Your Brain in the Wild: Why Nature Is Essential for Your Nervous System

0:02Darin Olien:Welcome to Super Life with me, Darin Olien. A podcast where we explore, discover, and share solutions that promote a healthier life and a better world. Together, we'll ignite possibilities, inspire change, and build sovereignty, creating a roadmap towards a super life for you and for all. Get ready to start living your super life.

0:33Darin Olien:Before we get into today's episode, I want to acknowledge the company helping to support this conversation, Alchemist. You know, most of us spend so much energy thinking about what we put into our bodies. The food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe outside. But here's something that doesn't get nearly enough attention. The air inside your home. Here's a fact that floored me. Conventional paints, which are petrochemical-based, are off-gassing, endocrine-disrupting chemicals for not just days, for years after they've been applied. This means the walls of your bedroom, your kids' rooms, your kitchen, they could literally be releasing toxic chemicals into the air you're breathing every single day.

1:22Darin Olien:That's why I want to talk about Alchemist. Alchemist is the world's first wellness paint. Their paints are mineral-based, VOC-free, and completely free of PFOS, those damn forever chemicals that have no business being anywhere in our environment, especially in our home. And because the formula is rooted in natural minerals, it's inherently anti-mold, anti-fungal, so there's no synthetic additives needed to perform, nature has already done the work. On top of all of that, alchemist paint is class A fire resistant, which I love here in Southern California, because guess what? Rocks, i.e. minerals, don't burn.

2:09Darin Olien:So you're not just protecting your family's health, you're protecting your home on every level. No downside. And here's the thing that really speaks to me. Alchemist is cradle-to-cradle certified. If you're not familiar with that, it's one of the most rigorous sustainability certifications in the world. It means the product has been evaluated across its entire life cycle from the ingredients sourced to make it all the way to what happens when it is no longer needed. Nothing is an afterthought with this company. That's a standard most companies never even attempt to meet, but they do. They've rethought the entire formula from the ground up, so you don't have to choose between a beautiful home and a safe one.

2:54Darin Olien:We put so much thought into the products that touch our bodies or go into our bodies. It just makes sense to extend the same standard to the surfaces that literally surround us. If you're repainting a room, or now inspired to do so, building something new, or just ready to make a healthier swap, check out Alchemist. Go to A-L-K-E-M-I-S dot com. Use the code Darren10, D-A-R-I-N 10. Right now, wherever you're listening to this in the car, on a treadmill, maybe at your desk, I want you to ask yourself one question. When's the last time you went more than a few minutes without seeing a straight line?

3:40What? What are you talking about, Darren? I mean, a wall, a screen, a ceiling tile, a floor tile, even a steering wheel. Because here's what not a lot of people are talking about. Your brain did not evolve for straight lines. It evolved for branches, coastlines, cloud formations, the repeating irregular geometry of a forest canopy, a mountaintop. And the research coming out right now, real neuroimaging, fMRIs, FNIRSs, the whole toolkit of imaging the brain, it's telling us that the absence of that geometry, the chaotic, what seems to be chaotic geometry from our daily lives isn't just an aesthetic loss.

4:33It's a measurable neurological cost. Now listen, I'm not the neuroscience, but when I see something that's so interesting, I dig in. This is the Solo Super Life podcast with me, Darren O 'Lean, and today we're talking about going deep into the sensory neuroscience of nature. Maybe if I get Andrew Huberman on soon enough, I'm bugging you, Andrew, we'll get you on and we'll talk further about this or others. But the neuroscience of nature is fascinating and wild. Why your nervous system is quietly starving indoors. There's a lot of reasons for that. What the brain scans actually show when we actually step outside and exactly how much nature you need on a weekly basis to get your brain to reset.

5:28That's what we're talking about today. Let's get into it. So let's start with the fatal convenience because, you know, that's where I like to start. Because this one is so normalized in our modernity, in our modern world, we don't even register it as a choice anymore. Here's the number one. Yes, I'm outside, by the way. I'm recording this, scanning out, looking at the mountaintops beyond my computer for this very reason. and you've noticed I've been recording more solo podcasts outside. Here's the number. According to the landmark National Human Activity Pattern Survey, this is a federal data set the EPA still leans on.

6:17The average American spends roughly 87 % of their time indoors of their life, and the other 6 % is enclosed in vehicles. Add that up and you get right around 93 % of your lives are being spent inside. Some analysis pushes us even 97 % or above, depending on the population you're looking at, of course. Either way, round it out and it's the same brutal picture. We are an indoor species now, living in outdoor evolved bodies and brains and eyes and skin. So let that sink in. Think about what that actually means day to day. You wake up under a ceiling. In my case, my beautiful yurt. Yes, I'm still rebuilding.

7:08Yes, I'm still going to have a new house. All of that stuff. We wake up under a ceiling. We then commute in a metal box in a car sitting down, controlled environment. You sit, then you go to a job or you're at home in your office job or your office at home under fluorescent lights in a wall, in a building or in your room, a drywall, right angles, all of that stuff. If you come home and the outside, quote unquote, you get is a five minute walk from the parking garage to the front door. And that's pushing it if it's five minutes. That's it. That's what we're looking at. And I want to be super clear about this right now, about why this matters, because go outside more sounds like the kind of soft, feel good advice that I know common sense you get.

