Podcast

In 2017 when Amy picked 20 minutes as her minimum daily outdoor time, she based that decision on some research she read in passing that said 20 minutes is enough time to spend outside and see health benefits from doing so. But Amy isn’t a social scientist or a scientific researcher, so her choice of 20 minutes wasn’t overly scientific either. That and every other outdoor decision she’s made is just based on gut.

So was she right? Has her outdoor experiment been aimed at the right thing — or has she been wasting her life on the wrong timing and wrong activities? In this episode we bring in an actual outdoor experience researcher and scientist, Dr. Kathleen Wolf, to weigh-in on not just what the research says about what Amy is doing, but on how everyone can get the most out of their own time in nature.

Hetty Key was so curious about how people experience the outdoors and what it does to their lives and attitudes, that she started her own research company to look specifically at women in sport. Her U.K-based firm, Women in Adventure, has now produced three studies on women in the outdoors. In this episode she walks us through her findings about mental health and nature, detailed in her 2019 report on her Mental Wellbeing Survey. We loved hearing her most surprising discoveries, and how we can use her findings to fuel our everyday life outdoors.

So often when we think about heading outside, we think about what it’s doing for our body and emotions — how we feel. But time in nature and, specifically, doing things outside your comfort zone has a real impact on your brain, which then has an impact on everything else. And one of those brain things is creativity.

In this episode, positive psychologist and creativity expert Cordele Glass talks to us about how spending time in nature works with our brains to put us in what he calls an upward spiral, increasing our well-being and specifically making us more creative. He also tells us how we can harness that experience for our own lives.