Modern life can leave many of us feeling anxious and restless due to the relentless demands and complexity of each day. In this episode, the second in a three-part series, I want to talk with you about the importance of deliberately and specifically making time to reconnect with the natural world. This is not a luxury for the few. This is crucial to your well-being and success.
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Transcript
Well, Hey everybody, Jonathan Doyle with you.
Speaker:Once again, welcome back to the daily podcast.
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Speaker:We're in the middle of a three-part three-day series is day two.
Speaker:So I'll talk about that in a moment.
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Speaker:All right.
Speaker:This is day two, my friend, this is day two of a three part
Speaker:series where I'm talking about.
Speaker:What is driving some of the stress and anxiety and depression that
Speaker:is affecting so many people.
Speaker:And if you are listening and it's never been your experience, then more power
Speaker:to you, but many people listening will have had, uh, can feel overwhelmed.
Speaker:Absolutely overwhelmed and.
Speaker:I just felt as I was planning the next few weeks of content, that this was
Speaker:something we needed to talk about.
Speaker:So yesterday we didn't hear yesterday, I went deep on the
Speaker:concept of social connectedness.
Speaker:So it's a really good episode.
Speaker:Go back and check yesterday as if it's helpful to you.
Speaker:Today, I'm going to talk about.
Speaker:We can exposure to nature.
Speaker:And I'll explain why that's super important.
Speaker:You're gonna get a lot out of this.
Speaker:And tomorrow I'm going to talk about technological complexity.
Speaker:I'm going to talk about.
Speaker:Just how our brains are wired and, uh, and why that's a, technology's making
Speaker:such a huge impact upon all of us.
Speaker:I guess there's positives, right?
Speaker:You get to podcasting, you get to do YouTube so you can
Speaker:share good ideas with people.
Speaker:But, uh, there's a lot of other stuff around technology that
Speaker:can be pretty challenging.
Speaker:So today we're gonna talk about weakened exposure to nature.
Speaker:Why.
Speaker:Because in the last few months I have been.
Speaker:Really specifically and deliberately spending more time.
Speaker:Just choosing to be in nature.
Speaker:And.
Speaker:I think there's some incredibly powerful things in, I'll tell you a story first.
Speaker:So.
Speaker:Whenever you plan to spend time in nature.
Speaker:If anything like me, there will be a voice.
Speaker:And the voice will say to you, are you serious?
Speaker:Do you know how busy you are?
Speaker:Do you know how much.
Speaker:Planning, you got to put into this gym.
Speaker:You got to drive somewhere and you've got to pack everything.
Speaker:And then you got to sleep on an air mattress in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker:And there might be other people on the camp side, and it's
Speaker:going to be, what are you doing?
Speaker:Like this is the voice that we'll always try and do one
Speaker:thing, try and keep us safe.
Speaker:Tries to keep everything exactly the way it is.
Speaker:So you have to just say thank you for your advice and ignore that voice.
Speaker:It's a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker:I took my son.
Speaker:Uh, who's 14.
Speaker:And we, we went and camped at this amazing campsite near the beach
Speaker:and, and it was extraordinary.
Speaker:It was just, the beach itself was just incredible.
Speaker:And we both love fishing.
Speaker:So we ended up on the beach till about 10:00 PM.
Speaker:And it was just perfect.
Speaker:There wasn't a soul there.
Speaker:The weather was just beautiful.
Speaker:It's nice and warm.
Speaker:And what I wanted to be there for was not just the fishing, which we enjoy.
Speaker:But I wanted to see the stars.
Speaker:I hadn't seen the stars properly for too long.
Speaker:Because if you live in a city, like most of us do.
Speaker:You've got all that light pollution and you forget.
Speaker:And so there we are down on this beach and as they came out, it just
Speaker:got better and better and better.
Speaker:It was absolutely extraordinary little in the sunset that proceeded it.
Speaker:So we stayed down there right through the sunset is incredible.
Speaker:And just this beautiful time together and the stars, man, like
Speaker:I said to my son, I said, you know,
Speaker:I said the word anthropology, the study of the human person.
Speaker:I said, anthropology.
Speaker:It comes from the Greek word.
Speaker:Anthroposophy.
Speaker:And Anthropocene means the star gazer or the one who gazes at the stars.
Speaker:And it's really interesting because of all the other animals.
Speaker:If you think of other animals, most of them, you know, four
Speaker:legs, two legs, they look down.
Speaker:You don't find animals staring at the stars.
Speaker:You know, you might've seen those romanticized images of wolves howling
Speaker:at the sky, but it is howling.
Speaker:They're not going home.
Speaker:Howling cause these stars are amazing.
Speaker:We're the only species that looks at the stars.
Speaker:And finds them interesting.
Speaker:And that's significant because we've been made for beauty.
Speaker:We've been made for connection we've been made to, if we'd been
Speaker:H B B has been made for wonder.
Speaker:And for all.
Speaker:Now you can find wonder, and, or I guess in the city.
Speaker:But it's harder.
Speaker:But when you're confronted with a billion stars or a perfect sunset,
Speaker:it's a different experience.
Speaker:So.
