The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

by Florence Williams

He is part of a new breed of Korean Forest Agency employee known as a forest healing instructor. He’d actually gone to graduate school for this, passing rigorous entrance qualifications.

“There are two and a half million individual trees here,” said Park. A subtle mist rose from them, made of the very aerosols we were smelling. Atmospherically, these serve a cloud-seeding function, helping forests regulate their moisture levels. But Park, healing instructor that he is, holds a strictly medical appreciation. “The phytoncides are antibacterial,” he said. Citing the Japanese research of Miyazaki, he continued as though he’s recited it many times before: “They reduce stress fifty-three percent and lower blood pressure five to seven percent. The soil is also good for healing. It is antiviral and the geosmin is good for cancer.”

Geosmin, I learned, causes the funky-great smell of earth after a rain.

Geosmin comes from soil organisms, particularly the streptomyces bacteria that are key to so many antibiotics. According to the Royal Society of Chemistry, we are alert to this rich smell in incredibly small quantities. We can detect the equivalent of seven drops of geosmin in a swimming pool.

coniferous essential oils fight atopic skin diseases (when applied to the skin in low concentrations), mitigate stress by lowering levels of cortisol (when inhaled), and reduce symptoms of asthma (ditto). The major components of hinoki oil are camphor, turpenes, pinenes and humulenes, limonenes and sabinenes, depending on the season and the part of the tree sampled. The sabinenes seem particularly helpful for treating asthma, the terrines for fighting bacterial infections and stress.

the city of Seoul recently spent $100 million painting special parking spaces pink for women. They are supposed to make women happy, but they are also longer and wider, leading many not to feel happy but to feel insulted by the implied dig on their driving ability.)

The agency now offers everything from prenatal classes in the woods to forest kindergartens to forest burial options. It’s a cradle-to-grave operation. There is even a “Happy Train” that delivers school bullies to a national forest for two days so they can learn to be nicer.

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.

mothers can identify their babies by scent alone, but fathers can’t. My sense of smell is my sharpest sense, for better or worse.

Nineteen percent of Americans live near “high-volume” roads, and most cities don’t monitor these corridors for air quality. 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. Many scientists suspect it has something to do with fine particles causing tissue inflammation and altering gene expression in the brain’s immune cells. “I hold my breath when I’m behind a diesel bus,” said Michelle Block, a neurobiologist who studies pollution’s effects on microglial cells at Virginia Commonwealth University.

When we say we can smell spring, we are really smelling tree aerosols. As the air temperature heats up, so do the biochemical reactions within the wood and leaves.

I learned, though, that tech abstention isn’t the goal, any more than a dietary cleanse leads to anorexia. Unplugging isn’t realistic, and seeing the Korean kids made me understand this in a new way. For many of these kids, gaming is the only play they get, and certainly the only play unsupervised by adults.

“In nature, they have to use all their muscles and senses. They develop body sense. They get scared but they develop self-confidence. They develop more ability to solve problems themselves.”

“Kids with higher self-esteem are less likely to get addicted,” he told me. Based on this work, he recommends that preteens get out in nature for a half day or so every two weeks.

Because sound waves vibrate through bones and the brain (the frequency of a violin note, for example, will cause neurons in the auditory cortex to fire at exactly that frequency) it is a sense we feel with our whole being.

The results were linear: 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 think.”

I was reminded of something the National Park Service’s Kurt Fristrup had said, that unless we learn to make cities sound better, we stand at risk of losing the range of this precious sense. He calls our tendency to wear earbuds during all hours of the day “learned deafness.” We are tuning out the real world in favor of our own personal soundscapes. The cost is we forget how to listen. And we lose an opportunity for true mental restoration.

[When] the myopia had become stationary, change of air—a sea voyage if possible—should be prescribed. — HENRY EDWARD JULER, A HANDBOOK OF OPHTHALMIC SCIENCE AND PRACTICE, 1904

Every year for Christmas, he made me a book about our wilderness trips the previous summer. They were filled with grainy images of river rapids and rock cliffs. The one from 1978 is titled “Adventurous.” In his acknowledgments, he calls me out. “This is specially written for her. It is printed in a limited edition with only one copy.”

