How Nature “Naturally” Calms Us Down

Los Angeles is the worst city I have ever lived in. To be fair, I was going through the breakup of a lifetime and doing some major healing, but I’d be lying if I said I would have liked it much better in the absence of those things. 

I also didn’t quite enjoy living in New Haven, Connecticut, but for entirely different reasons. Los Angeles was a cacophony of cramped, expensive apartments in a drought-ridden, polluted, and ego-driven environment. No green spaces. No outdoor escape from the heat. New Haven was just… loud.

My neighbors in Connecticut were always up to something, whether it be screaming matches, running up and down the stairs many times in a row (Olympic training, perhaps?), or throwing their trash in any place they could find that wasn’t the dumpster. I think out of everything, the road noise downgraded my quality of life the most. Something about assholes on motorcycles really boils my blood.

I say all of this because, since I graduated college, I feel that I’m constantly having to defend the places I choose to live. My career is in film and marketing. In my family's eyes, I would be much more successful traversing the streets of New York City or West Hollywood, instead of the rural New England town I now reside in, population of 9,000 and no large chain grocery stores. In the 4 years of my life outside of schooling, I’ve been told, not asked, what is right for me, and my family has gone so far as to say that I am limiting my career potential because of where I choose to live.

It’s true, my career prospects would be entirely different, perhaps even better, if I was living in a city. But my mental state wouldn’t be. And aren’t those things irrevocably intertwined? When one fails it can be monumentally difficult to maintain the balance of the other.

Los Angeles, 2019

It does seem kind of silly to me sometimes that I’ve ended up where I am. Because for the longest time I was convinced I was going to live in a major city. I had a dream that I was going to be a big time female film director, with many great works of art and swanky outfits. The type of famous where people recognize your name but not your face. Quietly rich.

After college I had a change of heart. I spent the months after my graduation living in Pennsylvania with my mother during lockdown, staring at my LinkedIn page and trying to figure out how to make money in an economy that was completley upended. I found my solace outdoors, connecting deeply to the twisting, forested trails that bordered the suburbs I was residing in. The relative quiet chaos of nature gave me a type of peace that I couldn’t find inside, even while meditating or doing yoga. It helped that this peace was only within a few steps of leaving the house.

I would sometimes think about what it would be like to live in a city as I walked along these quiet, green corridors that were bursting with life. Was I willing to give up this kind of peace for money? For the prospect of a better career? As I watched a world saturated with Covid swirl and reinvent itself around me, my definition of a successful career also shifted.

A mossy, abandoned rail road track. Easton, PA.

I recently saw a headline by the Washington Post about how birdsong is good for our mental health. Apparently even 6 minutes of recorded birdsong can increase our mood and overall well being. It’s one of those things you read that feels obvious - who doesn't love a good bird call? Some of my favorites are the wail of a loon, the cascading sound of veery song, and the many beautiful calls of a song sparrow. I can attest to feeling in a better mood after hearing those sounds. But my 'overall well being' increasing? Interesting...

This prompted digging around for studies on the relationship between nature and mental health. Studies like this one, which found that spending 2 hours a week in green spaces had monumental impacts on our bodily, mental, and perceived well-being.

By the time I was reading these papers, I was living in New Haven, and I resonated deeply with the findings. I no longer had peace right outside my door - instead I lived in a neighborhood that was not within walking distance of any green spaces. If you wanted to go anywhere resembling a park or a walking trail, you needed to get a ride. I was sharing a car with my fiancé at the time, and I felt pain for those around me without any type of car, without ready access or transport to greenspaces.

I lay awake at night reading Silent Spring and wondering about the effects of pollution and development, not only on our non-human relatives, but on our own populations, and even more subtly, on our subconscious minds. I was (and still am) anxious about how capitalism is continuously pushing for more development and depletion of greenspaces, and what that will mean for the world and how we connect with it. I encourage us all to think about the effects we have on this world, how we can diminish our impact as a society, and what the systems in place are contributing to the current problems.

So why does nature calm us down?

From what I’ve found, there’s no one answer. If I had to speculate, it’s because not a lot of what fills our modern schedules is anything akin to how or why we evolved. We aren’t supposed to be sitting in front of computers and machines all day… I’m happy we have these inventions, but our brains are definitely wired to forage in the woods for food, not send out emails.

A Much Needed Escape Outside During Peak Covid. Ithaca, NY.

