A lot of us spend time outside. We run, ride, hike, train, explore, and use nature as a place to play or pursue our goals. But does spending time in nature actually mean we’re connected to it?
This episode was inspired by something I heard during a recent breathwork session: many of us use nature without being in relationship with nature. That idea stopped me in my tracks and made me think about my own life as an athlete—and all the years I spent outside focused on intervals, performance, Strava times, and self-improvement without always noticing the world I was moving through.
In this solocast, I explore the research around nature connectedness and the difference between simply being outside and actually feeling like you’re part of the natural world. I talk about awe, the “small self,” meaning, curiosity, sensory awareness, and simple ways we can become more present outside without giving up our workouts or performance goals.
This isn’t about slowing down all the time. It’s about occasionally looking up, paying attention, and remembering that nature can be more than the backdrop for what we’re trying to accomplish.
What might change if we stopped only using nature—and started building a relationship with it?
LINKS
– Nature Connectedness & Well-Being with Molly Peterson & Dr. Holli-Anne Passmore
– Mindfulness in Action: Grounding in Nature
– Movement, Nature, and Connection for Optimal Well-Being with John Ratey
LISTEN TO SONYA
If you want to work towards your goals and more, check out my self-paced online course: Moxy & Grit Mindset Academy.
Episode Transcript
Sonya (00:12)
It’s fun to sit down to do solo episodes because they force me to pause, but they also are hard because I’m so passionate about the topics I bring and I have to maintain limits on myself so that I don’t go too far down the rabbit hole whenever I’m learning about the topics that I’m telling you guys about. Today’s idea came from a breathwork session that I did over the weekend. And I’ll first say that
Breath work is something I’ve just started doing in the last couple of months. And I used to think breath work was like what you do in yoga, you know, pranayama breathing, or like, you know, breathing in through one nostril and breathing out the other. this type of breath work is more of like a holotropic breathwork.
And the type of the facilitators I go to do it slightly all do it slightly differently, but basically it’s a method of breathing, where you’re lying down for an hour with your eyes closed, accompanied by music that evokes really strong emotions. And you’re breathing continuously. So you’re not hyperventilating per se, but you are taking a breath into the belly, taking a breath into the chest.
And then exhaling and then immediately breathing in in that way again over and over. for me, my hands tingle, my body shakes, and I have these very intense vision experiences. And the first time it happened, it caught me off guard and really surprised me because it was more of what people hear, what you hear of when people go on psychedelic journeys. and so I’ve been getting that through breath work, and it’s been really powerful.
That’s sort of just an aside. I can talk about that more another day because it’s it’s actually surprised me so much. and it’s it’s hard to talk about because it’s just so overwhelming and so exciting. Anyway, so I was at the beginning of a breath work and this person uses cacao as a plant medicine. So she uses cacao to you drink cacao and it’s supposed to open the heart. And her her intention that she brought into it was that.
Many of us use nature, but we are not connected and in a relationship with nature. And when she said that, it was it really hit me that that was such an important topic to talk about. I live in Squamish, British Columbia, which is arguably one of the most beautiful places on the planet, and there are many extreme athletes here. And whenever she said that, I thought about an old version of myself. you know, the the aspiring professional athlete doing my intervals,
Being overly concerned what other people think about me, even like an easy ride on Strava, which is a social media platform for cyclists like or for athletes, like worrying about what my times meant. or even just going out into nature and on the trails and like enjoying the thrill of being on the trail, the thrill of good dirt, things like that. So whenever I think about using nature, it’s it
It it it comes across my mind is like we are going out into it and enjoying for fun, having fun with it, like having fun playing on the terrain, or using it as a form of self-improvement.
If we use nature as an optimization tool or just a tool to machine our own self-improvement, it actually doesn’t necessarily make us connect with nature. It’s just a location or a thing that we’re using, like taking a supplement.
There are days where you do need to stay focused on your workouts and be outside, you know, going on your hike, trying to get your heart rate to a certain point, or, you know, trying to do something in a certain period of time, or being competitive. Like there are there is a time and a place for that. But there’s also a very important time and place to be doing though be in nature, using your body, but doing it in a way that brings more connection.
more consciousness, more a reciprocal relationship where you’re thinking about your impact and the energy that comes from being in the forest and from the trees and from what you’re doing.
