San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Trinity professors use nature to cut stress
Undergraduate students can earn credit while collecting data to document effects of being outdoors
Laura Allen and Courtney Crim are nature lovers who also happen to be Trinity University professors. When their students would complain about being stressed out, they would recommend spending time amid the trees and birds.
Again and again, the students would tell them, “We don’t have time for that!” They were busy enough with their classes.
Allen and Crim thought of a way to help: Why not give the students course credit for it? Relaxing in nature could be their assignment.
They went on to create a three-hour, semester-long course, “The Natural Environment & Well-Being,” teaching undergraduates about the health benefits of spending time in nature.
While the course requires plenty of reading, on subjects ranging from the Japanese practice of forest-bathing, or shinrin-yoku, to the unequal access to green spaces among income levels in the U.S., it also asks students to put the ideas in practice by sending them to local nature spots such as Brackenridge Park and Woodlawn Lake.
The goal is to help the students build a healthy relationship with nature that will serve them through their lives.
“The problem is, we don’t have time in our society to recharge,” Allen said. “We really need to take a step back and realize that we cannot survive without nature. We think we can now, because we are so sophisticated in technology and all this stuff, but we really can’t.”
Interest in the course has grown since they began teaching it in 2021. Recently, there were about 70 students on the waiting list. At first, it was mostly students focusing on education and environmental studies, but the classroom has grown more diverse, with business, engineering and biology majors.
In September, they took their students to Guadalupe River State Park, where they practiced the art of “forest bathing” — basically, immersing themselves in the forest, trying to quiet their minds and focus on their senses.
The students wandered on their own to gather observations on visuals and textures — the patterns formed by swimming tadpoles, perhaps, or the roughness of tree bark. In between their wanderings, they gathered in “sharing circles.” At the end of the day, they held a tea ceremony.
“It’s about getting out of your brain, getting out of the cognitive part of your body and into a sensory part of your body,” Crim said. “To get into the sensory piece, you have to slow down.”
While there are professors at other universities studying the health benefits of being in nature, Allen and Crim said that to their knowledge, there is no other class like theirs, in which students are asked to do the relaxing themselves.
Before and after their nature visits, the students fill out surveys asking about their moods.
The data that Allen and Crim have gathered show that the visits do reduce the students’ stress.
“There’s a lot of people doing the pure research, but there’s very few people applying that research to the real world,” Allen said. “That’s kind of our goal.”
Students more stressed out
Allen and Crim — who are both in Trinity’s Department of Education — say that today’s young people are more stressed than in prior decades as they face tremendous pressure to get into the right school, to get the right job. Meanwhile, smartphones and other digital devices are making demands on their attention, tiring their brains. They often don’t get enough sleep.
The research shows they’re right. In a survey conducted as part of the American Psychological Association’s Stress in America 2022 report, 46 percent of adults under 35 percent said they were so stressed that they couldn’t function — a higher percentage than for all other age groups.
“I saw what the students here were going through — just increasing levels of anxiety and stress,” Allen said. “Obviously, it’s always been there, but it was just so much more pronounced than it was before.”
As part of the course, the students find their own “natural space” — it could be a spot in a forest, a field or a garden — and visit it every week for 30 minutes, capturing their feelings and observations in a journal. They take four photographs, weaving them into a visual story showing how they have fostered a stronger connection to what the professors call a “more-than-human world.”
The students often change their attitude toward the nature visits over the course of the semester. At first, they might think of the visits as “doing nothing,” Crim said, because our society doesn’t place much value on quiet self-reflection. But upon reading the research
that has been done showing the health benefits, they start to understand.
In our society, there’s an idea that if you’re sitting still and relaxing, “you’re not being productive,” Allen said. “That Protestant work ethic from way back is alive and well. If you’re just sitting, people assume you’re wasting time and doing nothing.”