Louise Delagran, MA, MEd at University of Minnesota writes “...environments can increase or reduce our stress, which in turn impacts our bodies. What you are seeing, hearing, experiencing at any moment is changing not only your mood, but how your nervous, endocrine, and immune systems are working.” 

She goes on to say “Exposure to nature not only makes you feel better emotionally, it contributes to your physical wellbeing, reducing blood pressure, heart rate, muscle tension, and the production of stress hormones.” (This was mind-blowing to me!)

As I dug into the research, I found one particularly interesting thought process called ‘The Attention Restoration Theory.’ This theory speculates that the level of attention needed to live and work in cities and modern places of employment is quite high, whereas within a natural environment, people are able to pay attention with much less effort, leading to higher levels of relaxation in body and mind.

Another finding I loved was the practice of ‘forest bathing’–particularly popular in Japan. Forest bathing is, simply put, walking in the woods, and is thought to allow the inhalation of aerosols which in turn promote certain cells in the immune system that fight tumors and infections. And, voilà, you are healthier just from walking in the woods. 

How can you maximize the benefits of being in nature if you have minimal access to green space?

I’m glad you asked. If you don't have a car, please figure out your local bus system! There are also online groups you can join who hike together, or do other outdoor activities together. Be safe with meeting strangers from online, but if you are able to safely do so, you might develop a new friendship - hopefully someone with transportation!

As I mentioned before, Mathew White says that people who spend “two hours a week in green spaces… were substantially more likely to report good health and psychological well-being.” For those with busy schedules (AKA most of us), he suggests spreading these two hours out across your week. That’s less than 20 minutes a day. Or, you could take your weekend to spend those 2 hours in nature.

Also - having plants and flowers in your house has a heavy pay-out. They can significantly reduce stress, anxiety, and pain, according to research done on hospital patients by Robert Ulrich. He found that having nature present in hospital rooms did wonders for patients' perceived levels of pain, and even shortened the length of their hospital stay.

If you cannot get outside, or the spaces you do have access to just aren't cutting it - utilize the effects of birdsong by listening to it on Youtube. Not my favorite solution, but definitely worth a shot.

Taking a stroll on conserved land in Redding, Connecticut.

I know I trash talk cities a lot, but they are so important, and there is no avoiding the fact that as our populations grow, these conversations need to happen much more frequently. If these greenspaces are doing wonders for our mental and physical health, they should be treated as essential to our survival. I cringe away from a future with less of these spaces, replaced by more stressors and concrete.

Even in Los Angeles there were tiny pockets of priceless repose - trails leading to desert gardens and small, shady parks; mountain hikes with prickly cacti; grassy corners in the middle of a populated city. These spaces were invaluable to me when I lived there– I needed them. They would make me feel calmer and a bit more grounded amidst the craziness around me.

With this information in hand, I hope you feel closer to your evolutionary roots and use that knowledge to better your life in the small ways that we can. 

Much to my family’s dismay, I am now living in rural New Hampshire, and I can truly attest to the stark difference being surrounded by nature (and the lack of human-caused noise) can make on mental well-being. Oh, and the mushroom foraging out here is amazing. Maybe they should do a study on that next.

Stay Well Out There!

XX,

Renee

One of 2024's mushroom forage trips - picked about 5 minutes down the road from where I live!

Thinking about Mental-Health Medication: How to know if you should start.

Medication is one of many tools you can use to help stabilize your behavioral and mental health. But it is important to recognize that while yes, medication can work wonders in conjunction with the right mix of coping mechanisms, it will not fix all of your issues by itself. And we don’t want to lean too heavily on medications to cure our problems - your mental health is something that needs attendance and attention on an ongoing basis. It’s for this reason that I always, always recommend going to a therapist before considering starting a medication for a mental health reason (and your doctor probably will, too). You can read my blog post on therapy here if you are interested.

I did not start anxiety medication until my last year of college (I was 22 at the time), and this is because I was terrified of it. I'd heard horror stories all through high school that anxiety medication made people act like “zombies” - apathetic and boring, completely stripping the individual of their identity. I didn't want to lose who I was at the core, even though I was miserable. It was only after almost a decade of constant self-improvement initiatives with only minor results that I decided to bite the bullet and finally try medication with the support of my therapist.

