Rebuilding Your Connection To Nature And Why It Matters

Well, Hey everybody, Jonathan Doyle with you.

Once again, welcome back to the daily podcast.

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All right.

This is day two, my friend, this is day two of a three part

series where I'm talking about.

What is driving some of the stress and anxiety and depression that

is affecting so many people.

And if you are listening and it's never been your experience, then more power

to you, but many people listening will have had, uh, can feel overwhelmed.

Absolutely overwhelmed and.

I just felt as I was planning the next few weeks of content, that this was

something we needed to talk about.

So yesterday we didn't hear yesterday, I went deep on the

concept of social connectedness.

So it's a really good episode.

Go back and check yesterday as if it's helpful to you.

Today, I'm going to talk about.

We can exposure to nature.

And I'll explain why that's super important.

You're gonna get a lot out of this.

And tomorrow I'm going to talk about technological complexity.

I'm going to talk about.

Just how our brains are wired and, uh, and why that's a, technology's making

such a huge impact upon all of us.

I guess there's positives, right?

You get to podcasting, you get to do YouTube so you can

share good ideas with people.

But, uh, there's a lot of other stuff around technology that

can be pretty challenging.

So today we're gonna talk about weakened exposure to nature.

Why.

Because in the last few months I have been.

Really specifically and deliberately spending more time.

Just choosing to be in nature.

And.

I think there's some incredibly powerful things in, I'll tell you a story first.

So.

Whenever you plan to spend time in nature.

If anything like me, there will be a voice.

And the voice will say to you, are you serious?

Do you know how busy you are?

Do you know how much.

Planning, you got to put into this gym.

You got to drive somewhere and you've got to pack everything.

And then you got to sleep on an air mattress in the middle of nowhere.

And there might be other people on the camp side, and it's

going to be, what are you doing?

Like this is the voice that we'll always try and do one

thing, try and keep us safe.

Tries to keep everything exactly the way it is.

So you have to just say thank you for your advice and ignore that voice.

It's a couple of weeks ago.

I took my son.

Uh, who's 14.

And we, we went and camped at this amazing campsite near the beach

and, and it was extraordinary.

It was just, the beach itself was just incredible.

And we both love fishing.

And it was just perfect.

There wasn't a soul there.

The weather was just beautiful.

It's nice and warm.

And what I wanted to be there for was not just the fishing, which we enjoy.

But I wanted to see the stars.

I hadn't seen the stars properly for too long.

Because if you live in a city, like most of us do.

You've got all that light pollution and you forget.

And so there we are down on this beach and as they came out, it just

got better and better and better.

It was absolutely extraordinary little in the sunset that proceeded it.

So we stayed down there right through the sunset is incredible.

And just this beautiful time together and the stars, man, like

I said to my son, I said, you know,

I said the word anthropology, the study of the human person.

I said, anthropology.

It comes from the Greek word.

Anthroposophy.

And Anthropocene means the star gazer or the one who gazes at the stars.

And it's really interesting because of all the other animals.

If you think of other animals, most of them, you know, four

legs, two legs, they look down.

You don't find animals staring at the stars.

You know, you might've seen those romanticized images of wolves howling

at the sky, but it is howling.

They're not going home.

Howling cause these stars are amazing.

We're the only species that looks at the stars.

And finds them interesting.

And that's significant because we've been made for beauty.

We've been made for connection we've been made to, if we'd been

H B B has been made for wonder.

And for all.

Now you can find wonder, and, or I guess in the city.

But it's harder.

But when you're confronted with a billion stars or a perfect sunset,

it's a different experience.

So.

Not only was that experience with him, just wonderful in the moment, but I

often find that experiences in nature.

Especially with people you love, tend to stay with you that like a

movie that you can replay and they become very precious memories.

All right.

That's my long winded introductory story.

So why do I want to talk to you about nature?

Here's some things to think about the planet that we inhabit is

around about 3.6 billion years old.

I think, I think it's about 3.6 billion years.

I think they think the universe is around 13.7 billion years old.

And this planet that we.

Uh, inhabit is about 3.6 billion years.

Homo sapiens sapiens, the current iteration of team human, the bodies that

you and I inhabit are actually only.

About 350,000 years old.

Now that may sound like a long time to you, but in cosmological

history, it's next to nothing.

So, you know, as hominids, we go back much further than that, but as this

homosapiens, about 350,000 years,

The first civilizations only emerged about 5,000 years ago.

Mesopotamia.

You know, ancient Mesopotamia, the.

The confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, of course.

And then we had the classical civilizations or we had Egypt first,

and then we had, I mean, Egypt, wasn't a classical civilization,

Roman Greece for the classical.

Uh, civilizations.

Um, the reason I'm telling you this is because cities, as we

know them only really emerged in the last kind of 200 years or so.

I mean, there were cities before that, but not in the way that

we would understand them now.

You know, the great cities, even in the U S I mean, you know, the great

Chicago, New York, LA, they only really spring up in the 20th century and the

way that we understand them now, what does all this got to do with you?

What I'm trying to get you to understand is that for most of our human journey,

as a species, we tended to live in first, very small communities and

second communities that were directly.

Embedded in nature.

You know, like we weren't living in cities, like as a species,

what we are actually used to.

Is immersion in nature.

You know, Often that would have been pretty unpleasant rain, snow,

wind, all that sort of stuff.

But the fact is that.

We were surrounded by nature.

It was everywhere.

You know, you just walked out of your hut and there it was so.

What I'm trying to get us to understand here is that.

This is really.

Being cut off from nature.

Maybe I'll phrase it.

This way.

Being cut off from nature is the novel thing is the new experience.

So, can you see what I'm trying to put together here?

That basically.