Speaker:Not only was that experience with him, just wonderful in the moment, but I
Speaker:often find that experiences in nature.
Speaker:Especially with people you love, tend to stay with you that like a
Speaker:movie that you can replay and they become very precious memories.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:That's my long winded introductory story.
Speaker:So why do I want to talk to you about nature?
Speaker:Here's some things to think about the planet that we inhabit is
Speaker:around about 3.6 billion years old.
Speaker:I think, I think it's about 3.6 billion years.
Speaker:I think they think the universe is around 13.7 billion years old.
Speaker:And this planet that we.
Speaker:Uh, inhabit is about 3.6 billion years.
Speaker:Homo sapiens sapiens, the current iteration of team human, the bodies that
Speaker:you and I inhabit are actually only.
Speaker:About 350,000 years old.
Speaker:Now that may sound like a long time to you, but in cosmological
Speaker:history, it's next to nothing.
Speaker:So, you know, as hominids, we go back much further than that, but as this
Speaker:homosapiens, about 350,000 years,
Speaker:The first civilizations only emerged about 5,000 years ago.
Speaker:Mesopotamia.
Speaker:You know, ancient Mesopotamia, the.
Speaker:The confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, of course.
Speaker:And then we had the classical civilizations or we had Egypt first,
Speaker:and then we had, I mean, Egypt, wasn't a classical civilization,
Speaker:Roman Greece for the classical.
Speaker:Uh, civilizations.
Speaker:Um, the reason I'm telling you this is because cities, as we
Speaker:know them only really emerged in the last kind of 200 years or so.
Speaker:I mean, there were cities before that, but not in the way that
Speaker:we would understand them now.
Speaker:You know, the great cities, even in the U S I mean, you know, the great
Speaker:Chicago, New York, LA, they only really spring up in the 20th century and the
Speaker:way that we understand them now, what does all this got to do with you?
Speaker:What I'm trying to get you to understand is that for most of our human journey,
Speaker:as a species, we tended to live in first, very small communities and
Speaker:second communities that were directly.
Speaker:Embedded in nature.
Speaker:You know, like we weren't living in cities, like as a species,
Speaker:what we are actually used to.
Speaker:Is immersion in nature.
Speaker:You know, Often that would have been pretty unpleasant rain, snow,
Speaker:wind, all that sort of stuff.
Speaker:But the fact is that.
Speaker:We were surrounded by nature.
Speaker:It was everywhere.
Speaker:You know, you just walked out of your hut and there it was so.
Speaker:What I'm trying to get us to understand here is that.
Speaker:This is really.
Speaker:Being cut off from nature.
Speaker:Maybe I'll phrase it.
Speaker:This way.
Speaker:Being cut off from nature is the novel thing is the new experience.
Speaker:So, can you see what I'm trying to put together here?
Speaker:That basically.
Speaker:What if exposure to nature is actually not optional, but
Speaker:central, not optional, but crucial.
Speaker:What if time in nature is much more important than we actually think.
Speaker:You know, interestingly, one of the things about being immersed in nature right
Speaker:up until the middle ages and probably.
Speaker:Up towards the start of the enlightenment.
Speaker:People saw their place in the cosmological order.
Speaker:Uh, that sounds like a big phrase, but what it means is
Speaker:that people saw the stars a lot.
Speaker:They sold the cosmos a lot.
Speaker:They.
Speaker:They saw big, expensive spaces around them a lot.
Speaker:And it tended to embed them in a sense of, or in wonder,
Speaker:and even in smallness, right.
Speaker:That they would contingent dependent beings dependent upon a.
Speaker:Uh, create tour in a vast universe.
Speaker:So people's cosmology, especially, you know, you find a fair bit of that in
Speaker:Shakespeare, for example, you, there was a strong sense of a cosmological order.
Speaker:Like, you know, if it rained and stormed, it was because something
Speaker:significant was happening and.
Speaker:And so people were really connected to the elements in a way that
Speaker:we're probably not connected now.
Speaker:So, I don't want to labor this.
Speaker:I don't want to lose you, but I'm basically saying what if.
Speaker:We're supposed to be way more connected to nature than we actually are.
Speaker:What if despite all the conveniences of modern life we're actually
Speaker:missing out on something?
Speaker:So I did a little bit of research and they came across an interesting study in the
Speaker:journal of landscape and urban planning.
Speaker:See how much work I do for you.
Speaker:I hope you're grateful.
Speaker:I mean, you didn't get up today and research in the journal of
Speaker:landscape and urban planning.
Speaker:Did you know you didn't?
Speaker:I did it for you.
Speaker:Ah, I'd be grateful.
Speaker:And I came across a really cool study where they got 60 participants.
Speaker:And they took them on a 15 minute walk and a percentage of the participants
Speaker:got to walk through an urban landscape, like a city scape or a suburban Skype.
Speaker:And the other people got to walk through a really beautiful natural environment.
Speaker:And they did before and after psychological test and they give a
Speaker:whole battery of psych tests around a whole bunch of different things before
Speaker:and after they went on their walk.
Speaker:And they discovered that the people that did the nature walk, head, wait for it.
