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

by Florence Williams

“People may avoid nearby nature because a chronic disconnection from nature causes them to underestimate its hedonic benefits.”

We don’t experience natural environments enough to realize how restored they can make us feel, nor are we aware that studies also show they make us healthier, more creative, more empathetic and more apt to engage with the world and with each other. Nature, it turns out, is good for civilization.

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.

Wilson didn’t actually coin the word “biophilia”; that honor goes to social psychologist Erich Fromm, who described it in 1973 as “the passionate love of life and of all that is alive; it is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, an idea or a social group.”

The biophilia hypothesis posits that peaceful or nurturing elements of nature helped us regain equanimity, cognitive clarity, empathy and hope.

Li gets asked this a lot. He had a small list. “If you have time for vacation, don’t go to a city. Go to a natural area. Try to go one weekend a month. Visit a park at least once a week. Gardening is good. On urban walks, try to walk under trees, not across fields. Go to a quiet place. Near water is also good.”

exercise is the single best way to prevent aging-related cognitive decline.

Perhaps what matters is not the source of the stress but the ability to recover from it.

Studies show that when people walk in nature, they obsess over negative thoughts much less than when they walk in a city.

As Paul Atchley put it at the end of the evening, no doubt inspired by the night sky, the beverages and a new laser focus in his attentional network, “It’s many fingers pointed at the moon. If you look at all the different fingers, eventually you can see where the moon is even though every perspective is different. There won’t be a single piece of evidence. Science doesn’t work that way.”

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.

This is not true. Notice the author does not cite a source for this “fact.” If Williams had researched this, she would have found this myth has been debunked multiple times: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26181612/ https://helloclue.com/articles/cycle-a-z/do-menstrual-cycles-sync-unlikely-finds-clue-data https://health.clevelandclinic.org/myth-truth-period-really-sync-close-friends https://www.healthline.com/health/womens-health/period-syncing https://www.figo.org/news/period-syncing-myth-debunked

weird things start happening to our eyes in the absence of outdoor space and light. One clue was a study from China that found twice the rates of myopia (nearsightedness) in wealthier, urban parts of the country than in rural areas. In Shanghai, a stupendous 86 percent of high school students need eyeglasses. 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.

All told, over 95 percent of Finns regularly spend time recreating in the outdoors.

It could be that the Finnish exist in something of an arrested state of development, or perhaps the rest of us somehow got overdeveloped. We put down our floral wreaths earlier, acting, for better or worse, like civilized grown-ups. Finland is highly unique among Western countries for urbanizing very late in the game.

Finland has 5 million people, and 2 million kesämökki, or “summer cottages,” so almost every family still has a rural, nature-based anchor.

Finland scores high on global scales of happiness. Many people assume this is because there isn’t much income disparity here. But perhaps it’s also because everyone has access to what makes them happy—a bunch of lakes, forests and coastlines, combined with ridiculously long, state-sanctioned vacations and a midnight sun. (Of course, there is a flipside, the grim, dark winters, when Finns drink too much and act up, unless they’re skiing.)

Finland is the most forested country in Europe, with trees covering 74 percent of the land.

Of course, the ultimate paradox is that humans need both wilderness and civilization, and that one makes us all the more poised for the other.

But if Muir and Emerson and, before them, eighteenth-century Irish philosopher Edmund Burke had it right, feelings of spirituality don’t just spring from religion: they also spring from transcendent experiences in nature. In 1757, the twenty-eight-year-old Burke landed in the center of the Enlightenment when he published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.

The word “awe” derives from Old English and Norse words for the fear and dread one felt before a divine being. It isn’t for nothing that many churches play up the music, the visions, the robes and architectural heights and spans. These elements fill us with wonder, humility and a bit of trepidation.

To find out how, Piff, Dacher Keltner at UC Berkeley and two other colleagues conducted some unusual experiments. Keltner had already posited that awe is a unique emotion that turns us away from narrow self-focus and toward the interests of our collective group.

She recalled the words of a yoga instructor: “Anxiety is just excitement without breath.” The river was teaching her to breathe. “I wasn’t sure I was going to go back in and keep kayaking,” she continued, “but I did, and I was trying to breathe in every rapid.” She clearly liked being a badass. Who doesn’t?

One morning I sat on a big gear raft next to Linda Brown, the older vet who had been institutionalized for depression. She sat with her arms wrapped around her life jacket, her sandaled feet propped on the front tube of the boat. “The trees can’t control their lives,” she’d said, speaking so softly she practically whispered. “We can’t always control what happens to us. The trees can teach us acceptance. And metamorphosis.”

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.

THE HUMAN BRAIN evolved outside, in a world filled with interesting things, but not an overwhelming number of interesting things.

Everything in a kid’s world was nameable: foods, creatures, constellations. We were supposed to notice passing distractions; if we didn’t, we could get eaten. But we also needed a certain amount of stick-to-itiveness so we could build tools, stalk game, raise babies, and plan big. Evolution favored early humans who could both stay on task and switch tasks when needed, and our prefrontal cortex evolved to let us master the ability.

Since starting this book, I’ve changed the way I walk around, seeking out the routes with more trees. I go to parks a lot, and I walk in them often. I make my kids come with me. We make an effort to listen to the birds, to look at the fractal patterns in nature, to watch the creeks flowing. I still shake my fists at the planes, but I also enjoy getting on them to go somewhere more wild.