An Interview with Journalist Florence Williams
Florence Williams is a journalist, author, podcaster; her work specializes in the interconnections of the environment, health and science.
Chris Russo: Thank you for joining us today on our installment of The Seattle Psychiatrist Interview Series. I'm Chris Russo. I'm a clinician with Seattle Anxiety Specialists, and I'd like to welcome journalist, author, Florence Williams. Florence is a contributing editor for Outside Magazine, freelance writer for a dozen publications, including National Geographic, the New York Times. She's the writer-host of two award-winning Audible original series, a distinguished public speaker, has held fellowships and visiting scholar roles at different universities and centers, engaged and worked in nature and environmentalism. And you're known for work that focuses on environment, health and science. Before we jump into things, just want to start a little general, if you could maybe tell us a little bit about yourself and what led you into exploring nature's effect and relationship with humans.
Florence Williams: Sure. Thanks so much for having me, Chris, I'm excited to be here and serving your good work and your clients. I am a journalist and most recently I'm the author of The Nature Fix: Why Being Outside Makes us Happier, Healthier, and more Creative. And also a brand new book that's coming out any second, it's actually available now called Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey. And I've long been interested in the relationships, or the relationship really, between humans and nature and the hidden relationships— so the ways that our environment can actually make us sick. I wrote a book that looked at women's reproduction and the effects of toxic chemicals on breast cancer, for example, and breastfeeding. And also now interested in how the environment can help us and make us feel better.
And so the reason I wrote The Nature Fix, well, it started as an article for Outside Magazine. And I had just moved from the Rocky Mountains to the heart of Washington DC, and I felt personally that my own nervous system really responded negatively to that move. And I started to think a lot about what journalist Richard Louv calls Nature Deficit Disorder. Was that a real thing? Was I experiencing increased anxiety, depression, a lot of just general stress because of what I'd lost in terms of my daily connection to the mountains? And I think that actually was a big part of it. And so for Outside Magazine I went to Japan. That was the first place I went, where researchers there were actually studying the physiology and stress hormones, heart rate variability, some brainwave patterns and people in different environments and how being in nature actually really helped calm a lot of people's nervous systems.
And then, I started finding out there was more science. I wrote an article for National Geographic called “The Power of Parks.” And I realized there was really a book there looking at doses of nature and different levels of research and studies, what were the benefits of being outside on a city block where there's some nice trees, where there are still benefits, all the way to the three-day effect of what our brains are like after three days in the wilderness.
Chris Russo: Yeah. There's been such a journey through starting with an article to now having multiple books, podcast series that have come from this. When you started, did you anticipate that there was going to be such a hefty dive into all of this?
Florence Williams: I really didn't. For me, I thought my premise was very obvious. "Nature makes us feel good. Like, duh, everybody knows that, nobody's going to buy this book. Nobody cares, we all know it. It's so intuitive." But in fact, a lot of people don't know it or don't know it consciously. And I was really amazed by how many emails I would get from people saying, "Wow, I read your book and now I go outside." And it really spoke to, I think the society wide and cultural wide level of disconnection that so many of us do feel from the non-human world. And of course then the pandemic hit and it turns out the lessons from the book were more relevant than ever. And I think a lot of people have found so much comfort in the natural world, have gotten to know their local nature better. And so the book turned out to actually be way more relevant than I could have ever anticipated.
Chris Russo: Yeah. Really this resource and tool that possibly was in people's backyards and right around them, that they weren't sure how to access and engage with and know that it could be really helpful and supportive and beneficial. Curious for us to maybe dive into a little bit of some of that science, we hear it's good for us. And I think what you touch on is a really important piece is that many folks intuitively maybe know that. I do want to acknowledge within the world of eco-psychology and a lot of nature-based stuff, they talk about traditional ecological knowledge. We use terms like indigenous wisdom and there's generations of people that have known this, that has been passed down through stories and culture. But the Western science wants to have the data, which is something that I think you really dive into, right?
Florence Williams: Yeah.
Chris Russo: So curious if we could maybe look at and talk about, what's some of the data, what's some of the science that tells us how we can benefit when engaging with nature?
