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In society you will not find health, but in nature — Thoreau wrote it long before science proved him right. This lecture from Academy of Ideas mines his journals for a lost remedy. Nature restores focus, awakens the sacred without dogma, and shields us from the noise of the state and the feed. A landmark study found attention improved 20% after a walk in nature, but not after an urban one. The prescription is urgent and simple: go outside every day — the more high-tech our lives become, the more we need the wild.
Full Video Transcript
In society you will not find health, but in nature. Unless our feet at least stood in the midst of nature, all our faces would be pale and livid.
A growing body of research shows that spending time in nature elevates our mood, reduces stress, enhances creativity, restores our powers of attention, and even improves cardiovascular health and the functioning of our immune system.
There is growing empirical evidence to show that exposure to nature brings substantial mental health benefits,
wrote researchers at the University of Essex in 2009.
Such findings confirm what lovers of nature have always intuitively known.
In this video, we draw from the insights of the 19th century American philosopher Henry David Thoreau
and show how spending time in nature serves as an antidote to the psychological and spiritual sickness that plagues modern society.
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 fields absolutely free from all worldly
engagements, wrote Thoreau. Ah, dear nature, I come to it as a hungry man to a crust of bread.
There is a growing recognition that we live in a spiritually impoverished age. Many of us have
lost a sense of the sacred and no longer experience the world as infused with the divine. What is
often overlooked, however, is that we don’t need to attend a church or pledge allegiance to an
organized religion to reawaken our spiritual faculties. Spending time in nature can help
accomplish this end, as the natural world is the ultimate temple of the divine.
Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity, wrote Thoreau. Blessed are they who never read
a newspaper, for they shall see nature, and through her, God. Unlike organized religions,
the temple of nature does not demand adherence to any dogma, the acceptance of any moral code,
or belief in any particular god. Even if we are an atheist, the grandeur, beauty, and complexity
of the natural world can inspire a profound awe and wonder in us that gives rise to peak or
spiritual experiences. Or as Thoreau wrote in his journal, I have come forth to this hill at sunset
to see the forms of the mountains in the horizon, to behold and commune with something grander than
man. Alone in distant woods or fields, I come to myself. I once more feel myself grandly related.
I suppose that this is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer.
I suppose that what in other men is religion is in me love of nature. Another benefit of spending
time in nature is that it offers refuge from the suffocating tentacles of the modern state,
the propaganda of mainstream media, the negativity and hostility that pervade social media,
and the trivialities that consume so much of social life.
When immersed in the beauty of nature, we enter a reality far more expansive, liberating, and joyful
than the banal, corrupt, and often depressing worlds of politics in modern-day society.
Or as Thoreau observed in his journal,
I love nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him.
None of his institutions control or pervade her.
There, a different kind of right prevails.
In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness.
If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself.
I should lose all hope.
He is constraint, she is freedom to me.
He makes me wish for another world, she makes me content with this.
Nature also restores our capacity to focus,
which in modern life is being eroded by constant stimulation and distraction.
Emails, notifications, screens, apps, and social media feeds
deliberately designed to capture and hold our attention, pull our minds in many directions
throughout the day. One study found that the average American worker remains focused on a
single task for only about three minutes before becoming distracted. We are now developing an
attentional pathogenic culture, an environment in which sustained and deep focus is extremely hard
for all of us, and you have to swim upstream to achieve it, wrote Joel Nigg. The phenomena of
nature evoke what psychologists call soft fascination, which counteracts the negative
effects produced by constant distraction and overstimulation. Clouds drifting across the sky,
birdsong, flowing water, and leaves moving in the wind capture our attention without demanding
intense concentration. Nor do natural phenomena force us to rapidly switch our attention from
one stimulus to another or tune out distractions, both of which tax the cognitive systems that
sustain concentration. By engaging the mind in a soft and undemanding way, nature gives our
attentional faculties a chance to rest and recover. One influential study demonstrating
nature’s restorative effects on attention was published in 2008. It found that participants’
short-term memory and attention improved by 20% after a short walk through a natural environment,
while a comparable walk through an urban setting produced no such benefit. Subsequent research
suggests that longer periods immersed in nature produce even greater benefits for attention and
cognitive functioning. Thoreau recognized this restorative power of nature more than a century
before psychologists attempted to demonstrate it scientifically. For him, the natural world was
medicine for the mind. Nature is a kind of thorough-wort or bone-set to my intellect.
This is what I go out to seek, he wrote in his journal. This is a quick break from the video
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Nature also teaches us important lessons about life and serves as a source of self-knowledge,
for the movements and rhythms of our inner world often mirror those of the natural world.
For example, we pass through psychological seasons that resemble the seasons of nature.
The seasons and all their changes are in me, observed Thoreau. The most difficult of these
inner seasons are the winters of life, periods of despair, exhaustion, or stagnation in which
our vitality diminishes and we may even lose the will to live. Yet just as winter is a season of
dormancy in which seeds rest beneath the soil, trees conserve their energy, and tightly sealed
buds preserve the beginnings of new growth, an inner winter can be a period in which vitality
retreats into the depths of the psyche in preparation for renewal. To us, snow and cold
seem a mere delaying of the spring.
How far we are from understanding the value of these things
in the economy of nature, wrote Thoreau.
Recognizing this parallel can help us endure
our own psychological winters with greater patience.
For just as nature requires the dormancy of winter
before the renewal of spring,
the darker seasons of our own lives
may also serve a similar regenerative purpose.
Or as Thoreau wrote,
If rivers come out of their icy prison thus bright and immortal,
Shall not I too resume my spring life with joy and hope?
Shall a man not have his spring as well as the plants?
Catherine May echoes this insight in her best-selling book,
Wintering, The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.
As she writes,
Wintering is a season in the cold.
It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world,
feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress,
or cast into the role of an outsider.
However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful.
Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.
That’s where transformation occurs.
We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us,
revealing our bare bones.
Given time, they grow again.
Studies have shown that we need not venture deep into the wilderness
to experience the benefits of nature.
If we live in an urban environment,
a daily walk through a park filled with trees and greenery can enhance our well-being.
And we shouldn’t overlook the fact that even in poor weather, time spent in nature is still
beneficial. In a study conducted by Mark Berman at the University of Chicago, participants who
took a walk in nature on a cold and blustery winter day performed better on tests of creativity,
short-term memory, and attention, despite not particularly enjoying the experience.
Spending time in nature is a low-cost, high-benefit way to improve our life.
And in an age when most of us are glued to screens for a good portion of the day,
it is now more important than ever to connect to the natural world
and allow its restorative powers to rejuvenate our mind.
The more high-tech we become, the more nature we need,
observed the psychologist Richard Louvre.
Or as Thoreau wrote,
All nature is doing her best each moment to make us well.
She exists for no other end.
do not resist her. We must go out and re-ally ourselves to nature every day. We must make
root, send out some little fiber at least, even every winter day. I am sensible that I am imbibing
health when I open my mouth to the wind. Staying in the house breeds a sort of insanity always.
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Source: Academy of Ideas