Welcome And August Adventure Theme

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Hello friends, welcome back to the Salt Lake County Employee Wellness Wellcast, your go-to spot for tips and updates to help you live your happiest, healthiest life. Wow, can you believe it? The summer is absolutely flying by. August is here already, and I'm sure that it too will slip away like a moment in time. I hope you have been having the most amazing summer adventures. Because that is precisely what we are talking about this month. I hope that you all had a great time filling out your wellness explorer cards, and I also hope you're getting excited to play our new game for August, the Overlook Adventures game. And in the spirit of fun and adventure and each of us being our own adventurer, I want to dive in a bit to adventure and what benefits it has for us. So first let's dive in with a question. Have you ever come back from a hike, a camping trip, or even just a little walk outside? I noticed that you felt a little bit different. Maybe not just physically tired, but mentally quieter, a little clearer, or maybe just more like yourself again. If you felt that, or even just thought that you did, I promise you weren't imagining it, you're not making it up. And today we're gonna talk about why. Over the last

Why Outdoors Feels Mentally Different

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few decades, researchers in neuroscience, psychology, and physiology have all been asking similar questions. Why does stepping outside change the way we think, the way we feel, and the way we function? And the answers are kinda crazy, and they're amazing. They're deeper than just, oh, getting fresh air or touching grass would suggest. So let's break it down and look into some of the science. To understand why your brain changes when we spend time outside, we have to look back. And by back I mean way back. For almost all of human history, humans didn't really live in cities. There were no highways, no constant digital noise. The environments that shaped the human brain were places like forests, rivers, grasslands, mountains. Our world

Biophilia And Brain-Friendly Nature

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changed so fast. But evolution moves slowly, and perhaps our brains haven't quite caught up yet. This is the foundation of the biophilia hypothesis. This is pioneered by E. O. Wilson, and the core idea here is that humans have an innate biological need to connect with nature because it was our survival environment. When we step into nature, our brains don't just relax, they return to the environment that they were designed to interpret. Modern environmental psychology explains this through two primary frameworks. The first is Roger Ulrich's Stress Recovery Theory, or SRT. And SRT suggests that natural environments trigger an immediate, automated, parasympathetic response. And within minutes of seeing natural geometry in nature, our heart rate slows and our autonomic stress drops. How crazy and cool is that? Just being out in nature

Stress Recovery And Attention Restoration

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and experiencing it is that good for us. The second theory is Rachel and Stephen Kaplan's attention restoration theory, or ART. ART suggests that in urban environments, we are using our directed attention, and that is constantly forcing our brain to filter out things like traffic, sirens, screens. This leads to attention fatigue. Nature, however, generates something called soft fascination. Things like the movement of leaves or clouds capture our attention effortlessly. And this allows our higher cognitive prefrontal cortex to completely recharge in a way that it's not often permitted to in our modern world. Also, so crazy and so cool. Because of how these attention networks are wired inside our brain, researchers have grouped the world into three environmental categories green spaces, blue spaces, and gray spaces. Green spaces are going to be places that have trees, grass, green foliage, bushes. Think places like parks, trails, mountains. As documented

Green Blue Gray Spaces

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by environmental psychologists, these spaces are masters of attention recovery and physical stress de-escalation. Then there are the blue spaces. This is going to be places like rivers, lakes, and oceans. Research suggests water environments are uniquely powerful for calming our nervous systems and shutting down rumination. Rumination is just the clinical term for repetitive looped negative thoughts. And the soft auditory rhythm of water quiets that neural noise. For instance, do you ever listen to rain sounds when you are stressed? This is why that helps. And I guess I just learned why I use rain sounds when I want to drown out the world and get something done. Kind of crazy. Learning about myself here too, guys. And then finally, there are the gray spaces. For this, think places like cities, think concrete, think indoor offices. Gray spaces aren't bad, but they require a lot of directed attention. Directed attention is the type of attention that we usually use in gray spaces that involves choosing where our focus is going and holding it there while we tone out everything else. This has become, from an evolutionary standpoint, one of our greatest strengths. But cognitively, it's expensive, it's taxing, it demands a lot of filtering and micro decisions, and uses a lot of our mental energy, way more than I think we often realize. So it's easy to think of it like this green spaces restore attention, blue spaces regulate emotion, and gray spaces consume our attention. So if we spend a lot of our time in gray spaces, and gray spaces are draining us, so to speak, and natural spaces are restoring us, how does that work? What's the exact dosage? Like what do we need to reverse what I'm going to call the gray drain? We finally have some information on that. A study published in Scientific Reports and coming out of the Mayo Clinic recommends that our weekly dosage is 120 minutes per week. Their data showed that spending at least two hours a week in nature is the tipping point associated with significantly higher health and psychological well-being. And here's the

