SOMETIMES A WALK IS NOT ONLY A WALK
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona shared some sobering statistics in October regarding youth mental health. Before the pandemic, he told NPR, about 13 percent to 22 percent of school-age youth had experienced some mental health challenges. Now, researchers estimate that that number has climbed to 80 percent. Social isolation, stay-at-home orders and an overreliance on technology, in addition to other pandemic-related stressors, have resulted in what the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Children’s Hospital Assocation has called a “national state of emergency” in mental health among American youth.
Long before the pandemic, many cultures recognized the importance of the natural world to human health. The phrase Shinrin-yoku, which translates to “forest bath” in Japanese, reflects the restorative power of a walk in the woods, and the integration that can comes from allowing nature to enter through one’s ears, eyes, nose, mouth, hands and feet.
The science backing this connection between nature and mental health is respected and rigorous. The European Centre for Environment and Human Health published a study documenting that time spent in natural environments significantly increased self-reported good health and senses of well-being. Richard Louv, who coined the phrase naturedeficit disorder, worries that children who have diminished use of the senses have higher rates of attention difficulties, conditions of obesity, and higher rates of emotional and physical illnesses.
Louv writes, “Nature is not only nice to have, but it’s a have-to-have for physical health and cognitive functioning.”
I’ve seen the role that nature can play in managing youth mental health firsthand. In addition to being a concerned parent, I’m also the founder of Intellectual Athlete, a mental fitness company that offers healthy stress inducing play opportunities and breath-work training to children, through school and neighborhood-based programming. One of our more popular outdoor activities run are night hikes, a 2-mile long loop hike in the dark, with headlamps.
On night hikes, kids encounter nature in darkness and creepy, crawly creatures that create true fear. Our hikers learn to breathe in order to attend to their feelings and emotions in real time. We’ve seen coyotes, owls and scorpions. We know we are not alone out there. But the kids also get a sense of interconnectedness — with their breath, their friends and with their natural environment.
Over time, the kids become more resilient individuals in relation to their own development and the natural world. The fact is resilience needs to be experienced. At the end of each night hike, kids write their fears down on rocks, which are stacked and then left on the trail. The kids grow confident in displaying courage in front of their peer group, which gives them a sense of validation.
One of the unexpected benefits of our night hikes is that they have been shown (anecdotally) to produce positive results for kids with nighttime anxieties and disturbed sleeping patterns. Multiple families report their child either no longer comes into their bed in the middle of the night or no longer requires a parent to sleep with them after the experience. One grateful parent had previously visited several child psychologists who offered an array of tactics that included buying night lights, timing steps between rooms and using progressive muscle relaxation, which is a body scan technique involving tensing and tightening of muscles.
Our approach involves desensitization — freeing someone from a phobia or neurosis by gradually exposing the person to the thing that is feared. It’s interesting that our fears can be used to remedy our fears. We believe we have stumbled upon a unique and effective strategy and will be working with researchers and evaluators in the coming months to gather more data, analyze our approach and root our efforts in science.
Of course, night hikes are just one way to integrate American youth into nature and the associated “have-to-have” experience of our natural world. As winter is coming throughout the country, and cold brings fear of another COVID-19 spike, San Diego County sets itself apart for its year-round outdoor options available to our youth: a walk in the woods, a walk on the beach, a hike at night. These simple techniques are available to all, and sometimes the structured setting that Intellectual Athlete and other mental health programs provide can transform an outdoor walk into “eco-therapy.”
Shinrin-yoku, which translates to ‘forest bath’ in Japanese, reflects the restorative power of a walk in the woods. Kids need it.
Touhey