When we can view ourselves as something that’s more embedded into an ecosystem instead of something that’s using the ecosystem, we feel a lot better. And I think that that’s what that practitioner was talking about when she was saying being in a relationship with nature.
There’s so much interesting nature out there, or there’s so much interesting research out there on green space and nature and how it impacts our well-being. And had a podcast with Holly Ann Passmore and Molly Peterson that we can put in the show notes about this. But, you know, whenever we think about nature, there’s different ways that we can be a part of it. Like number one, that’s number one, it’s about our exposure to nature.
And a lot of us have that. It’s how how often we’re outside, how many hours, how many days per week. and the other thing is how connected we feel. And there’s actually that’s what the podcast I did with Holly Ann Passmore and Molly Peterson was about was something called nature connectedness. And that’s our sense of relationship with nature, whether you experience yourself as part of a living world or, you know, just using it, being out in it. And that’s a different feeling.
There are several different pathways that research shows that we can connect with nature. One is sensory contacts. You can think about, you know, the smell or the touch, like touching the tree you go by, or the smell of, you know, how it smells outside after it rains, or squamish has a very particular smell in the morning and evening that I absolutely love. Same bend organ I noticed has a very distinct smell. That’s a sensory thing.
Seeing nature is a sensory thing. So many of us experience nature through our senses. But what are some other pathways that we can experience nature? One of them is through emotion, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. And most of us have these incredible feelings of awe when we see something beautiful, something that diminishes our sense of sense of self, the me self.
So paying attention, we can use our senses to evoke emotion and paying attention to what those emotions do and pausing with them and thinking about how they actually make us feel where we feel them in our body and coming back to those emotions can be a deeply, a deeply life-enhancing experience. Another way is through just the sheer beauty of nature. And then the other two pathways are through the meaning that we create and we get from being in nature and compassion.
So if you find that you don’t slow down enough in nature, like you don’t have to give up on being fast or on your workout goals, but just trying to focus a little bit more on this makes such a big difference. So there’s one activity you can do called the three good things in nature. And you can do it every single day for five days. And just notice. Don’t worry about logging data or like figuring out what bird is making that sound. Just experience it, be there in the present moment.
And after five days in the research, this actually improves people’s nature connectedness and it lasts for up to two months later. So doing this on a regular basis can make a big difference and it doesn’t take very long.
And that said, you know, a lot of athletes who spend a lot of time in nature do feel more connected to nature than the average person because you are communing with that world so often. So I’m not saying that everybody feels this way, but it’s just something to think about even as you’re in nature, to enhance your sense of nature connectedness, even if you already have it.
A lot of athletes are part of groups like Protect Our Winters and a lot of races will actually have make a donation to environmental societies because athletes are in tune with nature.
So I just wanted to give you sort of an overview of what I’m gonna talk about. So now I’m gonna go deeper. So I want to talk about what nature connectedness actually is. when researchers talk about nature connectedness, they’re not just talking about the amount of time that you spend outside. they’re talking about something more subjective. So it’s more of a felt sense. It’s a degree to which you feel emotionally and cognitively bound up with the natural world, whether nature feels like a part of who you are. And
I think the more time we spend in nature, perceiving nature, the more connected we feel, even whenever we’re not there.
earlier I talked about exposure and connectedness. So in the research, you could have thousands of hours spent outside, but still score low on connectedness. And that would be an example of using nature. or you know, you can live in the city and not get into nature that many hours per week.
But you might still have a higher score on nature connectedness. It’s a loose relationship, but it’s how we pay attention to nature that actually predicts our well being.
So what are we talking about specifically whenever we’re talking about measuring nature connectedness? So I have brought it up and there are 14 different things. So being aware of what these things are can help you enhance it because you might realize, I’m already doing that, or you might realize, I actually want to do more of that. So I want to read them to you so that you have them in your back pocket. So number one, I often feel a sense of oneness with the natural world around me.
Two, I think of the natural world as a community to which I belong. Three, I recognize and appreciate the intelligence of other living organisms. Four, and this is reverse chord, I often feel disconnected from nature. Five, when I think of my life, I imagine myself to be part of a large larger cyclical process of living. Six, I often feel a kinship with animals and plants.