The nature fix
Growing up in a rural town in the Ozarks in northwest Arkansas, Allen spent her childhood exploring mountains, rivers and forests.
She couldn’t wait to leave the town, anyway — it didn’t even have a movie theater. She went on to study education, earning a doctorate in curriculum and instruction from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. She’s been teaching at Trinity since 1994.
Crim, who got her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Trinity before earning a doctorate in education from the University of Houston, has her own love of nature: She likes to hunt and fish. She became interested in environmental education while working in her first higher education job at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she became a certified trainer in Project WILD, a curriculum helping teachers include nature topics in their instruction. She joined Trinity in 2010.
One day, Allen went to
Crim’s office to ask whether Crim had read the book “The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier and More Creative” by Florence Williams. Allen was enthusiastic about what she’d read.
“It really spoke to my roots growing up in the outdoors,” she said. “I started to realize I have really divorced myself from the outdoors because I’ve lived in this urban space; I was busy with the husband and two kids and a job. When I go back there, I do feel completely restored.”
With their backgrounds in environmental education, they
started digging into the research on nature’s benefits to mental well-being. “The Nature Fix” is now on the course’s reading list.
It took them two years to design the course and get it approved by Trinity’s curriculum council. The university’s environmental studies program was supportive of their experiment — the course was like none other that anyone had heard of.
“There were people here that took a risk on it,” Allen said. “And I think that was very admirable because it’s very different. I’m not sure it would fly everywhere.”
Separated from nature
One of the topics explored in the class is how humans came to be so distanced from nature.
Allen and Crim point out that since 2008, more than half of the Earth’s population has lived in cities. The trend continues: By 2030, about 5 billion people will be living in cities as countries in Asia and Africa urbanize, according to the United Nations.
The students also learn about the disparity in access to natural spaces among different income and ethnic groups in the United States. As an example, Crim described how difficult it might be for someone living in San Antonio without a car to get to Phil Hardberger Park, one of the places she and Allen take their students.
“It may take me an hour and a half to get to a park that’s 5 miles away, depending on the bus routes,” she said. “That’s one thing we want our students to realize, and make decisions in the future. I mean, we send them out to be leaders in whatever field they’re in.”
As part of the course, the students design a “green space” where elementary school students can learn in nature. This semester, they’re partnering with one school in the San Antonio Independent School District and five in the Northside ISD. Last year, an Eagle School picked up the students’ design and built it into a reality.
Benefits of nature
Allen and Crim hope to spread the model of their course to other universities. Two schools have contacted them about replicating it, they said. In June, they made a presentation at the International Conference of Environmental Psychology in Aarhus, Denmark.
While it’s good for mental well-being just to be in nature, or even to look at it, they teach their students that they should approach nature in a certain way, letting it influence their thoughts and senses.
“If you’re just going to be out there, you could still be thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve got to make my shopping list,’ and all these things,” Crim said. Instead, “do things that invite things into your senses — if it’s just lying down on the ground and looking up — cloud-gazing; I used to do it all the time as a kid … You’re looking at details. By doing that, you kind of get out of your cognitive piece.”
Yet it isn’t necessary to go to some distant place to enjoy nature’s benefits, they said. In the middle of a workday, someone could spend five minutes sitting on a bench near some trees.
They offered advice for busy people who want to do more to connect with nature: live somewhere with trees; spend time sitting outside, listening to the birds; take walks; give yourself permission to do “what we consider to be nothing,” Crim said.
Above all, it’s important to give the nature therapy time to work, they said.
“It’s kind of like yoga practice. Some people, you go in and they’re like, ‘Oh, this is natural.’ Other people are like, ‘Oh, gosh, I am not flexible. I need to work on that! ’ It’s the same idea with your brain,” Crim said. “It takes some practice to allow your cognitive part to shut off and to not be worried about, ‘Am I doing this right? Am I doing this wrong? ’ Some people take longer with that — and that’s OK. Give yourself that grace.”