I'd spent years and years trying everything I could before medication. It slowly became clear after all that time that the therapy, yoga, running, herbal supplements, affirmations, and even church attendance were not going to be enough. I’d been doing exactly the right things, but it wasn't working for me - I was still quite anxious and depressed, and when the pandemic hit my mental wellness took a nose-dive.

I spoke to my therapist about how I'd been feeling. I told her that my anxiety was debilitating for me-- I wasn't getting school work done on time, I wasn't connecting with others, and I couldn't shake the feeling that there was always something bad waiting for me around each corner. She admitted to me that she had believed for a while that I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), and that, as long as I also continued therapy and my other coping mechanisms I had built, she believed that medication would help me. She explained that my emotions were like peaks and valleys, and that they were quite dramatic and close together. “With the help of medication, you can bring those peaks and valleys a little closer to the middle line."

I was hesitant to continue, but at this point I really felt that I had nothing to lose. I knew that I couldn't keep living the way that I was, so the only thing to do next was drag myself to the doctor. I told them my fears -- that I would lose myself and my personality. And I was pleasantly surprised by how reassuring they were. They had spoken to my therapist and after evaluating me, told me that I most likely had a chemical imbalance that was contributing to my anxiety. They told me that they were determined to be a good support system for me, and that I had nothing to fear.

Pros, Cons, and Conspiracies

Going on medication is a journey and it can take some trial and error to find the right fit for you. The first medication I tried made me feel restless and affected my sleep schedule. After a month or two, I decided that it wasn’t right for me, and switched over to a different medication, which I’ve been on ever since. I do consider myself lucky, as I know friends who have gone through several more medications before finding a good fit. But the end result seems to be universal - once you find your fit, it's all worth it.

The pros of being on medication are that, when you find the right one, your problems do lessen. You have one more layer of support that you didn’t have before to help level your mood. Medication can boost your mental stabilization, and at least for me, it has played a pivotal role in my mental health journey.

The cons are that it may take you some time to find a medication that is right for you, and in that process, you might deal with some side effects. On top of this, some meds can take anywhere from weeks to months to take full effect, so you may be dealing with side effects (or the lack of any effect) for a while until you determine that the medication is not the right fit for you. Another con to mention is that there are some meds that you can’t just stop, otherwise you’d go through withdrawals, so changing and/or stopping that medication may take some time as you ween off of it (with the help of a doctor, of course).

I've gone through this weening, and as it only took a week or two (and I wasn't on a very high dose), this period of time didn't really affect me at all.

Some conspiracies you may have heard about medication are that you will never be yourself again-- instead inducing a drugged-up, false version of yourself. Another pessimistic viewpoint is that medication is subbing one unhealthy coping mechanism (ex: alcohol) for another, and that your body will never learn to balance its natural chemicals and emotions if you supplement it with manufactured chemicals. I could write whole blog posts dedicated to these two conspiracies alone, but let me break it down simply: medication is not intended to act as a recreational drug, and it is not meant to change who you are integrally.

Yes, some medications may be strong, and you may not like how they make you feel. But you can always change prescription strength, or move on to a new prescription entirely. You should feel better on medication, not like a zombie. Because I am on a prescription that suits me, I have never felt more like myself. I am so much more level-headed, and feel that I can actually pursue my passions and navigate my relationships healthily. Your brain isn’t going anywhere, and neither are your emotions. Therapy and medication don’t stop thoughts and behaviors, but make us more aware of them, while giving us a bit more agency to calm ourselves.

Prescriptions are not just substitutes for other recreational drugs. Drugs like alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, ecstacy, etc have effects that harm and sometimes even destroy our cells, whereas prescribed drugs should be heavily tested and deemed healthy to use by the Food & Drug Association. It's important to have these types of conversations with your doctor when thinking about going on medication - your provider is aware of your health history and will make informed decisions about what they believe to be the most beneficial for you.

How long will I be on meds? When can I stop?

Ah yes, people always want to know the answer to this question. And I actually can’t tell you - this is something only you and your doctor can figure out. Some people go off their meds in a few months. Other people will need to be (or choose to be) on medication for years. Some for their whole lives. But I strongly encourage the idea of length not to scare you. 

Focus on one day at a time. Is medication serving you today? Is it making it easier for you to cope? There is absolutely no shame in being on medication, and this idea that you are not yourself when you are on medication is not true. Continue to have conversations with your doctor and make informed decisions about your mental wellness.