Number seven, I feel as though I belong to the earth as equally as it belongs to me. And I think this is a really important one because you could expand am I using nature and being in a relationship relationship with it to am I using the earth or being in a relationship with the earth and with where climate change and everything is? I think many people are using the earth instead of being in a relationship with it. Number eight, I have a deep understanding of how my actions affect the natural world. Number nine, and not with number eight.
I think that this one can evoke shame for people if they they think they understand. But and we all have so much humility in in how we think that we are impacting nature and our s and and how we might think we’re making a difference and learn that there’s so many other ways that we can make a difference. And I mean, I’ve experienced that myself. Like I th whenever I think I’m doing something right, I’ve learned that like maybe I actually shouldn’t be doing that. Like for example,
I picked a wildflower last year and I posted a picture of it and people were like, How dare you pick the wildflower? And I felt kind of embarrassed because I just thought that that was fine, like you pick flower. And I do think that that I don’t know. I don’t know the like I didn’t look at the research on how bad it is to pick a wildflower, but I started thinking about more broadly, what does that mean if I pick a wildflower for the ecosystem? So again, no judgment or shame, but just people were holding me accountable, which made me think about.
something bigger than the action that I did where I thought, Well, what’s the big deal?
number nine, I often feel part of the web of life. Number ten, I feel that all inhabitants of her earth, human and non-human, share a common life force. And, you know, I’ve I felt this life force. It’s it’s like a light, it’s like an energy inside of me. during these I have like these self-transcendent experiences, even in exercising. So like I remember I was in Albuquerque riding my bike a couple years ago, and I just kind of got into this like
State and I felt the trees around me. Like I felt like there was no difference between me and the trees. I it felt like we were one life force. So that was interesting. I know this is a little bit like it might seem it some of the things I’m saying are it might seem a little bit woo-woo, but like they’re the research actually backs up some of these things. And I don’t often talk about the woo-woo, but I don’t even want to call it that, but it’s just the things that aren’t as easy to explain.
Okay, number 11, like a tree can be part of the forest. I feel embedded within the broader natural world. And I think about like loneliness whenever I hear about this, like so many people are lonely and lacking connection. And if you’re struggling with human connection, like how might you be more connected to your natural world? Exploring you know, the the inner the inner part of a flower and just wondering how how it possibly could look like that and why and like what that does, and using your curiosity or like
Why do some mushrooms have pores and some mushrooms have gills? Like curiosity is such a superpower to unlock connection with the natural world. Number twelve, when I exist on my when I think of my place on earth, I consider myself to be a top member of a hierarchy that exists in nature. That’s a reverse score, which means it’s trying to see the opposite. And I think that do a lot of people do think that they are a top member of a hierarchy that exists in nature, that they are exempt from taking care of it for for whatever reason.
Number 13, I often feel like I am only a smart part small part of the natural world around me, and that I am no more important than the grass on the ground or the birds in the trees. Number 13 has really helped me in my racing career. when I’d be racing, there would be times where I’d feel so self-conscious, worrying what people are gonna think about me. Like, I’m not good enough, I’m not good enough, I’m not good enough, I should be better than this. And then
I would either do something like zoom out and imagine looking down on planet Earth and how insignificant of a tiny speck I was from that perspective. Or I would think about the natural world in this way. that like who am I to make myself so important that people actually care about me in that way? Like people are judging me. and that actually really helps as well to just make yourself part of the natural world around you, recognizing that.
like sometimes when I see a tree, I think that tree has been there for so long and here I am ruminating over these problems and that tree has stood there and for some reason it just helps me not feel like my problems are quite as bad. And number fourteen’s a reverse score. My personal where welfare is independent of the welfare of the natural world. again, the reverse score ones are to are just part of how you do research. So I just want to put that out there.
To make it more simple, just think about two circles. One circle labeled me and one circle labeled nature. And in the research, you’re shown seven versions of what this could look like. Two circles sitting far apart, all the way to two circles being completely, almost completely overlapping. And you pick one that just most describes your your relationship with nature. And that one is actually about.
inclusion of nature in ourselves. So how much of nature is included in yourself? And that’s just another interesting thing because that might it might vary on a day-to-day basis. And if you go into nature with more intention and more perspective and more curiosity, those circles might converge more for you.
