Mark Berman

And, you know, that tree had probably been around for 200 years.

And, you know, those mountains that Allison has talked about have been there for decades.

thousands and thousands of years.

And there's just something about that.

They've been there for so long that it almost seems like they carry some kind of wisdom.

And again, just see that we're just a part of something bigger than ourselves.

Yeah, I think it's a really interesting point from that listener.

And I definitely don't want to equate all nature experiences.

I mean, sometimes when we publish our papers, people ask us, you know, what about a wildfire?

Or what if you're in nature being chased by a bear?

In my book, Nature in the Mind, I talk about one experience that I had in nature that was not restorative at all.

And that was when I was hiking in the Smoky Mountains

and we were hiking up this one peak, and we decided to take an alternative route down.

And it turned out that the path was three times longer than the one that we had taken on the way up, which meant that we started to hike in darkness.

And it was terrible.

It was not restorative at all.

And we all started to fight with each other.

And it really took a lot of mental energy to navigate our way down and not get into fights with each other.

So it was not pleasant at all.

As the listener says, if you don't feel safe in nature, we don't think it's going to be restorative.