Health benefits of nature; please step outside; I feel good! – but why?; evolution and Mother Nature; chained to a desk in a premature coffin; cold and SAD; winter refugees to Bali or “up north”; Health Benefit #1: the Forest Effect, or shinrin-yoku; going bush in Craigie, Joondalup; Health Benefit #2: the Grounding Effect, or the body electric; Health Benefit #3: the Sunlight Effect; Dr Jack Kruse’s brilliant quantum-schwantum; what we lesser mortals can do every day
Again*, this is an extensively adapted and much longer version of an article I recently wrote for The Explorer, Bawah Reserve’s inflight magazine for the resort’s own seaplanes. (*The last was 5 Great Mental Health Habits – click here for that one, if you missed it.) These seaplanes are the only way to get to this enchanting resort. The only way, that is, unless you have a private yacht to take you there.
And click here for my January 2024 post on Bawah in my other blog, Travels with Verne and Roy. For the record, we were lucky enough to visit the resort again just last month (September 2025), but I haven’t yet got around to chronicling those three lovely days.
Health Benefits of Nature: I Feel Good!
Wow, I feel good, I knew that I would now
I Got You – James Brown and the Famous Flames
Why do we feel so good after spending time outdoors?
You don’t need double-blind randomised scientific research to know that being in nature does you good – you’ve experienced it for yourself, whether camping in the wild, walking through woods, swimming in the sea or even doing a bit of gardening. The physiological and biological mechanisms may be unimportant… but they’re nonetheless interesting.
How I see it
For starters, we humans evolved in natural surroundings. Like all our fellow mammals, we are designed to be outdoors during most of the day, surrounded by plants, trees and a myriad other life forms.
Not only is each of us a one-person ecosystem composed of multiple smaller symbiotic subsystems, but we’re part of the far greater ecosystem that is Mother Nature.We are designed with lungs and vascular systems that need to breathe fresh outdoor air, with electrically energetic bodies that must connect with our bare feet to the ground, and with built-in circadian mechanisms that thrive on exposure to sun, wind and rain, heat and cold and the changing seasons.
We were not designed to spend our time in square boxes, sealed off from the natural world. Blue-lit cubicles in air-conditioned office buildings awash with EMF radiation are not our natural habitat… they’re like premature coffins, and our homes can be just as bad.
Luckily for me, I’m not buried under work and I can choose my hours. My pet peeve is winter.
Winter woes
Normally, Western Australian winters are quite mild, and you can still count on plenty of sunshine in between the blustery rainstorms.
What’s more, a lot of people are able to flee to warmer climes at least once or twice during the colder months of June to September – either up north to WA destinations like Monkey Mia, Coral Bay or Exmouth; or to somewhere truly tropical like Bali. Being less than a four-hour flight from Perth WA makes the Indonesian island a relatively cheap and accessible getaway. But Roy dislikes Bali, so that isn’t an option for us.
Serendipitously, daughter-in-law Carrie has just sent me this pic (above) from their camping holiday in Coral Bay. Aren’t those girls having fun with Dad?
Winter 2025 in WA
And this winter of 2025 in WA has been particularly harsh, with more rain than we’ve seen in more than 30 years. There have even been unusual stretches of several or more days so stormy, wet and windy that exercising outdoors has sometimes been unappealing, if not impossible. Stuck inside the house and with little desire to drive to my gym for yet another indoor class, it doesn’t take long for me to start going a bit stir-crazy.
Less than a month after our recent getaway to Singapore and Bawah, I was already moping around and feeling sorry for myself. Yes, I know how pathetic that sounds.
Health Benefits of Nature: How it works
Here are just a couple of ways to explain the health benefits of nature, and why being outdoors has such positive effects on us.
#1 The Forest Effect
I’d rather be a forest than a street
El Condor Pasa, Paul Simon
Research into the famous Japanese health practice of shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing, explains some of the therapeutic benefits of time in nature. These include reducing stress, lowering cortisol levels and improving focus and concentration.
What is forest bathing?
Forest bathing is simply spending mindful time alone in a forest. It entails consciously slowing down, while using your senses to connect with your environment – listening to the birds and insects, seeing the minutiae of mosses and ferns, feeling the kiss of the breeze on your skin and the support of the forest floor beneath your feet.
More than just the fresh air
What’s more, the forest air you’re inhaling is rich in health-boosting polyphenols and other phytoncides emitted by trees. These naturally occurring anti-oxidant compounds are absorbed by the lungs, contributing to stress reduction, better mood and enhanced immune function.
Relatively speaking, trees are not super-abundant here in Iluka, one of the northern suburbs of Perth. There are many more densely forested areas down south in the beautiful Margaret River region, for example Yallingup. (We’ll be spending a few days there during the first week of November… I’m looking forward to it.)
But we do have several fabulous natural bush reserves closer to home – like Craigie Bushland, which is right next to Craigie Leisure Centre, my world-class gym just a 15-minute drive away from home.
#2 The Grounding Effect
I’d rather feel the earth beneath my feet
El Condor Pasa, Paul Simon
According to physicists like Gaeten Chevalier PhD, we are bioelectrical beings living on an electrical planet. The Earth is like a giant battery that contains a subtle electrical charge, they explain… “a special kind of energy in the ground”. All of our cells transmit multiple frequencies that run, for example, our heart, immune system, muscles and nervous system.
That’s why we need earthing, or grounding, just like we need air and water. For humans, being grounded makes us feel centred: solid, strong, balanced, less tense and less stressed.
Earthing or grounding is putting the body in direct and uninterrupted contact with the Earth. Skin needs to touch soil, sand, water or a conductive surface that is in contact with the ground. Wet sand or damp grass are ideal – but almost any natural surface will do.