Florence Nightingale’s famous nursing textbook from 155 years ago: “It is the unqualified result of all my experience with the sick, that second only to their need of fresh air is their need of light,” she wrote. “It is a curious thing to observe how almost all patients lie with their faces turned to the light, exactly as plants always make their way towards the light.”

“When we stare at screens all day, we blink less,” she said. “We all do it.” She sent me off with some eye drops and told me to make myself blink twenty times in a row as often as I can remember.

As recent studies in Ohio, Singapore and Australia found, the real difference between those with myopia and those without is the number of hours they spend outside. Sunlight stimulates the release 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.

One classic way to measure positive and negative emotions is to show people pictures of faces and have them rate them for moods like fear, anger, happiness and surprise, while timing the exercise. Happier people will recognize happiness in others more quickly, and take longer to recognize fear or disgust.

“When you built a hospital a hundred years ago, you built it around a nice park. That was self-evident. But after about after 1930 or 1940, man is treated like a machine. He gets energy and medicine and that’s all. We are just now starting to get fuller knowledge back.”

he believes an effective garden should incorporate a number of elements ranging from safety to fascination to naturalism to species diversity.

Here’s the emerging European coda on public health from Finland, Sweden and Scotland: encourage people—especially distressed populations—to walk, often together, and provide safe, attractive and naturalistic places for them to do it. The research also suggests some special places to go: forests and coastlines.

if you want to be happy, there is a simple, scientific formula: “get married, get a job and live near the coast.”

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.

THE ABILITY TO see electrical waves inside the human brain was pioneered by German psychiatrist Hans Berger in the 1920s. Berger, who fell off a horse as a young soldier and was convinced his brain then sent a telepathic message to his sister,

yet another Stanford team designed a walking-in-nature study (it’s interesting to note that the campus most known for changing our relationship to technology—by incubating it—is now becoming known for helping us ditch it).

Strayer, who was, naturally, a Scoutmaster when his boys were young, said he believed the campfire setting was vastly superior to power points in classroom. “Here, they really raise their game,” he told me. “By fire they come alive.”

Keltner and colleagues asked participants how many times in the previous month and on that very day they experienced up to twenty negative and positive emotions such as fear, anger, joy, surprise, etc. They also took saliva samples from the subjects and measured their levels of cytokine IL-6, a marker for inflammation. Part of the immune system, these signal molecules help heal wounds and fight illness. In healthy people, lower levels are considered better, while chronic high levels have been linked to depression, stress and poor muscle repair. Of all the positive emotions, experiencing awe was the only one that predicted significantly lower levels of IL-6.

perhaps the absence of scale-induced awe is one of the reasons virtual nature will likely never match the real thing. Burke’s essential ingredient of vastness is hard to simulate on a screen,

Among other things, awe promotes curiosity, explains Anderson. This is because we experience things out of our normal frame of reference, things we can’t easily categorize or understand. When we are curious, we are drawn out of ourselves. We seek information from others. With their mixture of fear, beauty and mystery, these experiences also tend to get seared into our memory. I will probably never forget seeing my son’s face for the first time, or peering into the Grand Canyon as a child, or watching Northern Lights swirl in an Alaskan sky or driving through a surreal lightning storm in Texas.

wanted to know if awe, by focusing our attention on the present moment, might expand our perception of time. Anything that could do this might be a great discovery “given that there is a huge time famine in many societies in the world,” as she put it, “and this has a huge impact on mental and physical health, life satisfaction, depression, headaches and hypertension.” Nearly half of all Americans feel they do not have enough time on a daily basis.

Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes Calamity. — MICHAEL CHABON

Its founding principle—radical several decades ago and still surprisingly underappreciated—was that kids with ADHD thrive in the outdoors. Since then, ADHD diagnoses have exploded—to the point where 11 percent of American teens are said to have it—while recess, physical education, and kids’ access to nature have miserably shriveled.

“I hated nature,” as he put it. But something clicked under the wide Wyoming skies. He found he was able to focus on tasks; he was making friends and feeling less terrible about himself. Zack turned his restlessness into a craving for adventure—which is perhaps what it was meant to be all along.

not only do these kids need nature-based exploration, but exploration needs them.

Modern life has made all of us, along with our kids, distractible and overwhelmed. As McGill neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains, we consume 74 gigabytes of data every day.