The 120-Minute Weekly Nature Dose

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best part. It doesn't have to be lumped into a grueling two-hour mountain trek. Even though that's some for fun for some people, I know I would probably enjoy that. But the Mayo Clinic notes that the dose can even be broken up. So you can do four 30-minute walks or a couple of quick trips to a local park as long as you hit the cumulative amount of 120 minutes per week. That threshold across seven days is when our biology starts to see the benefits. And I want to know more. So how does it shift? What is being outside doing for us? We talked about some of the physical and mental benefits, but let's dig a little bit deeper. To dig deeper and understand another benefit, we have to talk about trees. Trees are constantly fighting a battle to survive. And when something happens to them, it's not like us. They can't just run to a doctor or run to an instacare. So what do they do? They have evolved another strategy. And that strategy is chemistry. Trees produce aromatic compounds called phytuncides. These are chemicals that help

Trees And Phytoncides For Immunity

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defend them from pests and pathogens. How interesting. But looking even further at it, it turns out when we walk through green spaces, especially places like pine, cedar, or oak forests, we are actively inhaling these compounds. These compounds are antimicrobial organic compounds and are what plants and trees secrete to protect themselves from bugs and disease. When we, humans, breathe in these phytoncides, it triggers a physiological chain reaction inside us. A famous series of studies by the National Institute of Health demonstrated that exposure to phytoncides significantly increases both the number and activity of our natural killer NK cells. NK cells are a vital part of our immune system that target and destroy virus-infected cells within our bodies. So literally, being out there walking through the trees, standing by some trees, is not only altering your mind and making you feel better, but also altering your blood chemistry and strengthening our immune system. I always thought that when I was just looking through the forest and I could smell the trees on my hikes, that was it. But it turns out I'm actually strengthening my immune system and taking care of my mind. Now, to be clear, standing near a pine tree is not going to solve all your problems. It's not going to erase your stress. It's not going to replace modern medicine. It isn't a cure all. But it is a cool, powerful biological reminder that when we step out into nature, our bodies are able to reset in more ways than we realize. Okay, now that we've dived in a little bit to the nature aspect of adventure, let's shift gears a little bit. Because adventure can be a lot of things. It doesn't have to be going up in the mountains, it doesn't have to be walking in the park. It can be doing or going someplace that's just new, or participating in a new or challenging activity. Or just doing something that makes you step out of your comfort zone in your day-to-day life. I've noticed, at least in my life, that we often get trapped in our comfortable

Adventure As A Comfort Zone Reset

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routines. We get trapped in our gray spaces, in our digital loops. And when we do that, our brains operate, it turns out, in a high-frequency beta wave state. This state is associated with active thinking, stress, and hypervigilance. Honestly, those are some of my big weaknesses when I'm not taking care of myself the way that I've learned I should. But stepping out of our comfort zone and into an unpredictable adventure forces a cognitive shift, forces us to restructure things, and it quiets that overactive amygdala, and that's our brain's threat detector. And then it triggers us into a flow state where some of our fears will fade and our focus takes over, and our brain is able to handle the pressure of that activity. And I've noticed that myself. May not be the same for everyone, but the principle remains the same. When we are doing those things, it's going to help. It's going to quiet our brains. It's going to allow us to just enter that flow state and enjoy the adventure. It can also cause some other cool changes that can be powerful. For example, who's ever done something intimidating? I know I have. And when you did, and when you completed it, did you feel like you could do other hard things because you did that thing? Amazing. Because I totally did too. So years ago, I did a Spartan race with some of my friends. It was the first one I'd ever done. And we, of course, signed up for the hardest tier because it was the only one being offered at the time in our area. And we were poor college students. So we definitely did not have the money

Hard Things Build Self-Efficacy

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for the steep entry fee. So we opted to volunteer so that we wouldn't have to pay that entry fee. So we ended up starting our day extra early, and we started the race late in the day, already tired, and when this when the day was at its hottest. But while doing it, I kept thinking, this is the hardest thing I've ever done. Oh my gosh. Now that may or may not be true. Although it was probably the most physically strenuous thing I'd ever done up to that point. But as I kept going, I got closer and closer to the end. And I just kept saying to myself, well, I've gotten this far. And eventually I finished the race. A friend and I who ended up running the race together because we had similar paces and were at similar levels. We honestly did very well for ourselves, especially in our particular demographics and age groups, and especially for our first try. But what is interesting is I didn't go into this confident. Leading up to it, I was sure that I was going to struggle and I was going to do poorly, but it was something that I wanted to try, and I decided I was going to do it. And in doing something hard and something challenging, my brain collected evidence. Evidence that I could do something hard even when I didn't necessarily feel ready for it. So even more than just winning a medal, I won what psychologists would term self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a newfound belief in one's capacities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments. And what's funny is it's true. Looking past the fancy words that I was unaware of at the time, I would find myself later in life referring back to that experience. When I would face something difficult, when I'd have a big challenge come up, I would literally think to myself, well, I did that Spartan race. I can probably do this thing. And it's funny because it's led me to do lots of things that I've really enjoyed in my life and having lots of adventures and making friends that honestly I feel like make my life more worthwhile. And all of that kind of feeds into the next item. Let's talk about fun in our adventures. So the balance of physical and mental alteration brings us to how we experience adventure and life in general. In 1985, a professor at the University of Alaska, Dr. Rayner Newberry, came up with a really interesting scale that seems to ring true regarding fun. He suggests that there are two types of fun: type one fun and type two fun. Type

