Anxiety can be a strength — When you’re out in nature

Stopping to smell the roses is an important sentiment for modern times. But, for most of our evolution, if you lingered too long, you might have missed the bear lurking behind the rose bush.

That’s why our brain is hardwired with something known as the negativity bias. This is, essentially, the inclination to pay more attention to unpleasant information and undervalue the good stuff. That’s the reason smear campaigns in politics outnumber campaigns which focus on the positive attributes of a candidate. It’s also the reason stories of bunnies and flowers rarely make it to the front page news. We are constantly on the lookout for the bear. And that hyper-vigilance has served humanity well for some 200 thousand years of evolution. For the bulk of that time, life was more or less boring. We lived in small groups, traveled around slowly by foot, and those bears were fairly infrequent. In that setting, having a nervous system wired for hyper-vigilance was an asset. Having a propensity towards being anxious meant you would be the first one to spot danger and alert your tribe.

But we live in a different environment now. And in modern times, we can spot the figurative bear anywhere and anytime simply by reading the news or opening our email inbox. Here’s a great cartoon from The Farside from 1997, only some twenty years ago.

27 emails! That seems heavenly today when inboxes have thousands of messages. In modern times, that inherent attentiveness to details, that sensitivity to one’s environment can be overwhelmed by our environment.

Sometimes, extremely negative environments augment that inherent negativity bias. Dr Filletti, a physician at Kaiser Permanente hospital, noticed a steep decline in the weight loss program he was running. What was puzzling was that patients who were losing weight were dropping out of the program. When he dug deeper into the reasons behind that, he uncovered that folks who had had adverse childhood experiences of trauma, abuse and neglect were more likely to drop out of his program. They were also significantly more likely to experience anxiety and depression, to be overweight, and also to suffer from drug and alcohol abuse. Dr Filleti’s research points to how adverse events in one’s childhood can essentially hardwire someone to perceive their world as unsafe. In this extreme case, the learned hyper-vigilance led to a myriad of compensatory behaviors such as overeating and self medicating.

Whether a sensitive mind is that way by nature or from its environment, we should be protect ourselves from over stimulation.

And nature can help! Researchers have long known about entrainment, a natural tendency in us, to harmonize with our environment. Its why light and dark patterns in our environment help dictate when we feel sleepy and awake (more on this later). It’s how babies align their heartbeats and breathing to their mother’s when held close.

If we can re-pace our brains to the subtle and slow movement of nature, it can put that hyper-vigilance back in its proper context in a way that wont burn us out.

Today’s exercise is about reconnecting with nature’s rhythms. If it feels a little boring, that’s good and natural. It will take some practice to re-calibrate yourself to enjoy the slower pace.