temporarily, the slow backward death march of our telomeres.
What changed Mitchell mind, gradually, was reading the studies from Japan that showed lower stress among forest walkers but not city walkers.
Time in nature, as the structure of this book suggests, appears to have a dose curve. Five minutes is good; thirty-minute stroll is better.
Interestingly, though, it was an early American psychologist, Benjamin Rush, who first popularized the idea of nature-ish therapy for his mental patients in an 1812 treatise: "it has been remarked, that the maniacs of the male sex in all hospitals, who assist in cutting wood, making fires, and digging in a garden... often recover, while persons, whose rank excerpts them from such services, languish away their lives within the walls of the hospital."
She described the typical progression of patients, and it resembles the experience of Ottosson during his recovery. For the first week, the participants often spend their garden hours lying down alone in the garden, either in a hammock or on the ground. Because the program operates year-round, they wear large insulated snow-suits as needed. “Many cannot feel anything bc of severe depression. “Now I can taste coffee and enjoy it.”
Nature appears to act directly upon our autonomic systems, calming us, but it also works indirectly, through facilitating social contact and through encouraging exercise and physical movement.
The idea of solvitur ambulando (in walking it will be solved) has been around since St. Augustine, but well before that Aristotle thought and taught while walking the open-air parapets of the Lyceum. It has long been believed that walking in restorative settings could lead not only to physical vigor but to mental clarity and even bursts of genius, inspiration (with its etymology in breathing) and overall sanity. ... Jefferson walked to clear his mind, while Thoreau and Nietzsche, like Aristotle, walked to think. "All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking," wrote Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols. And Rousseau wrote in Confessions, "I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs."
“I think that 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 over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.” Thoreau
The phone talkers by contrast may have been relaxed by being outside in the fresh air, but they were not as liberated from daily cares.
Note to self: leave the cell phone at home, or at least deep in your pocket, hen in need of cognitive reboot.
“The more time participants spent in nature, the greater well-being they reported.”
"by fire they come alive."
He's not the first to think so. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in 1938 that fire "begat philosophy." In drawing us together for meal preparation and warmth, fire drove evolution, selecting those of us who could be sociable, communal and even entertaining.
In America, Emerson picked up Burke’s themes of vastness and humility, writing in his famous essay “Nature” in 1836, “Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing." That secular transcendence still informs the modern environmental movement.
"Things that cause people to feel all tend to be information Rich, vast, and things that we have trouble wrapping our minds around," he said. Face tension disappears. "So basically, the body is quieting down a bit so that I can take in information in the environment."
"at the end of the day," said Strayer, his eyes glazing the horizon, "we come out in nature not because the science says it does something to us, but because of how it makes us feel."
"Between every two pine tree's there is a door leading to a new way of life." John Muir
PTSD was common after most of these wars—even Homer wrote about it—but it went by different names: shell shock, soldier’s heart, combat fatigue. Frederick Law Olmsted: They start and turn pale at the breaking of a stick or the crack of a percussion cap—it is a terrific disease“. PTSD wasn’t officially named and recognized by the Veterans Administration until 1980.
In war combat, the stress response isn't small or ephemeral. It's big. And it lasts for days, sometimes weeks or months. It lasts so long that the brain changes—more in some people than in others. Blame evolution. Our nervous systems are naturally hardwired for fear, telling us what to avoid and how to stay safe. Some psychologists argue that fear is our oldest emotion, existing in the earliest planetary life forms and predating even the drive to reproduce. It starts deep in our brainstem, in the Milk Dud—sized amygdala.
Our nerves systems are naturally hardwired for fear, telling us what to avoid and how to stay safe. Some psychologists argue that fear is our oldest emotion, existing in the earliest planetary life forms and predating even the drive to reproduce. It starts deep in our brainstem, in the Milk Dud-sized amygdala.
But there’s a reason we feel fear: It may have given us the gift of memory. The very reason we remember anything may be that we must remember near-misses, narrowly avoided dangers, and attacks from predators and enemies.
At its root, PTSD is a memory disorder. Brain scans of people suffering PTSD show cellular and volume changes in the hippocampus, a region that helps process memories and sits very close to the amygdala.
Its founding principe—radical several decades ago and still surprising under appreciated—was that kids with ADHD thrive in the outdoors. Since then, ADHD diagnoses have exploded—to the point where 11 percent of America teens are said to have it—while recess, physical education, and kids’ access to nature have miserably shriveled.
We have come to see the restlessness that was once adaptive as a pathology. A recent advertisement for an ADHD drug listed the “symptoms” to watch for: “May climb or run excessively, have trouble staying seated.”