“The digital age is profoundly narrowing our horizons and our creativity, not to mention our bodies and physiological capabilities,” said adventure photographer James Balog, even as his hard-won chronicles of a changing planet are delivered to millions digitally. Yet Balog, who roamed the hills until dark as a kid in rural New Jersey, can hardly get his eighth-grade daughter off her phone. “These are hours not being spent outside,” he said. “It kills me.”

History is full of examples of the fortunate ones who went on to become celebrated iconoclasts like wilderness advocate John Muir, who spent his early childhood sneaking out at night, dangling from the windowsill by his fingertips, and scaling treacherous seaside cliffs in Dunbar, Scotland. Frederick Law Olmsted hated school. His indulgent headmaster used to let him roam the countryside instead.

Olmsted, looking back on his life, identified the problem as the stifling classroom, not troublesome boys. “A boy,” he wrote, “who would not in any & under all ordinary circumstances, rather take a walk of ten to twelve miles sometime in the course of every day than sit quietly about a house all day, must be suffering from disease or a defective education.”

The Academy at SOAR—accredited for just the last three years—was determined to find a better way. The school enrolls just 32 students, 26 of them boys, divided into four mixed-age houses. Each kid has an individualized curriculum, and the student-teacher ratio is five to one. Tuition is a steep $49,500 per year, on a par with other boarding schools, although you won’t find a Hogwartsian dining hall or stacks of leather-bound books. The school still covers the required academics, as well as basic life skills like cooking, but finds that the kids pay more attention to a history lesson while standing in the middle of a battlefield or a geology lecture while camping on the Ordovician formation.

they just found that climbing, backpacking, and canoeing were a magical fit for these kids, at these ages, when their neurons are exploding in a million directions. “When you’re on a rock ledge,” Willson says, “there’s a sweet spot of arousal and stress that opens you up for adaptive learning. You find new ways of solving problems.”

In one experiment, exposure to nature reduced reported symptoms of ADHD in children threefold compared with staying indoors. In another, she had 17 children aged eight to eleven with ADHD walk for 20 minutes with a guide in three different settings: a residential neighborhood, an urban downtown street and a park setting. After the park walk they performed so much better memorizing numbers in backward sequence that the improvement was equal to the difference between having ADHD or not having it, as well as to the difference between not being medicated at all and experiencing the peak effects of common ADHD medication. More recently, a study of 2,000 children in Barcelona found that those who spent more time playing in green spaces were reported by parents to have somewhat milder symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity.

ADHD symptoms, it turns out, are somewhat contextual. If you’re the sort of person who thrives on chaos and stimulation like a lot of extreme athletes, sitting in school all day may well suck out your soul. But with the rise of industrialism, educators thought all kids should be in standardized classrooms. “ADHD got its start 150 years ago when compulsory education got started,” said Stephen Hinshaw, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “In that sense, you could say it’s a social construct.”

Not only will exploratory kids feel bored and inadequate in conventional schools, he said, the constrained setting actually makes their symptoms worse. Maria Montessori went so far as to suggest in 1920 that middle-schoolers should ditch lecture-based instruction altogether and head for farm and nature schools where they can move around and learn by doing. For kids like Zack Smith, school feels especially stifling and rule-bound; they act up; they may get moved into an even more restrictive environment, sometimes with chain-link fences, guards, and neurotropic meds that go beyond ADHD to deal with the ensuing anxiety, depression, and aggression. Sometimes they end up in trouble, or, as Zack feared might happen to him, getting “gooned” in the middle of night by burly strangers who would pack him off to a residential therapeutic program that may look like Outward Bound in the brochure but end up feeling like a gulag.

When Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Washington State University, restricted the free exploration and play of his young rats, their frontal lobes (which control executive function) failed to grow properly. As adults, they behaved like rat-style sociopaths. “We had the insight that if animals don’t play, if there are not sufficient spaces for them to engage, they develop play hunger,” said Panksepp. “They have impulse control problems and eventually problems with social interactions.” In contrast, animals given time to play appear to develop deeper and more durable neural hardware. Panksepp’s studies show that just thirty-minute play sessions help young rats release brain-growth factors and activate hundreds of genes in the frontal cortex.

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.”