Newsletter | Go Outside, Often
Spending time outdoors. It’s one of the five behaviors we use in our Building H Index framework to assess how products and services influence the health of their users. But let’s be honest – it’s not one of the more recognizable health behaviors like diet and physical activity. Yet we care about it because it does have significant health impacts. Spending time outdoors – and in nature – has been linked to a growing list of health benefits from lower blood pressure to avoiding myopia.
It’s also a behavior that’s increasingly challenged by trends in the product environment. As we’ve discussed in previous editions, more and more of life takes place in our homes. We used to need to get out to experience entertainment; now we have massive screens we can watch 24/7. We can go to work via Zoom. We can shop “at” Amazon. We can “eat out” via DoorDash. We can text our friends. Houses have gotten bigger and more comfortable. All of these developments, while bringing many new conveniences into our lives, mitigate against getting out of our homes and set up a problematic dynamic: in an article we shared last fall, Diana Lind introduced the idea of the “human doom loop, a cycle in which people stop connecting in real life, reducing the quality of in-person activities and the physical realm itself, further discouraging IRL activities, and so on.” (Emphasis added).
As a result, we don’t spend much time outdoors. Our own survey showed that a majority of Americans spend less than an hour per day outdoors and that more than a third spend less than 30 minutes. A survey from the early 2000s found that Americans spend nearly as much time inside of their vehicles each day as they do outdoors. This from a species that has lived outdoors for 99.9% of its history.
Spending time outdoors is something of an odd health behavior and is perhaps better understood as an exposure that results from other behaviors. Or, like a needle pulling a thread, it can be seen as a behavior that pulls other behaviors along with it: going outdoors frequently requires, even inspires, physical activity; getting out of the house it can lead to more social interaction; it even helps with alignment of circadian rhythm, which in turn promotes better sleep at night.
This rich, complex interconnectedness is evident in several recent articles that speak to the role of the outdoors – in and out of nature – and wellbeing. The New York Times ran a beautiful piece on a community health center that sends its patients into a nearby nature preserve to heal the land, and with it, heal themselves. The intervention works at multiple levels – people are outdoors, physically working, bonding with each other across generations, and connecting with the land and their heritage on a spiritual level. The results include increased mobility for seniors, drops in glucose levels for people with diabetes and brightened affects for teens with depression. While nature plays a central role in that story, Anita Chaudhuri’s story in The Guardian, “Cities trigger our imagination’: why a walk in town can be just as good for you as a stroll in the countryside,” describes the benefits that come from walking in cities. Narrating a walk with Annabel Streets, the author of The Walking Cure, Chaudhuri discusses how the social and cognitive aspects of urban walks can provide different and complementary benefits from experiences in nature. This social element resurfaces in an intriguing study that looked at the relationship between spending time in nature and risk of dementia. The researchers observed a U-shaped distribution where too little – but also too much – time in nature were associated with increased risk of dementia. One possible explanation they offered was that very high levels of time in nature might be indicative of a very rural, socially isolated lifestyle. In some cases, the benefits are more straightforward. Sun exposure is a key contributor of vitamin D, which we all know is important for bone development, but, according to a recent article, might also be protective against colon cancer.
The relationships among the outdoors, daylight, nature and our bodies and minds might indeed be complex, which can make it hard for people to know what to do. How much? How often? In nature or just outdoors? For that, we’ll leave you with advice from Florence Williams, author of the excellent The Nature Fix:
“Go outside, often, sometimes in wild places. Bring friends or not. Breathe.”
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