Chapter 1: Why is it important to spend time outdoors?
My students have an expression, my kids have an expression, anybody who's under 30 knows this, and most people over 30 as well, that when, you know, you're behind the computer screen all day and maybe getting wrapped up in some stupid conversation on social media and you're losing touch with reality, you're getting sucked into the matrix.
into the simulation of life, that you gotta turn it off and go touch grass. The average child today spends between four and seven minutes a day outside. By the way, also, more than four to seven hours online. This is an evolutionary argument. You know, our brains are the same thing that they were about 250,000 years ago in the late Pleistocene.
sitting around the campfire outside talking to each other while we shove pieces of yak meat into our mouths or whatever it is. That's how our brains were made, to understand each other, to find meaning in our lives. And when we deviate from that too much, well, we're going to suffer. Hey friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks.
Chapter 2: What are the negative effects of not spending enough time outside?
This is a show dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas.
Chapter 3: How can reconnecting with nature improve mental health?
This is how I do my work, is getting these ideas out. The deepest ideas in the research on social sciences, on neuroscience, on all different areas that can actually help us understand human flourishing. And my job is to bring those ideas to you, whether you have a background in science or not. Why?
Because when you understand these ideas as a layperson, then you become the teacher to the other people who listen to you. And that's how we together lift people up and bring them together.
Chapter 4: What practical steps can you take to spend more time in nature?
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Chapter 5: How does urbanization contribute to decreased outdoor activity?
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Now, one of the things that I've been talking about in my work and on episodes of the show in the past is how one of the ways that people find meaning in happiness is through beauty.
Chapter 6: What role does technology play in reducing time spent outdoors?
And there are three kinds of beauty, artistic beauty, moral beauty, but especially natural beauty. It's funny because we kind of know that, that if you want to get more meaning into your life, it's good to get out of the house. It's good to get out into nature. People know this intuitively. It's funny because my students have an expression. My kids have an expression.
Anybody who's under 30 knows this, and most people over 30 as well, that when you're behind the computer screen all day and maybe getting wrapped up in some stupid conversation on social media and you're losing touch with reality. You're getting sucked into the matrix, into the simulation of life that you got to turn it off and go touch grass. Man, I'm going to go touch grass.
That's what my kids will say. And what that means is go into real life and to get out into something that's actually growing and good. And of course, there's an intuition behind that, that when you're in the matrix, your brain isn't working right. You're getting a simulation of real life. And if you've been watching the show, you know exactly why.
You're sitting in the left hemisphere of your brain, which is the complicated part of your brain for complicated problems. And for reality and satisfaction and meaning and happiness, you need to get to the right hemisphere of her brain. And you can't simulate one with the other. So you've got to go get into the part of the world that will stimulate that right hemisphere of the brain.
And the fastest way to do that is to Go touch grass. So I wanna talk about touching grass today. I wanna talk about why you need more nature in your life. I'm gonna tell you about the trends that we actually see and the problems that we see in modern life where people are doing so less and less and less. The deleterious consequences of that
the benefits that you can actually get from spending more time outside in nature. I'll tell you specifically what the research is saying, and most importantly, the steps for actually doing so progressively in your life.
I'm not going to go ask you to go live outside, but I am going to give you some very specific suggestions on how you can use the research to get what you actually deeply want in your brain
and in your heart okay now the data are very clear fewer and fewer people are spending leisure time in in nature and this is one of the reasons that of course meaning is becoming more and more elusive that's what this whole book is about is meaning is harder to find and we're using our brains less well and and and that's one of the reasons that happiness has been in decline you know it's these are intimately tied to each other first let me give you the evidence on that not that you need it that people are spending less and less time outside
There's the Velux Group in 2019 published a really interesting survey that found that Americans went on one billion fewer outings in nature in 2019 compared to 2008. That's a lot. That's something like three fewer per year. outings, I mean, like trips out into nature per year per American, as a matter of fact.
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Chapter 7: How can walking in nature enhance your perspective on life?
Everybody my age spent more time outside than kids do today. We just did. Now, a part of it is you might, you know, be critical of parenting. I remember my mother saying, don't come back before it's dark, right? That might seem like under parenting, but suffice it to say that there's a lot less.
John Haidt, Jonathan Haidt in his work in The Anxious Generation, which is a great book, I strongly recommend. I'll put that in the show notes if you haven't read it yet. He knows that the average child today spends between four and seven minutes a day outside. By the way, also, more than four to seven hours online for many kids today is between 10 and 12 hours online.