When I r when I think about this, I also think a little bit about privilege. many of us have the privilege of going into nature and, you know, having the time to do it or doing our sport in it or being able to access it because we have a car or, you know, we live somewhere close by. Like there are lots of people who don’t have that privilege and that time to be able to get out into nature. And
I can’t remember the name of the study, but this was actually in one of Ethan Cross’s books. He writes about how simply looking at a picture of nature can help help you feel better. So I think about that as not a band-aid or a fix, but just as an additional thing. Like if you’re stuck inside or you’re so busy, just having a picture of a beautiful mountain vista or a desert scape, something can actually help you feel more connected.
I was thinking about this. I was at a doctor appointment yesterday, getting a scan for something. And on the wall they had a picture of an alpine mountain with a glacial lake. And I felt I was just feeling nervous because I was in there. I don’t like doing stuff like that. when people are looking for problems. And I felt calmer and I tried really hard not to analyze in the moment, but of course I was. But it’s just
It makes sense why when you go to a doctor’s office there’s a picture of nature because it helps us feel calm, it helps us diminish our self consciousness.
So increasing our nature connectedness is also great because it helps us feel happier. It helps us experience more positive emotions and have more life satisfaction. It also increases eudaimonic well-being. So I don’t I can’t remember if I’ve talked about this at length on the podcast or not. And certainly you guys haven’t listened to every single episode, but there’s kind of two types of well-being that people talk about. One is hedonic well-being, which is mostly about pleasure. It’s about pleasure and positive emotions from pleasure. So doing things that feel good.
versus eudaimonic well being and this is from ari Aristotle eudaimonic well being is about meaning, vitality and personal growth and it doesn’t always feel good but you experience kind of more depth in your life, more depth growth growth and energy that comes from how you’re living your life.
It’s that sense that your life makes sense to you and is meaningful because you’re becoming someone, you’re becoming something.
So nature can increase our eudaimonic well being.
So we talk about positive emotions, I talked about awe a little bit earlier in Daker Keltner’s work. He’s he has some books out about this stuff. And awe is just an emotion we all think about when we see something. We we we’re like, whoa, like it takes our breath away. and nature-induced awe is something that’s it’s easy for a lot of us to access. And it it produces something called the small self. And it’s this this diminished sense of your own importance.
That goes hand in hand with feeling part of something larger. When I think of that, when I because I’ve experienced that feeling so many times, and if I tune into my body, I feel that feeling. It’s an expansive feeling in my chest. So being able to reflect on those feelings also can make that sense of awe last longer. Small self actually predicts predicts generosity. So people who’ve just experienced awe in nature are measurably more pro-social afterwards.
So if you’re feeling a little bit stingy, go out and spend some time in nature.
Being in nature also decreases materialism. So, you know, I started this podcast talking about are we using nature, you know, just like as an athlete trying to get our workout done? That’s one extreme end of the spectrum, to the other end of the spectrum of I am intentionally going out into nature with the idea that I want to experience awe and this fear this experience of self-transcendence and oneness, and also.
Like just feeling like I’m part of an ecosystem so that I can have more meaning and growth and connection in my life.
And when we think about meaning, this is also very interesting. So I was just saying how nature can make you s feel smaller, but it can also expand your sense of self. So what I mean by that is it helps you feel included in the bigger world. It helps you feel connected to things that are bigger than you. That’s one pathway. that’s a growth-oriented pathway to meaning. And the second is a separate pathway and it’s a relief-oriented pathway.
Where nature reduces our existential anxiety, unless you have eco anxiety about things going wrong. that’s another podcast. But nature, that relief oriented piece can help us you know, lessen that background hum of dread we might feel, the fear of insignificance, just whenever you’re in nature.
It makes you feel more expansive and it makes you feel less afraid.
So let’s come back to the things you can actually do. Say you’re thinking, like, wow, all this sounds really good. I want more of this, or I have experienced this, and I want to be more intentional on how I can experience more. go back to those five pathways of of sensory, emotion, meaning, compassion, and care. again, sensory is your five senses, experiencing it,
Pausing, making time, not being in a hurry so that you have time to do that. I get distracted sometimes. sometimes my runs and rides get shorter because I I see something and I have to stop. Like the other day I saw these two giant trees. I’d gone on this trail probably a hundred times and I had never noticed these two trees, massive trees next to each other. One was a cedar tree and one was a birch tree. And it was like they were best friends that had been there. So I sat I sat there with those two trees, thinking like, wow, these two trees have been there for
Who knows how long together, right next to each other. and then I let yeah, okay. And then emotion we already talked about, meaning we already talked about, using nature as a symbol or as a story that can help us. That that’s another way we can find meaning, like using the river as a teacher or using how something grows and changes in nature as a metaphor. Like we always hear about
Like the butterfly as an example. And then compassion, extending concern to other living things. And that fits right into that nature connectedness scale. We care about the things and acting on behalf of nature rather than just being in it. And the last one was beauty. We talked about this. This is the aesthetic appreciation, stopping for the light, noticing the patterns and the different colors on the rocks or in the moss, things like that. But the underlying thing.