Florence Williams: Yeah. I was so interested to learn that there are so many neuroscientists and psychologists and immunologists and physicists who are really captivated by this topic. And I think it's because there is a recognition that we live in an increasingly urbanized world, where not only our children, so cut off from nature and disconnected, but we are ourselves because of our phones and because of our increasing time indoors, there's this increased anxiety that's I think driving a lot of the research. And so there is a lot of really interesting research going on. As I mentioned, I started in Japan and what researchers there were finding, there's this popular practice there called forest bathing, or shinrin-yoku, it's now been popularized here in the United States, there are guides all over the place.
But in Japan, what they were finding out was that even after just 15 minutes of people just strolling around or sitting in a forest that their blood pressure dropped, their heart rate variability shifted to a profile that was more consistent with stress reduction, their brainwave patterns changed a little bit. Additional studies since then have shown that their immune cells, their killer T cells increase in the presence of these forests, their blood sugar improves, it's just this big list. So that's just looking at an individual. And there are also these really large scale epidemiological studies, especially in Western Europe where there's great socialized medicine, like big public health databases and really good maps of where people live, like how close to green space do people live? And when they put these data sets together, what they see is that people are just a lot healthier who live closer to green space and that's after adjusting for income and education.
So there are just lower rates of all these illnesses, including a lot of cardiovascular, stroke-related… There's less anxiety medication prescribed, and in fact, better learning outcomes even in schools that don't have so much urban noise, that may be closer to green space. Lower mortality rates overall, pretty statistically significant drops in mortality and especially true in people who are underprivileged, so who may not have access to a lot of the other stress reducing things that wealthier people have. And so it turns out that if you live close to a green space, it's this social equalizer or leveler a little bit in terms of health. And then there have been a lot of other studies looking at, even in cities, the density of trees on your block, for example, once you hit a certain threshold of trees, it's the equivalent of a $20,000 boost in income in terms of health outcomes.
And in communities that have lost trees, for example, to the various blights like the Elm blight, that cardiovascular rates go up, risk goes up, and disease goes up. And then there have been some research in places like Finland, looking at depression specifically, and finding that people can prevent mild depression if they spend a couple of hours a week in nature. Really again, well, that was in medium scale studies, but in the UK, that was replicated in a really large scale study looking at I think 10,000 people, showing that two hours a week in green space was the optimal for wellbeing, both physical and mental.
Chris Russo: Yeah. So a lot of these physical markers that are, you said, indicating a profile that would resonate with reduced stress, reduced anxiety, increased mood.
Florence Williams: Yeah, exactly. And now there have been some interesting brain studies as well showing actually that blood flow to the brain is different when you are in nature. If you're out for a 90 minute walk, for example, there's reduced activation in a part of the brain associated with depression. And they think that's because there— the psychologist who was at Stanford at the time of the study, Greg Bratman, he's actually now in Seattle, found that rumination is associated, sort of negative thought cycling, associated with depression. And that there's a part of the prefrontal cortex called the subgenual prefrontal cortex, that was really reduced in activation after walking in nature, but not after walking in a city.
Chris Russo: I was hoping we would touch specifically on rumination, so I’m glad you brought that up. Because I think that's, whether anxiety, depression, I work a lot with folks with obsessive compulsive disorder and rumination. It really impacts us, distraction, our attention, mood, right?
Florence Williams: Yeah, it does. That voice in our heads is a brilliant mechanism of evolution. It helps us do so much. It helps us form priorities and articulate our thoughts and have some self concept, all that good stuff, but it can also run away with us. And sometimes it's good to quiet that voice or to give ourselves some distancing and some perspective, that that voice isn't really the most important thing all the time and we need to quiet it down. And it turns out that being in nature looks like it's one tool among many for just being more in the moment, waking up our senses. And that's what forest bathing is actually, as practiced by the Japanese and as practiced here now, increasingly.
It's a series of cues that are very simple, that just, you know, go outside for a little while and take some deep breaths and focus on your senses. What are you hearing? What bird song is out there? Are there some interesting patterns of light that you see in the trees? What is the breeze? What does the temperature of the air feel like on your face? Just some really basic elemental cues that are so easily grounded in nature. And when our sensory sort of animal brains wake up, our thinking brains dial down a little bit in a really healthy way.
Chris Russo: Yeah. I want to, I think on that note but steering us a little bit, if we could touch a little bit on the role awe plays. That came up through some of your work. I was wondering if you could maybe speak a bit more about that?