Type One Fun Vs Type Two

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one fun is enjoyable while it's happening. It's enjoyable in the moment. Things like eating ice cream, going on a ride at an amusement park, sitting on a sunny beach requires zero to limited effort and yields immediate dopamine responses. Type 2 fun are things that can feel absolutely miserable in the moment, but in retrospect are so fun and that we will reflect on throughout our lives. So yeah, it might be cold, it might be muddy, it might you might be exhausted, your lungs might be burning a lot like me at the Spartan race. But when you look back on it, it becomes an absolute highlight of your week, your month, your year, and it may even become the story that you tell or the memory that anchors you and is the catalyst for future growth. So I bring this up to say that everything doesn't have to go perfectly in an adventure for it to be good for us. Sometimes the messy bits of advent of an adventure are the best parts, even though it might not seem like it at the time. So all of this is cool information, right? It's really fun to know and hopefully will lead to us taking some more risks and trying new things and going on adventures, but all of that is useless if we end up staying locked inside our houses or stuck in our gray spaces. And I don't think the reason that we stay inside is a lack of wanting to try or wanting to do something new. It seems to me that it actually tends to be uh due to a behavioral science concept called friction. Friction is any obstacle that makes a behavior harder to complete. Our brains are wired to conserve energy. So it magnifies our small logistical

Beat Friction With Simple Tools

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hurdles into bigger excuses. So jumping back to our first topic, we were trying to hit our 120-minute weekly dose of nature, or even just trying to do something new, we may need to implement some tools to help us get past that friction. So let's create a toolkit for ourselves. What are things that might help? The first tool that I came across is the five-second rule. If you're thinking about doing something, the moment you think about stepping outside or doing that adventure, just do it. Count down five, four, three, two, one, stand up, and beat the hesitation before your brain can manufacture an excuse. And distract it with that countdown and just get up and do it. Give yourself five seconds and go have some fun. Our second tool is reducing setup friction. Don't let things like searching for your gear ruin your momentum. Pack an adventure red bag with your shoes or a jacket, maybe some water or an empty water bottle, and leave it right by the door or someplace that's easy to access and out of the way. For me, I keep a storage tote in my trunk with my little hiking backpack, my hiking boots, and some other adventure gear that I may want or need at any given time so that if I'm ready for an adventure, I can go. Or perhaps we are intimidated by the size of an adventure. And we could try things like a micro adventure. Stop thinking about our nature dose as like a massive trek to a national park. It doesn't have to be anything huge. It could even be a 10-minute loop around our neighbor a neighborhood park that totally counts towards our 120-minute goal. Or taking a quick afterwork stroll or a lunch break stroll. Our last tool, one that works really well for me, is social commitment. Replace vague plans like we should hike sometime or we should do something sometime with some automated accountability. Be like, oh, meet me at this time at the trailhead and we can go for this hike. Give yourself less of an opportunity to back out and or leave a vague idea in the air that will never happen because who hasn't done that? I definitely know I have, even with the best of intentions. I've totally said, oh yeah, we should do this sometime, and then it never happens. So all of that being said, maybe the real question isn't what good do nature and adventure do for us and for our brains? Maybe the real question is what kind of a person do I become, or what kind of a person can I become when I regularly choose things that challenge me, when I choose time and green and blue spaces, and when I choose adventures? Interesting thing to think about, right? And I think the answer is simpler than we might think. We might be someone who's a little bit calmer, a little clearer headed, and someone who knows that they're more capable than they were before. And I totally want that for me, and I totally want that for all of you. So these are some things to consider. I hope that you're able to implement some of them and that they're helpful for you. Thank you for spending some time with me today. Try some of these tips, try something new and see what changes. I hope that your adventures are amazing, and hopefully I will see you out there on the next one. Until next time, have a great day, a great month, and stay happy and healthy.