As the saying goes, sometimes nature and fresh air can be the best medicine.
Steve Buback is a natural history biologist for the Missouri Department of Conservation and spends most of his day outdoors – dealing with various rare plants, insects and birds.
He spoke about how exposure to nature can impact people’s mental and physical health, and a little bit about how the pandemic has shifted some people’s relationship with the outdoors.
Missouri Health Talks gathers Missourians’ stories of access to healthcare in their own words.
Steve Buback: As someone who works outdoors, if I’m in the office for, you know, even five days straight, it starts to really grind on me. I can tell a noticeable difference in my emotional health.
And I think that’s true for everyone, but not everyone has the same recourse that I do where my job brings me outdoors.
You know, here in Columbia, we’re relatively lucky to have a really good park system with a lot of trails, with a lot of wooded areas where people can go and experience that. Even if you don’t have a car, or even a bicycle, you can still get to these areas and experience them and start to lower your blood pressure. Start to, you know, bring your attention back to the world around you instead of, you know, maybe what’s happening across the globe, or in Washington, D.C., or what have you. It really brings you back to a local place
When you're in nature, it's up to us to engage. You can go to natural area and find things that you don't know what they are, you know, you can very quickly become exposed to new things. There's always a sense of adventure out there, there's a sense of excitement, because it is new.
"They are demonstrating that nature time can lower your blood pressure, it can decrease anxiety symptoms, it can decrease depression symptoms, it can decrease anger."Steve Buback
Because it even changes the way you look at things – your gaze indoors is limited to 10,20 feet, depending on the size of the room, you go out, you know, to some of the bluffs overlooking the Missouri River at Eagle Bluffs conservation area, and you can see for miles, and your eyes don't always have that long term, that long focus. So, even just being outdoors has a way of changing your perception.
And you know, as you really get into a forest or a prairie, and if your mind is open to exploring the world that's there, there's things that demand your attention up close from the, you know, extremely small ants building ant hills to long-term vistas. It is just a much broader perception than we often get inside our houses.
Sofi Zeman: And why do you think it’s important that people kind of, you know, take the time to recenter themselves in that way?
Steve Buback: I guess, you know, there’s physical and mental benefits just to relaxing, to disengaging. It’s deeply rooted in Eastern cultures, and, you know, a lot of the “forest bathing” practices are coming out of Japan – where it’s been far more well-studied than here.
But, you know, they are demonstrating that nature time can lower your blood pressure, it can decrease anxiety symptoms, it can decrease depression symptoms, it can decrease anger.
And, you know, we are also right now, after coming out of two years of pandemic – mental health is probably worse than it’s ever been.
And we also saw over the last two years far more interest in people getting outdoors, you know, when people were confined to their houses for weeks on end, everybody was looking for a way to get out.
Sofi Zeman: Right.
Steve Buback: And I think that has been one of the silver linings of this – it has reengaged people with the world. Their immediate world around them.