Speaker:My friends decreased anxiety, decreased rumination that's
Speaker:dwelling on your problems.
Speaker:Decrease negative ethics.
Speaker:It's basically depression.
Speaker:Uh, an increased level of preservation of positive states
Speaker:and increased working memory.
Speaker:Just by simply walking through a forest.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Just by simply walking through a forest and some of you will
Speaker:be like, well, you know where I live, there's nothing like that.
Speaker:I'll tell you another cool story.
Speaker:A couple of years ago, I was speaking in San Francisco.
Speaker:And we were staying at this beautiful house near the beach.
Speaker:And.
Speaker:I got up one morning to go for this long run.
Speaker:And I ended up running towards the golden gate and there's some quite beautiful
Speaker:forested areas around the golden gate.
Speaker:And despite all the people living in tents and despite.
Speaker:Uh, large numbers of people smoking very strange substances,
Speaker:very early in the morning.
Speaker:I came around, like I've just ruined it.
Speaker:Haven't.
Speaker:It makes it sound terrible, but it was a pod from that stuff.
Speaker:I came around a corner and there was this.
Speaker:Coyote standing in the middle of the path.
Speaker:And it just stared at me and it was this sublime moment.
Speaker:There's this beautiful environment.
Speaker:There's the Pacific ocean, the golden gate and the sunrise coming up and.
Speaker:And the smell of marijuana flirting.
Speaker:3d hair?
Speaker:No, it wasn't.
Speaker:It wasn't me.
Speaker:And this coyote and I'm like, wow.
Speaker:So even in the midst of an, I mean, a massive global city,
Speaker:there are places we can go.
Speaker:So often said we talk about action steps.
Speaker:So let me put, let me explain something.
Speaker:If you are listening to this and you get, yeah.
Speaker:You know what?
Speaker:I haven't done that for ages.
Speaker:Eh, it's, it's harder than you'd think these days it's a
Speaker:fair bit of planning involved.
Speaker:So again, like a lot of things I teach, you have to be deliberate.
Speaker:You have to say to yourself, you know what, this matters, this is important.
Speaker:I am going to do this.
Speaker:So, whether it means you buy camping gear and you do some research and you camp out
Speaker:overnight, or you do this, you do that.
Speaker:So over time, I've accumulated heaps of cool gear.
Speaker:I liked my cool gear.
Speaker:But I'm deliberate about it.
Speaker:And every time I got a planet, I think to myself, Ah, man, but the rugby's on, you
Speaker:know, the footies on Friday night and.
Speaker:And you've got a very comfortable bed.
Speaker:You have air conditioning and.
Speaker:And you end up sleeping, you know, in the Bush for my American
Speaker:friends, that's the woods and a.
Speaker:On an air mattress.
Speaker:But it's always worth it.
Speaker:It just, is it just, you, you just get this beautiful connection
Speaker:with the physical world and with the people that you love.
Speaker:So, whether it's camping, whether it's going to the beach, whether
Speaker:it's just walking through a local green area and sitting in it.
Speaker:Uh, just get it done, friends, get it done.
Speaker:What am I talking to you about it?
Speaker:Because this is the three part series on the things that are
Speaker:making life harder for us, the stress, the anxiety, the overwhelm.
Speaker:And yesterday, we said, we need stronger social connections today.
Speaker:We need some reconnection with nature.
Speaker:We need to reconnect to the physical world.
Speaker:You know, as I wrap up, the other thing that I've been doing lately is, you
Speaker:know, I'm usually up around 4:00 AM.
Speaker:And I'm into racking, which is using a military style backpack with heavy
Speaker:whites in it and walking with my dog.
Speaker:And I love it.
Speaker:It's 4:00 AM and I do it because it's like super quiet.
Speaker:It's so peaceful.
Speaker:And.
Speaker:You know, around us, there's some pretty beautiful spaces.
Speaker:Let's kangaroos and.
Speaker:And just the solitude and the peace.
Speaker:And this morning, you know, it was still warm enough to walk just in a t-shirt
Speaker:and it was pitch black and it was windy and just the feel of the wind, you know?
Speaker:So before the day has even begun, I've had some of that
Speaker:connection with the physical world.
Speaker:So if you find that, you know, you've been binging on Netflix
Speaker:and you're on your screen every five seconds, I understand it.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:It's just, this is the reality of the world we inhabit, but you are not.
Speaker:A pure victim to this.
Speaker:UChem transcend this.
Speaker:You can get outside this, if you are deliberate and on purpose.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:That's it for me today.
Speaker:Please make sure you subscribed and tomorrow we're going to do part three.
Speaker:We're going to talk about.
Speaker:How increased technological complexity has been affecting us.
Speaker:If you want to get a few insights around just how text's effecting us and what
Speaker:you can do practically check in tomorrow, go and check out that coaching link.
Speaker:If you're ready to grow, you want me to help you put some of these things into
Speaker:practice and really get your life shifted.
Speaker:Go ahead.
Speaker:Book yourself, a coaching call with me and we'll get you moving forward.
Speaker:All right, everybody.
Speaker:My name's Jonathan Doyle.
Speaker:This has been the daily podcast and you and I are going to talk again tomorrow.
