The key ideas

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

Florence Williams, 2017

Why does a weekend in the countryside clear your head, only for a week at the office to cloud it again? Journalist Florence Williams moved from Colorado to Washington, felt life grow dull without nature, and set off to meet scientists in Japan, Korea, Finland, Scotland, and the American wilderness. You will discover how forest scents, birds outside the window, and the sight of a tree canopy affect stress and attention, and how much nature a city dweller needs to feel a difference.

Who it is for

For anyone who lives in a big city, feels tired for no apparent reason, and visits places with trees less and less often. And for anyone curious about what a walk in the woods actually does to the body and brain.

Go outside, often, sometimes into wild places. With friends or without. Breathe.

A plane over the roof every few minutes

Imagine moving from a small town near the mountains to a large capital city. A trail used to begin at your doorstep; now there is asphalt outside your window, and every few minutes a plane passes over the roof on its landing approach. After a couple of months, you sleep worse, become irritated more easily, and the world seems to lose its color. Nothing bad has happened; living has simply become harder.

This is Florence Williams’s own story. For more than twenty years, she lived where the Rocky Mountains rise, in Montana and Colorado, before her family moved from Boulder to Washington. Their house lay beneath the flight path to the capital’s airport. Williams felt low, and instead of blaming her character, she asked a journalist’s question: what exactly does nature do to our bodies and brains, and how much do we need to feel a difference?

Back in 1984, biologist Edward Wilson proposed that humans have an innate attraction to living things, calling it “biophilia.” Williams investigates what remains of this appealing idea when measuring instruments enter the picture. She visits scientists in Japan, South Korea, Finland, Scotland, and the American wilderness, sometimes becoming a test subject herself: wearing sensors, walking through forests with electrodes on her head, and measuring her blood pressure.

Her conclusion is that we have grown accustomed to treating nature as a vacation luxury, when it is closer to a necessity. The book is arranged like a prescription with doses: from fifteen minutes among trees to three days far from roads. Let us begin with the place where a city dweller least expects to find stress relief: their own nose.

Your nose recognizes the forest before you do

In the Japanese city of Chiba, Williams meets Yoshifumi Miyazaki. For years, he has taken people walking in forests and cities, measuring everything he can: blood pressure, heart rate, and stress hormones. The Japanese call a slow walk among trees shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing.” Nobody bathes in water: you simply walk through the forest, taking it in with all your senses.

Miyazaki’s results are modest but consistent. After a forest walk, people have lower blood pressure, a slower heart rate, and less cortisol than after an equivalent walk along city streets. Cortisol is a hormone the body releases under stress. According to the data Williams cites, changes become noticeable after about fifteen minutes.

Tokyo immunologist Qing Li looks at what we breathe. Trees release volatile substances called phytoncides into the air to defend themselves against pests and fungi. Li’s data show that after several days in a forest, people’s natural killer cells, the immune cells that destroy infected and tumor cells, become more active. The forest apparently works not only through beauty, but through the air as well.

Imagine entering a bakery. You cannot see the bread yet, but you are already smiling. Williams explains that scent takes a short route to the brain, reaching the parts involved in mood and memory. Coniferous air does the same; we have simply stopped noticing it.

Williams does not turn the forest into a miracle, however. She phrases it cautiously: nature seems to directly calm the part of the nervous system that controls heart rate and breathing without our conscious involvement. But it also acts indirectly, because outdoors we move more and spend more time with other people. The studies are still small, and nobody can fully separate these causes.

What can a city dweller take from this? You do not need to travel to Japan. Choose the nearest place with trees, even a small park near home, and walk through it slowly, without headphones or a phone in your hand. Touch the bark; breathe deeply near conifers or after rain. Fifteen minutes of this kind of attention gives your body a chance to switch from anxiety to rest.

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About the author

Florence Williams is an American journalist and contributing editor at Outside magazine. Her previous book, about science and health, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for science and technology.

All books by this author: Florence Williams

Terms from the book

  • Prefrontal cortex
  • Wilson
  • Stanford
  • Cortisol
  • Ulrich
  • PTSD
  • Biophilia
  • Salmon
  • Taylor
  • Boulder
  • Rumination
  • ADHD
  • Bluff
  • Awe
  • Rocky Mountains: A major mountain range in western North America, stretching from Canada to the state of New Mexico.
  • Chiba: A city in Japan near Tokyo. It is home to the university where Yoshifumi Miyazaki works.
  • Miyazaki: Yoshifumi Miyazaki, a Japanese scientist at Chiba University who has spent many years measuring how forest walks affect the human body.
  • Shinrin-yoku: A Japanese expression meaning “forest bathing”: a slow walk through the woods, taking them in with all your senses.
  • Qing Li: A Japanese immunologist at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo. He studies how time in forests affects immunity.
  • Phytoncides: Volatile substances released by plants to defend against pests, bacteria, and fungi. They give coniferous forests, for example, their scent.
  • Natural killer cells: Immune cells that find and destroy virus-infected cells and tumor cells.
  • National Park Service: The US government agency that manages national parks and protects their natural environments.
  • Fractals: Patterns in which a large shape repeats in smaller parts. They abound in nature: branches, leaves, clouds, and coastlines.
  • Alpha waves: A rhythm of electrical brain activity that usually appears when a person is awake but relaxed.
  • Kaplan: Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, American psychologists who developed a theory of how nature helps restore tired attention.
  • Soft fascination: The Kaplans’ term for a state in which something gently draws your eye, like clouds or leaves, without requiring effort from your attention.
  • Tyrväinen: Liisa Tyrväinen, a Finnish researcher who studies how urban parks and forests affect people’s well-being.
  • Bratman: Gregory Bratman, an American researcher who studies how nature walks affect mood and thinking.
  • Edinburgh: The capital of Scotland.
  • EEG: Electroencephalogram: a recording of the brain’s electrical activity using electrodes on the head.
  • Sallim yok: The Korean term for forest walks taken for health, similar to Japanese forest bathing.
  • Forest kindergartens: Kindergartens where children spend most of the day outdoors, in a forest or park. They are especially common in Germany and Scandinavia.
  • Strayer: David Strayer, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Utah who studies attention and how time in the wilderness affects it.
  • Three-day effect: An observation Strayer studies: around the third day in the wilderness, people’s senses sharpen and their thinking becomes clearer. It is a hypothesis that researchers are only beginning to test.
  • Outward Bound: An international outdoor adventure school that takes people on multiday wilderness trips.
  • Higher Ground: An Idaho nonprofit that organizes outdoor trips for military veterans.
  • Beatley: Tim Beatley, a professor at the University of Virginia who studies how to bring cities closer to nature.
  • Nature pyramid: A model resembling a food pyramid: plenty of nearby nature every day, fewer visits to large parks, and occasional journeys into wild places.

All terms

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