8:01You understand that. You find the biohackers and the sun and all that stuff, because I don't consider myself a biohacker. But we find ourselves using these things to go get back outside and plan time outside and go in nature, all that stuff. But it's almost too soft. It is a hard neurological problem. It's a massively mismatch problem. Our sensory systems, vision, hearing, even our sense of time, circadian rhythms, and pacing were calibrated over roughly 200 ,000 years of our human evolution against one specific set of inputs. It's light, wind, moving through the leaves, irregular nature sounds, visual patterns that repeat at different scales and doesn't have much repeating of anything.

8:56But there is some sort of rhythm and visual patterns that repeat on some level and different scales of that nature cacophony. We've had electric light and dense cities for what? A century? Maybe a century and a half, depending on where you live. In evolutionary time, that's not even a rounding error in terms of our human evolution. Your visual cortex has had zero time to adapt to drywall and fluorescent tubes and, dare I say, electromagnetic fields. Let's add that in. Because it's still running on this 200 ,000-year-old software on hardware it was never designed to process. It's having a hard time with our modernity, with our modern world.

9:48Here's the mechanism. Urban and indoor environments are what researchers call high-load, visual and auditory environments. Every surface is demanding something from your executive attention system. The part nerding out a little bit, the part of your prefrontal cortex responsible for filtering, prioritizing, and suppressing irrelevant information. Notifications, signage, traffic, fluorescent flicker, fans, you name it. None of it is dangerous from an individual perspective. But your brain doesn't get a rest from processing it. Constant to your brain because we, as humans, are constantly receiving information.

10:35That's how we survived. It's task-driven attention running continuously all day, every day in your brain. That's the part I want you to sit with.

10:47Darin Olien:Before we continue the pod, I want to share something. I've tried so many supplements. I've been in the space for 25 years. And every so often, something really pops out. Monovitality is that difference. It's not just about adding minerals. It's about tuning your body to the higher frequency, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Because this is the mana from the earth. The shilajit, the ormus minerals, and so on. There's so much going on with this brand. And I'm so excited beyond the SheLegit, they're expanding into other elementals. The brand is built on ancient alchemy with ingredients like gold nanoparicles, beta-glucans, SheLegit, Ormus, all geared to elevate you.

11:38Darin Olien:Especially in today's world, you need bioavailable, a bio-delivery system that upgrades your body from the inside out. Every formula is frequency charged to promote balanced energy immune system and cellular renewal. And the wild part, the more consistently you take it, the more you feel everything in your body. It's the same with me. The more I use it, the better I feel. My sleep improved. My skin glows. My stress goes down. My testosterone goes off. It's like my whole system is humming again. So if you're tired of low energy, brain fog, and or just not feeling the same and like something's missing, check out Mana.

12:25Darin Olien:Go to manavitality.com. That's M-A-N-N-A vitality.com. Use the code DAREN20 and you get 20 % off your order. This isn't about health. It's about living in harmony with your greatest and highest potential. Your attention system is not built for infinite, sustained, directed use. It's built like a muscle. It fatigues. And when it fatigues, what fills the gap isn't calm. It's rumination. It's looping. It's self-referencing. It's mental chatter. The replaying of the email you shouldn't have sent. The argument from three days ago. the thing you've felt anxious about with your colleague, whatever it is.

13:14That loop has a name in neuroscience. Not that that's important, but we're going to get to exactly where it lives in the brain just for a minute. So here's the fatal convenience. We built a civilization that has maximal efficiency for commerce, maximal depleting for the nervous system that has to survive inside this system we created. And because it happened gradually over generations, we were born into it. Not overnight. Nobody sounded this alarm. There was no single villain here. No industry to blame, no chemical necessary to point to in this context, just a slow compounding withdrawal of the single environmental input our sensory systems calibrated against for a couple of hundred thousand years.

14:10And the science now shows us in exact neurological terms what we lost. Okay, let's get into the deep dive here. First, the big picture review. Earlier this year, a team at McGill University working with researchers at Universidade, working at a research facility in Chile, published a scoping review in the Journal of Neuroscience and Behavioral Review. This wasn't a small study. They synthesized more than 100 brain imaging studies using EEG, FMRIs, FNIRSs, and structural MRIs across real-world natural settings, controlled labs, and even virtual reality environments. The lead researcher, Mar Estalis, and her team weren't asking, does nature feel nice?

15:10Which it does. They were asking, what does nature exposure actually do mechanistically inside the human brain? All right, everyone. I'm going to pause this episode right here on that question. We've set the stage on a massive mismatch between our indoor lives and our outdoor evolved brains. That's right. And we just introduced that incredible 100 study brain imaging review from McGill University. But what do those brain scans actually show? To find out, you have to join me over on Patreon, man. In the second half of this episode, I'm breaking down the exact four-stage neurological cascade that happens when you step into nature.

16:02We get into the fascinating science of fractal fluency, how the environment literally shifts your brain to stop depressive rumination, and exactly what your daily nature dosage needs to be. To unlock the rest of this deep dive, head over to patreon.com slash darinoline right now. That's patreon.com slash d-a-r-i-n-o-l-i-e-n, darinoline. Click the link in the show notes, type it in, and I'll see you over there right now to get into the rest of the science of this cool nature in your brain. Let's keep building your super life together.