Florence Williams: Yeah. I talk a lot about this emerging science of awe in The Nature Fix. It's really interesting to me, as a positive emotion, it's been late to the psychology game. People weren't studying it until quite recently. Of course, philosophers have talked about it and poets have talked about it for a long time. Typically the way awe is described or defined is that it's receiving vast input from a view or looking at the Milky Way or something like that. Looking at the sky, looking at the sunset, looking at the ocean. So something vast that also in a way may surprise us or be unexpected. It makes us open our mouths, drop our jaw, raise our eyebrows like, "Oh my God, look at that moon." And it's really interesting what that sensation does to us. And what the brain studies have shown is that when we see something arrestingly beautiful and overpowering, it shuts down our brain in a way, because we need to take that in.
We don't necessarily fully understand it. It may challenge our expected schema of what we think we're seeing. For example, an eclipse or something like that. It's like, "What is going on? My brain is not used to taking that in, I need to understand that." And so our thinking brains, again, shut down for a moment. And suddenly we feel deeply moved, we feel connected to the world around us in a powerful way. We actually feel diminished in terms of ourselves, our ego takes a backseat for a minute. And in fact, in studies, when people go look at views in Yosemite, for example, and another group goes to look at a view of Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, which is a cityscape, the subjects are asked to draw a picture of themselves in the landscape.
And people actually draw themselves as being much smaller when they're looking at powerful nature. So there's this like literal diminishing of self. And again, that's powerful in terms of wellbeing, where we feel like maybe other people and other things in the world are worthy of our attention, not just our own problems all the time. It makes us actually more empathetic and can also make us more creative, again, wakes up different parts of our brains in these really interesting ways.
Chris Russo: Yeah. Many folks that have maybe spent a lot of time in nature, we've had some of those really powerful awe moments that seems so unique that there's a novelty to it, right?
Florence Williams: Yeah.
Chris Russo: I'm wondering for folks that maybe are a bit more stuck in the city, you mentioned Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. Can we experience awe in the everyday?
Florence Williams: Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up. So one thing I learned through the course of writing The Nature Fix was how to cultivate a sense of beauty and awe in a city. And I actually participated in a study, I think it's called the North Bay Awe study. And there's some preliminary data from it already. And what it was is we were asked by the researchers to go out a couple times a day, just even walking around the block— this was in the middle of the lockdowns— and find something beautiful, like a flower or a sunset or the moon, they called it “micro-dosing awe,” to just stop for a moment and just be with this beautiful object or thing or feeling, could be even a food that you were eating or a house plant that you could look at, and take three breaths, just take three breaths while being with this point of beauty.
And then write about... there were a lot of questionnaires about, "Well, how do you feel today? How does your body feel? How does your mood feel? What's your sense of yourself? Are you liking your job? How is waking up this morning?" And what they found was that people who had engaged in this practice of micro-dosing awe for a period of weeks actually had a much stronger sense of wellbeing by the end of it. So I think we're used to awe being the Grand Canyon but it doesn't have to be, and we can in fact become better at savoring these moments of small beauty that can be very effective for mental health.
Chris Russo: Thanks for that. You have spent time rafting with veterans down Western rivers, hiking through super, super cold weather with women who have been trafficked and faced abuse and experiencing PTSD, have hung out with researchers in Utah and learning what they're doing. Curious what you found most surprising through all the work you've done so far.
Florence Williams: Yeah, good question. As you say, I knew intuitively that nature makes us feel better. But what I was surprised about was I think the cognitive piece, that even these quick walks outside could actually really make us feel more awake and more alert and more productive, and so that was a surprise. It can actually make us feel more creative. So that was really nice to learn. And then also in terms of how it makes us better members of society. The studies show that people who can feel awe on a pretty regular basis, those people in studies, they become more altruistic, they have a stronger sense of community and less a sense of self-driven ambition. So they want to make their communities better, not just themselves.
And this has been shown in various psychology studies where you give away more money or more lottery tickets, or you fold more paper cranes for earthquake survivors or things like that, that there are these acts of generosity that we're more likely to engage in after we've had these de-stressing moments of beauty and connection outside, and that really surprised me. So in this way, nature, it turns out is really good for civilization. And I hadn't really ever thought of it that way. I really thought it was separate from civilization or something different.