He points out that while common stimulant medications for ADHD like Ritalin and Adderall may improve attention skills and academic performance in many kids, they do so at the cost of killing the exploration urge, at least temporarily. “We know these are anti-play drugs,” he said. “That is clear and unambiguous.”
The bigger question is whether the drugs—and all the enforced sedentary behavior—squeeze the adventure impulse out of kids longer-term. Psychologists tend to disagree on this point, but the truths, no one really knows. It’s not a boutique question. Of the 6.4 million diagnosed kids in America, half are taking prescription stimulants, an increase of 28 percent since 2007.
As Erin Kenny, founder of Cedarsong Nature School on Vachon Island, Washing, has put it, “Children cannot bounce off the walls if we take away the walls.”
It was while walking in the woods that he came up with the name: kindergarten. In it, children would absorb the natural world though all their senses. Fredrick Frobel
Finland reports the same percentage of children diagnosed with ADHD as the US, about 11 percent, mostly boys. But while most adolescents in the US are taking medication, most in Finland are not.
Tweet: A 2009 study in Pediatrics found that 30 percent of third-graders get fewer than 15 minutes of recess a day, and another study found that 39 percent of African-American students had no recess compared to 15 percent of white students.
While 80 percent of seven- and eight-year-olds walked to school in 1971, by 1990 fewer than 10 percent did so.
In the UK, two-thirds of schoolchildren do not know acorns from trees.
The stats are alarming: Preschoolers are the fastest-growing market for antidepressants in the United States.
More than 10,000 American preschoolers are being medicated for ADHD.
According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly one in ten children has a vitamin D deficiency. That’s 7.6 million children. Two-thirds, another 50.8 million, are considered vitamin D “insufficient.”
It seemed the playful, exploratory, and physical adolescent yours exist to boost learning in mammals, just as SOAR’s Willson intuited. Or, as Green more formally put it, “the adolescent prefrontal cortex is ready to be molded by environmental experience.”
Tweet: One thing is clear: human brains seem to grow best when they get some time outside.
In 2008, our species crossed a significant Rubicon of habitat: for the first time, a majority of us lived in cities. We could now be called, as at least one anthropologist has suggested, Metro sapiens.
This momentous urban migration could be a good thing. Cities are often the most creative, wealthiest and most energy-efficient places to live. City dwellers typically experience better sanitation, nutrition, education, gender equality and access to health care, including family planning, that their rural counterparts.
Back in 1965, animal behaviorist Paul Leyhausen described what happens to cats in unnaturally crowded environments: they become more aggressive and despotic, turning into a “spiteful mob.”
Here are some essential take-homes: we all need nearby nature: we benefit cognitively and psychologically from having trees, bodies of water, and green spaces just to look at; we should be smarter about landscaping our schools, hospitals, workplaces and neighborhoods so everyone gains.
I took away two big lessons from Singapore. For greenery to truly seep into all neighborhoods, there needs to be—if not a totalitarian regime—then at least a strong government vision. Second, urban nature will serve us best when it’s allowed to be a little bit wild, at least in spots.
In fact, trees might be our single best tool for urban salvation. City dwellers get most excited about two natural features: water and trees.
Urban trees provide not just aesthetic pleasure but concrete health benefits. … taken as a whole they generally improve people’s physiology in several important ways.
But are not exercise and the open air within the reach of us all? ~ Walt Whitman
If there’s one major theme of this book, it’s that the benefits of nature work along a dose curve.
Moving up the pyramid are weekly outings to parks and waterways, places where the sounds and hassles of the city recede, places that we should aim to imbibe at least several hours a week in the Finish fashion.
The more we recognize these innate humans needs, the more we stand to gain.
Distilling what I learned, I came up with a kind of ultra simple coda: Go outside often, sometimes in wild places. Bring friends or not. Breathe.
We still have a long way to go. You can see poverty from space. My own city, D.C., has a clear “tree line” that can be seen in satellite photos analyzed by the Washington Post. To the west of the line, in the affluent Northwest quadrant, the streets glow green from above. To the east, where 40 percent of residents live in low-income neighborhoods, the area looks flat and gray.
Why shouldn’t doctors prescribe time outside to their patients? It’s taken nearly 150 years for Olmsted’s idea to gain some traction. There aren’t many doctors sending their urban patients to the park, but there are a few. Nooshin Razani, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, California, has forged a partnership with local parks so inner-city kids can get to them more easily and more often.
"But are not exercise and the open air within the reach of us all?" Walt Whitman