In Conclusion

You have nothing to fear in starting medication. Having a team of doctors behind you is very helpful in these situations - they should be a support system for you throughout this journey. Once you find the ideal fit, the benefits of taking mental health medication will severely outweigh the cons.

Let me know if you have any questions, thoughts, or opinions in the comments down below -- have you ever tried medication for your mental health? What was it like?

And as always, thanks so much for reading!

Xx,

Renee

Therapy: How Do You Know if it's Right for you?

*Disclaimer: I am not a doctor - if you or someone you know is in danger, please seek medical advice.

Hello again! In light of some recent circumstances I want to talk about one of the mental health toolkit essentials: therapy. How do you know if you need it? When should you reach out about it, and to who? Let’s get into it.

Thinking about therapy: how to know when it’s time to go.

If you are considering therapy, chances are extremely high you would benefit from it. Therapy is like any other medical service: delivered by a professional with your health plan in mind. Many of us go to the doctor when our throat hurts or as a way to stay on top of our health. Think of therapy in the same way - treated not only as urgent care, but also as preventative care.

I've attended therapy many times throughout my life. My parents got divorced when I was three years old, so they started bringing me to sessions around five. I'm thankful for this, because I did not grow up feeling ashamed to seek out mental health help when I needed it, but this is not the case for everyone. It wasn’t until college that I met people who didn’t understand what therapy was, and some of them even regarded it as shameful.

But it is not shameful. Having emotions doesn’t make you weak. It makes you a human being.

Nowadays therapy is much more accessible, even for those with social cohorts who are not supportive of mental health help. With the ability to attend therapy in-person or even online, it’s become way easier (and more discreet) to achieve mental health progress.

What is therapy like?

Every therapist is different, which can be both an amazing thing and a pain. Amazing because you can find exactly the right person for you - a pain because it may take a few sessions to find your ideal match.

Keep in mind that, like most things, therapy is much different than how the media portrays it. It’s not always looking for meaning in black and white splotchy illustrations and laying down in awkward half-bed half-couches. Many of my own sessions have been right in the comfort of my own home, but I’ve also attended art therapy, therapy at church, and group therapy.

As this discipline has developed, so have the ways it is administered - nowadays there's hiking therapy, sessions that take place over video game servers, and even LSD, magic mushroom, and ecstasy guided-therapy sessions.

Therapy functions as an opportunity for you to talk about your thoughts and emotions in a safe space, where there is absolutely no judgment and no pressure. A therapist is much different from a friend or a loved one- they are only there to help you, and you are paying for their service. It’s also important to note that your sessions are covered under HIPAA - your therapist is generally not allowed to reveal anything you discuss during your session to any person (unless they truly believe you are at risk to yourself or others).

In my own experience, therapy consists of conversations like any other, except the person you are talking to is a professional, and knows the right questions to ask to make you think deeper about your decisions and thought patterns. It’s like having a safari guide to your own mind. Many of my own sessions have been friendly banter, others heated venting, and some meaningful crying episodes.

One thing is for sure though - therapy only works if you are open to it. And it’s okay to take your time with opening up, but you have to be willing to listen and work on yourself if you want therapy to have lasting benefits.

Still unsure if therapy is for you? If you are considering therapy, or are even just curious about it, I think it is without a doubt worth trying it out for a month or two.

How often should I go to therapy?

This is really up to you and your therapist. During your first session, you’ll most likely discuss your base-line emotional state, a bit of your history, and your mental-health goals. With all of this in mind, some therapists may make a recommendation for how often you should attend therapy sessions in order to reach your goals. Other therapists might allow you to make that determination, depending on where you are in your journey and the goals you hope to achieve.

When can I expect to stop? Again, this is really up to you and your therapist. Depending on your goals and current life circumstances, your sessions can last as short as a few days, to years at a time. Many people decide to keep attending therapy even after they have “recovered” for preventative care. This can look like attending once a month, or once every other month.

The most important thing to remember is that you cannot rush improving your mental health, and that progress is not always linear, so ensure you are always being gentle with yourself.

In Conclusion

If you are thinking about going to therapy, I strongly encourage you to continue down that path. These things aren’t scary, they don’t make you weak, and most importantly they don’t define who you are! Unpacking emotions can be difficult and intense so I really appreciate the fact that you are even considering approaching this.

What do you think about therapy? Have you tried it before? Let's continue the conversation in the comments. :)

As always, thanks so much for reading!

Xx,

Renee