Shondaland – Say “Yes” to Awakening to Your Surroundings

The average user spends more than two hours per day on social media. It’s a number that can add up to years of your life spent in front of a screen. But it isn’t just our addiction to scrolling that’s doing us in. From office jobs to smartphones, we’re tuning out the world and spending large chunks of our lives behind screens. It’s sensory overload, served to us in 2D.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. According to studies in the National Library of Medicine, our bodies relax in natural environments— boosting our creativity, serotonin, and overall health in the process.

The even better news: Reconnecting and awaking to your surroundings doesn’t have to be any more complicated than a walk in the park (literally). Read on to learn how you can create a habit of mindfulness while enjoying your time outdoors.

Forest bathing

If the idea of movement and nature appeals to you, consider making a day out of it to try forest bathing. The concept, perfected in Japan, involves slow, intentional walks in nature, where a guide will occasionally lead you through simple exercises meant to draw your attention toward nature — and away from the stresses of daily life. The results of taking time out from the daily grind include a reduction of stress hormones, lower blood pressure, and — as Jenny Harrow-Keeler points out — a sense of pure wonder.

A few years ago, Harrow-Keeler was in a terrible, near-death accident. She’s healthy and healed now. But looking back, she sees it as a pivotal moment when she had to actively decide what kind of life she wanted. One of her realizations was that nature, which has always been a place of joy for her, was also incredibly healing. Interested in sharing it with others, she began studying forest bathing and founded her company EcoWisdom.

“It’s accessible to everyone,” she says. “It’s amazing to be able to go into a forest or into a more secluded space, but like you know even for folks who are living in the cities or places where it’s a little bit more populated, there’s trees everywhere. There are flowers everywhere. There’s nature everywhere. I think one of the most accessible ways to manage stress is just this practice of learning how to slow down and tune in to the environment around us, and just feel inspiration, to feel joy, to feel excitement. Walking in a beautiful space and seeing gorgeous wildflowers, or amazing views from the mountains, or the ocean, or wherever you’re at, just evokes this feeling of like, ‘Whoa, this is amazing! This is miraculous! This is beautiful!’ It takes us out of the doldrums of our everyday existence of work and all the chaos and gives us this pause to step back and be like, ‘How can we tune in to joy and beauty, and something a little bit bigger than just ourselves?’”

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