If You Feel Anxious And Depressed, Try This Nature Hack | Marc Berman

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0:49I saw a stat that the CDC has reported a 60 % increase of depression in U.S. adolescents and adults in the past decade. um and i know who is the author you're talking about the anxious generation i know he's got a lot of stats in there as well about you know uh teens and preteens and the depression rates and all these things like that but how can we combat combat these you know rates with nature and i'm also hearing about this terminology called forest bathing like what is that and how can we use that to support decreasing these rates. Right. So I think, you know, Jonathan Haidt would say that a lot of the rise in depression and anxiety is due to us being addicted to our smartphones and not connecting with each other anymore.

1:42We're doing a lot of social comparison. That's not healthy. And what we would say too is that it's also robbing your attention. It is. That it feels easy to just kind of scroll through, but it's actually draining your attention. It's draining your battery. So, I mean, the first thing that I would say is that, you know, we need to get kids and adults interacting with nature more and getting these breaks and taking some pauses off of the device and going into nature. You know, going into nature is kind of interesting, too. we did a study where we had people walk in an indoor conservatory versus an indoor mall.

2:25And when people were walking in the indoor nature conservatory, it's really beautiful, it's Garfield Conservatory in Chicago, they thought more about other people and they thought less about themselves. So that's also very interesting that nature maybe has this effect of getting us to be less egocentric and thinking more about others. So explain this again. What is this? People went into a conservatory. So we had people walk in the conservatory. It's Garfield Conservatory. So it's like an indoor nature conservatory. There's big plants and trees indoors. Or we had them walk in Water Tower Mall in Chicago, a beautiful indoor mall, not very natural.

3:06And we gave people cell phones that pinged them and asked them questions like, what are you thinking about right now? and it turns out that when people were walking in the nature conservatory they thought more about other people when they were in nature but they thought more about themselves when they were in the mall why is that you think why do you think about yourself in a mall when there's also people around i'm assuming right there's people walking around and you could see other people walking around yeah let's start with nature i think part of it is that when you're in beautiful nature I think it can sometimes make people feel a little bit small but small in a good way that you kind of maybe feel like you're part of something bigger you're in this awe-inspiring nature maybe my problems don't seem as big anymore and I think it encourages people to feel more connected to the environment and also to other people people are part of the environment and we also think that actually kind of being, you know, less egocentric and thinking more about others probably takes energy.

4:16And so if you're, if you're boosting your directed attention, you think about others, you think about others. Interesting. In the mall, I mean, I don't want to think about buying for you. Exactly. What can I get for me? I want to look good. Which is you're comparing yourself to other people. What do they have? But I want that. And, And people felt more impulsive in the mall. So again, the environment was designed for that reason. They want people to buy things. So, you know, I think part of our research and what we talk about in the book, too, is that, you know, in part, this is more than just nature.

4:48This is about the environment in general, the physical environment in general. And the physical environment in general has a significant impact on our behavior. I think sometimes as humans, we forget that because we have so much control over the environment, but it doesn't mean that we're immune to the environment. That's interesting.

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