On the other hand, living in modern cities and wearing rubber- or plastic-soled shoes (like my beloved Havaianas, unfortunately) deprives us of the kind of direct contact with the Earth that we had when we walked barefoot or in shoes made of animal hide. Escaping to natural surroundings is a way of returning, at least for a while, to the kind of environment that humans evolved in.
How it works
Going barefoot allows for the transfer of free electrons from the Earth into your body through the soles of your feet, generating a powerful and positive shift in the electrical state of the body and the electrodynamics of blood, restoring natural self-healing and self-regulating mechanisms. Wow!
Best of all, sea-bathing is a fabulous way to get grounded… in fact, immersion in water, particularly seawater, is the most grounded you can be. That’s because it gives your body direct contact with the highly conductive salty water of the ocean, facilitating electron transfer. At the same time, essential minerals like potassium, calcium and magnesium are absorbed through the skin, conferring benefits such as boosted hydration, improved skin health, enhanced mood, better sleep and much more. So come on in, says Roy… the water in Bawah lagoon is lovely!
#3 The Sunshine Effect
Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy
Sunshine, John Denver
I know I keep on yammering on about this, and I’m aware from the uncomfortable sideways looks that it goes straight over just about everyone’s head. Decades of propaganda about the dangers of sun exposure, everywhere but especially in Australia – always underplaying its overwhelming benefits – have closed people’s minds to the truth.
(For more, click here to read one of my earlier posts … with, wait for it, a bonus pic of Roy on the beach!)
Wait a moment…
Roy assures me that no one is going to click on the above link, which would take you to post #21, titled How is Your Light Diet? Part One: Vit D, Sunshine and More. Let alone Part Two: Circadian Rhythm. (Though I still hope you might.) So he thinks it looks as though I might be (a) advocating willy-nilly sun exposure; (b) summarily dissing / dismissing SPF products; and (c) underplaying the dangers of sunburn.
That isn’t true, of course. While safe and gradual exposure builds up a naturally protective tan, we should never, ever burn our skin, and the less-toxic SPF products have their place in preventing this. But there are other important ways to prevent burning, like: carefully limiting time spent in the hot sun, especially until you have a tan; covering up with shady and protective clothing; and, when you’ve had enough, getting out of the sun and finding shelter!
Why do we feel happier, healthier and more energised after time in the sun? Here’s what says revolutionary thinker Dr Jack Kruse has to say.
The photo-electric effect
Uncle Jack explains that sunlight, especially the ultraviolet and infrared parts of the spectrum, plays a fundamental role in human biology – acting as a form of quantum energy that drives cellular processes through what he calls “the photoelectric effect”. If you’re thinking “quantum-schwantum” and glazing over, stay with me – I’ll skip straight to answering the happiness question.
He describes how the skin functions as a photosynthetic organ, and how it is able to produce serotonin in response to sunlight exposure. I think that’s fascinating – and if you want to know more about the science, here’s a useful link. (Note: We have known for a long time that 95% of our serotonin – so important for mood, appetite, digestion and more – is made in the gut.)
The shocking truth, he says, is that sunlight avoidance and the overuse of SPF products are contributing not only to the epidemic of mental health problems but all the other chronic diseases, too. To paraphrase Dr Michael Prager in this article, it disrupts our natural circadian rhythm, alters brain metabolism and may promote over-eating. What’s more, it’s one of the reasons that skin cancer rates have skyrocketed.
If you like your science from PubMed – and who doesn’t? – here’s a paper on Sunshine, Serotonin and Skin, subtitled: A Partial Explanation for Seasonal Patterns in Psychopathology?
Health Benefits of Nature: What can we do?
Simply, spend more time outdoors.
Most of us can’t be on holiday all the time, unfortunately… and a lot of us will never get to the world’s most exclusive private island getaways. But we all need frequent exposure to our natural surroundings – daily, if at all possible.
I make a point of spending time outside most every day – on our local Burns Beach coastal path, on the beach itself, or in one of WA’s ubiquitous natural reserves like Craigie Bushland, which I mentioned earlier.
(Personally, I avoid public parks here pretty scrupulously. Against all scientific evidence and common sense, the local authority persists in spraying public parks and footpaths with toxic glyphosate. Click here for a PubMed article damning this scandalous practice.)
When we travel
It’s the same when we travel – I don’t mean the glyphosate, which has long been banned in more intelligent jurisdictions than ours; I mean having access to nature.
Depending where you go, you can often find parks, bush, trails or other areas to commune with nature – even in somewhere as apparently urban as Singapore.
If you’re lucky enough to have friends or family where you’re going, they’ll generally be delighted to share their favourite outdoorsy experiences with you. Make some memories!
More-or-less outside?
With Roy not being keen on walking (never was, never even pretended to be), I’m so grateful that our new house has an upstairs terrace with an unblocked view of greenery-covered dunes, a stretch of blue sea and a vast swathe of Western Australian sky.
When Roy reads out there for hours, I’m happy that he’s at least more-or-less outside, breathing in more-or-less fresh air and enjoying oodles of natural light.
At home with plastic plants
Rather forlornly, I have to admit that our house has neither grass nor real plants. We took a conscious decision, way back when, that it would be lock-up-and-leave-able – with nothing living that could die from neglect or be a burden on others while we travel. I say “rather forlornly” because I remember how it feels to watch plants inexorably die under my flawed watch: deeply sad and dreadfully guilty, too.
Flowers are different. We expect them to fade and wither in due course. So I can enjoy the sight and fragrance of my Coles supermarket lilies’ blooms opening, without a sense of personal moral failure when I have to throw them out.
Up Next?
Maybe a post on the ideal amount of exercise for health and longevity? … it’s a thorny question. Until then, continue to Live Long & Strong!
