But there was much they didn’t know yet, like what’s the best dose of nature? Who is best helped? How does it work? That sent me on a longer journey, including writing The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative. They wanted to quantify it, document it, deliver it up for useful purposes. Japanese researchers weren’t content to leave nature-love to the realm of haikus. I started to learn about the science behind what I was experiencing at home. I went to Japan on assignment for Outside magazine to write about a quirky practice the Japanese call “forest bathing.” This basically involves strolling or hanging out in the woods and letting the qualities of nature seep into all five senses.įor me, it was a new way of thinking about being outside for short spurts, and it worked, in measurable ways, to calm my nervous system. If I was going to do more than merely survive in my new habitat, I needed to figure some things out. Was nature-deficit disorder real? And if it so, could we fix it? I wanted to figure out what my neurons were missing, and why. I longed for my bird-filled ribbons of alpine trail, and longing is defined by loss.

I wasn’t sleeping well, I was anxious, and the constant noise of urban life was making me distracted and a little bonkers. What I did know was that something was wrong. I didn’t know much about how to find sustaining pockets of nature in the city and how to maximize my dosage-drip of it. Not to mention my humidity-averse hair, but that’s another story. It wasn’t long before my body and brain went into a kind of urban frizzle-freak. In 2012, though, a job move landed my family in Washington, D.C. Louv coined the term “nature-deficit disorder.” I was aware of it, but after 20 years of living and playing in the Rocky Mountains, I was happily inoculated against it. Thanks to great work by journalist Richard Louv and so many others, the importance of getting more people outside is now a goal of many schools, organizations and workplaces, including REI. A few years ago, this was a topic starting to bubble in the public consciousness. Welcome to The Nature Fix, the new blog that will peer into the tantalizing connections between nature and human health.

The nature fix book