piece of this is that we are present, that we’re not in a hurry, that we are taking a moment to take that in instead of rushing past it because we’re trying to get our workout done.
And the last one I’ll add is geek out a little bit. Cause when you geek out on something in nature, you start noticing it more. the things I’m geeking out on now, and this is kind of funny because kind of a side note, I was at the Squamish 50k registration and I heard somebody talking about birds and I went over and I very American of me. Canadians don’t do this, they don’t just like butt into people’s conversations like many Americans do, like I do.
I heard these people talking about birds. So I w I walked over there. I’m like, yeah, like blah, blah, blah bird. Like I I like that one. I and I I saw this one the other day. And then this woman just sort of paused and she goes, How old are you? I said, I’m 43. And she goes, yeah, you’re definitely in your birding years. So if any of you are middle aged and, you know, getting interested in birds, I’m here for it. There’s an app called the Merlin Bird ID where you can listen to bird song and then you can learn the type the different types of bird song.
I will give a warning though, if you’re somebody that likes to be competitive or gamify things, like my husband and I caught ourselves doing this, it was like, who can get more birds? But that’s actually not the same thing as being connected to nature, like pausing when you hear the bird song, closing your eyes, feeling it in your body and thinking about what it looks like and that you’re in the same area as that bird. Like that’s that’s more of what that is, instead of like seeing who has the most birds on their life list.
So p be curious, get curious about something. you know, birds, like I I’ve I’ve become obsessed with mushrooms, just something. And you’ll start seeing more of it and it’ll be it’ll be it’ll literally stop you in your tracks. It’ll it’ll actually be a forcing function to stop you from hurrying so much because your interest will overcome the desire to hurry or to, you know, get in the the perfect, you know, one-hour bike ride. It can’t possibly be.
fifty seven minutes moving time. It has to be one hour. Like allow it to be fifty seven minutes moving time and spend that extra three minutes in nature.
So yeah, I hope that this podcast just opened up a doorway for you to just help you recognize what you’re probably already doing. And again, whenever you realize what you’re already doing, you can do it more intentionally and then it can make a bigger difference for you. So some of the things that we talked about that you can do on a regular basis are the three good things in nature. thinking about how much overlap there is between the self and nature.
Looking at those five pathways of contact, emotion, meaning, compassion, and beauty, writing down those, those things, practicing getting obsessed with one thing using your curiosity in nature, and also reflecting on moments of awe that you’ve had and noticing where you feel it in your body and how that impacts you. And the last one is your perspective shift of zooming out and thinking about how you you fit into the greater ecosystem of this and what that means about your problems and the
you know, the the the self-referential things that all of us humans get stuck in. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your friends. If you want to hear about a topic from me, I’m always struggling with inspiration these days to come up with solo episode topics because I’ve been doing this podcast for nine years. So I feel like I’ve covered so many different things and I’m looking for a little bit more novelty and variety. So if you have some ideas, please pass them along. I would love to hear from you.
Thank you to my team at Palm Tree Pod for making this podcast happen. Without them, it just wouldn’t, it wouldn’t be going anymore. And I’m just so grateful to them and their patience with me. I’ve been trying to throw juggle all these different balls in the air. I c I’m coaching at the University of Northern British Columbia, their men’s soccer team right now, and I do executive coaching and I’m also doing coach mentorship, so lots of stuff in the coaching bucket happening. And I’m also
Feverishly working on my book, trying to find as much time as possible. I’ve I’ve made a lot of progress on it. It’s going to be coming out in about a year, so stay tuned for that. I’m very excited to share more. And as always, I’m with you on this journey of personal growth, adventure, and our mission to be better every day. We’ll see you right back here next week.