Four to seven minutes outside, that's obviously upside down, isn't it? If you're falling away from nature, you're almost certainly lowering your well-being and increasing your unhappiness. So I'm going to try to prove that to you.
But as spring is upon us and summer's on the horizon, this is a perfect time to make some new resolutions, to be spending more time where you can find the meaning of your life. Now, why is it that we're spending so much less time outside? Number one, and this was even true
more than 30 and 40 years ago that the world's population has been urbanizing for a long time and urban life is largely inside life i mean you can walk around new york city and people do as a matter of fact but the point is that when you live in a city you spend a lot more time in the house than you do when you live in the country and there's all sorts of reasons for that but
I don't think I really need to prove that. I think it's probably pretty intuitive. Now, life was really different in 1800, to be sure. The average American, which is to say that more than 50% of Americans, never left a 20-mile radius of the site of his or her birth in his entire lifetime. Yeah. So that was a different time of life. And there was less transportation and fewer roads.
But only 6.1% of the American population lived in a city. In the year 1800. You know what it is today? 79%. So 6% to 79% in 200 years. 200 years is a long time. But that means a fundamental change in the essence of life. I'll give you a quote at the very end about somebody who could have lived in a city and didn't. Somebody that you've read before that describes the result of that.
I'll put the references to all these statistics into the show notes in case you want to check them or you want to use them or whatever they happen to be. So urbanization is the first big force that's actually keeping us inside and keeping us from touching grass, maybe even seeing grass.
The second, of course, is technology, which is over the past 30 years in particular, where technology has displaced outdoors in our attention. In other words, going outside is just not something to do when you're completely addicted to wiping out any semblance of free time and boredom in your life by staring at your devices. The average American looks at her or his phone 205 times a day.
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Chapter 8: What are the benefits of grounding or earthing in nature?
And the time that you spend outside is walking from your house or your apartment to the car or the train. And you haven't spent serious time in nature in months or even years. So what's the result? The research is really clear that what the result is, based on a lot of studies, throw some of them into the show notes, but these are easy to find. This is an easy Google search.
That the less time you spend in nature, the more stress you're going to feel. Stress is the physiological response to anxiety. So therefore, the more anxiety you're going to feel, And the more depression you're likely to suffer, the more malaise that you're actually going to feel because, frankly, once again, I mean, I've said it again and again and again, psychology is largely biology.
These aren't just psychological phenomena. These are biological phenomena that your brain won't work right unless you're outside a lot. And again, this is an evolutionary argument. You know, our brains are the same thing that they were about 250,000 years ago in the late Pleistocene. We lived outdoors.
or at least pretty close to outdoors, in bands of 30 to 50 kin-based individuals, hierarchically arranged and depending on nature to make our living, hunting and gathering and sitting around the campfire outside, talking to each other while we shove pieces of yak meat into our mouths or whatever it is. That's how our brains were made, to understand each other, to find meaning in our lives.
And when we deviate from that too much, well, we're going to suffer because we're too far away from our factory settings. That's just the way it is. So these findings about stress and anxiety and depression and loneliness and alienation, there's no surprise in this at all. It's exactly what biological evolution or biologists would suggest. Okay, now, what happens when you reverse that?
In other words, there's nothing that says that you can't try to replicate a state of nature, at least a little bit more. If you're somebody who's getting four to seven minutes outside and you start getting half an hour outside, that's a big improvement. An hour outside, you're going for a walk? substantial. That's a big deal. What will happen when this occurs?
Now, there's great research that says, what happens when you start to add in time outside and especially time in natural beauty? So it's not just, you know, walking across the Walmart parking lot five times to get your steps. That's not what I'm talking about.
I mean, that fresh air is better than nothing, but getting out into plant life and nature and especially seeing green and as you'll see in a minute, touching things outside has special properties. And I'm not going to try to get all woo-woo on you here. I'm research-based, but you'll see what I mean in a minute. What happens when you start to add in more of this nature into your life?
And the answer is there's a bunch of really interesting benefits that actually occur that have been shown in randomized treatment-controlled experiments. For example, people get a perspective on life that they didn't have before. In other words, they're able to zoom out on life and see life from the outside in a way that they couldn't see when they were stuck inside. I'll give you an example.
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