What if exposure to nature is actually not optional, but

central, not optional, but crucial.

What if time in nature is much more important than we actually think.

You know, interestingly, one of the things about being immersed in nature right

up until the middle ages and probably.

Up towards the start of the enlightenment.

People saw their place in the cosmological order.

Uh, that sounds like a big phrase, but what it means is

that people saw the stars a lot.

They sold the cosmos a lot.

They.

They saw big, expensive spaces around them a lot.

And it tended to embed them in a sense of, or in wonder,

and even in smallness, right.

That they would contingent dependent beings dependent upon a.

Uh, create tour in a vast universe.

So people's cosmology, especially, you know, you find a fair bit of that in

Shakespeare, for example, you, there was a strong sense of a cosmological order.

Like, you know, if it rained and stormed, it was because something

significant was happening and.

And so people were really connected to the elements in a way that

we're probably not connected now.

So, I don't want to labor this.

I don't want to lose you, but I'm basically saying what if.

We're supposed to be way more connected to nature than we actually are.

What if despite all the conveniences of modern life we're actually

missing out on something?

So I did a little bit of research and they came across an interesting study in the

journal of landscape and urban planning.

See how much work I do for you.

I hope you're grateful.

I mean, you didn't get up today and research in the journal of

landscape and urban planning.

Did you know you didn't?

I did it for you.

Ah, I'd be grateful.

And I came across a really cool study where they got 60 participants.

And they took them on a 15 minute walk and a percentage of the participants

got to walk through an urban landscape, like a city scape or a suburban Skype.

And the other people got to walk through a really beautiful natural environment.

And they did before and after psychological test and they give a

whole battery of psych tests around a whole bunch of different things before

and after they went on their walk.

And they discovered that the people that did the nature walk, head, wait for it.

My friends decreased anxiety, decreased rumination that's

dwelling on your problems.

Decrease negative ethics.

It's basically depression.

Uh, an increased level of preservation of positive states

and increased working memory.

Just by simply walking through a forest.

Right.

Just by simply walking through a forest and some of you will

be like, well, you know where I live, there's nothing like that.

I'll tell you another cool story.

A couple of years ago, I was speaking in San Francisco.

And we were staying at this beautiful house near the beach.

And.

I got up one morning to go for this long run.

And I ended up running towards the golden gate and there's some quite beautiful

forested areas around the golden gate.

And despite all the people living in tents and despite.

Uh, large numbers of people smoking very strange substances,

very early in the morning.

I came around, like I've just ruined it.

Haven't.

It makes it sound terrible, but it was a pod from that stuff.

I came around a corner and there was this.

Coyote standing in the middle of the path.

And it just stared at me and it was this sublime moment.

There's this beautiful environment.

There's the Pacific ocean, the golden gate and the sunrise coming up and.

And the smell of marijuana flirting.

3d hair?

No, it wasn't.

It wasn't me.

And this coyote and I'm like, wow.

So even in the midst of an, I mean, a massive global city,

there are places we can go.

So often said we talk about action steps.

So let me put, let me explain something.

If you are listening to this and you get, yeah.

You know what?

I haven't done that for ages.

Eh, it's, it's harder than you'd think these days it's a

fair bit of planning involved.

So again, like a lot of things I teach, you have to be deliberate.

You have to say to yourself, you know what, this matters, this is important.

I am going to do this.

So, whether it means you buy camping gear and you do some research and you camp out

overnight, or you do this, you do that.

So over time, I've accumulated heaps of cool gear.

I liked my cool gear.

But I'm deliberate about it.

And every time I got a planet, I think to myself, Ah, man, but the rugby's on, you

know, the footies on Friday night and.

And you've got a very comfortable bed.

You have air conditioning and.

And you end up sleeping, you know, in the Bush for my American

friends, that's the woods and a.

On an air mattress.

But it's always worth it.

It just, is it just, you, you just get this beautiful connection

with the physical world and with the people that you love.

So, whether it's camping, whether it's going to the beach, whether

it's just walking through a local green area and sitting in it.

Uh, just get it done, friends, get it done.

What am I talking to you about it?

Because this is the three part series on the things that are

making life harder for us, the stress, the anxiety, the overwhelm.

And yesterday, we said, we need stronger social connections today.

We need some reconnection with nature.

We need to reconnect to the physical world.

You know, as I wrap up, the other thing that I've been doing lately is, you

know, I'm usually up around 4:00 AM.

And I'm into racking, which is using a military style backpack with heavy

whites in it and walking with my dog.

And I love it.

It's 4:00 AM and I do it because it's like super quiet.

It's so peaceful.

And.

You know, around us, there's some pretty beautiful spaces.

Let's kangaroos and.

And just the solitude and the peace.

And this morning, you know, it was still warm enough to walk just in a t-shirt

and it was pitch black and it was windy and just the feel of the wind, you know?

So before the day has even begun, I've had some of that

connection with the physical world.

So if you find that, you know, you've been binging on Netflix

and you're on your screen every five seconds, I understand it.

Right.

It's just, this is the reality of the world we inhabit, but you are not.

A pure victim to this.

UChem transcend this.

You can get outside this, if you are deliberate and on purpose.

Okay.

That's it for me today.

Please make sure you subscribed and tomorrow we're going to do part three.

We're going to talk about.

How increased technological complexity has been affecting us.

If you want to get a few insights around just how text's effecting us and what

you can do practically check in tomorrow, go and check out that coaching link.

If you're ready to grow, you want me to help you put some of these things into

practice and really get your life shifted.

Go ahead.

Book yourself, a coaching call with me and we'll get you moving forward.

All right, everybody.

My name's Jonathan Doyle.

This has been the daily podcast and you and I are going to talk again tomorrow.