Chris Russo: Takes it out of the individual and brings it more to a larger collective, right?
Florence Williams: Right. And we know that that sense of community is profoundly impactful for mental health. And so many of us are combating loneliness right now. And of course loneliness is bad for your health, not just your mental health, but it's bad for your physical health. And so, we are as human animals, we are really wired of course, to be not only social, but hyper social and our bodies feel pretty threatened in this very subconscious way if we spend too much time alone or feeling alone. It's a subjective feeling. You can be in a marriage, but still feel alone. And so being in nature is one of the ways we can really feel less alone.
Chris Russo: So it's been five plus years since you started diving into The Nature Fix stuff. Where is your journey taking you? You have this upcoming book, Heartbreak, A Scientific and Personal Journey?
Florence Williams: Yeah. Heartbreak. So after I wrote The Nature Fix, which by the way I said, I looked at doses of nature and I really only got up to the three-day effect in The Nature Fix. But I then went through my own personal emotional trauma which was a divorce of a 25 year marriage. And couldn't believe how much that hurt and also seemed to be affecting my physical health. And so I thought, "Well, maybe I need a much bigger dose of nature now." And so at the core of the book is actually a 30 day river trip, including some of it alone. And I was really trying to see if that would help me feel better. And it did in a lot of ways, and in some ways it wasn't enough.
And so I talk a lot about the science of that in the book. And I talk a lot about the science of the immune system. I worked with an immunogeneticist at UCLA, and we actually tested my blood samples for genetic markers of stress and threat and loneliness at various time points after the divorce. But there's also a lot of, like in The Nature Fix, I think pretty user friendly ideas and tools for feeling better.
Chris Russo: Yeah. It sounds like you kind of... You talk about Attention Restoration Theory and Stress Reduction Theory and I think Nature Fix maybe focused a bit on that, whereas this sounds like it really dives into grief, right?
Florence Williams: Yeah. It dives into, so specifically trauma and grief and loneliness. So I sort of pick apart the pieces of heartbreak and talk about how to feel better and the urgency to feel better, because really of the significant health effects associated with loneliness, and the adverse effects, not just for yourself but for your family and for your community. If you can learn to really have a sense of purpose and extract meaning from your experience, then that does help you feel more connected to other people. But to do that, you also have to figure out how to calm down, how to calm your nervous system, and that's where nature can be super helpful. So I think it's a piece of the recovery puzzle, it's not the whole thing.
Chris Russo: Yeah. So as someone who has spent some in-depth time researching, writing personal experiences through all of this, curious if there's any recommendation or advice for folks that might listen or watch this.
Florence Williams: Yeah. I have this like really simple little coda, which is go outside, go often, bring someone with you or not and breathe. And beyond that coda, I would say if there are people listening who aren't necessarily really comfortable with spending a lot of time outside, start small. Just have your cup of tea in a place where you can see some clouds and really think about your senses, cue into your senses. And it's great to work with professionals and clinicians like yourself who can help people do that and understand the power of it. So thanks for the work that you're doing, Chris.
Chris Russo: Well, thanks for bringing so much attention to it.
Florence Williams: You bet.
Chris Russo: And thank you for taking time to meet with me and chat about some of this work. It's exciting stuff and cool to learn about what's so immediately available. It doesn't have to be a 30-day back packing trip somewhere. Here in Seattle, we're so fortunate that we have so many green spaces. I know even in Washington, DC, you've got Rock Creek park that runs through. It's like there's a lot of stuff that is nearby that-
Florence Williams: There really is.
Chris Russo: We see some great benefits from as well.
Florence Williams: Yeah. And even when the weather is crummy, by the way, the benefits are still there scientifically. So you still feel a little bit revived, a little more alert, a little more energetic.
Chris Russo: So for a gray rainy Saturday... or Seattle days. Yeah.
Florence Williams: Yeah. Just go anyway. The first 15 minutes are kind of miserable, but then it's great.
Chris Russo: Well, thank you again for sharing all of your insights and reflections on this work.
Florence Williams: My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
For more information, click here to access our article in “The Seattle Psychiatrist” Magazine: The Need for Ecotherapy in Our Overstimulated, Over-Industrialized World.
Please note: The views expressed by the interviewee are for educational and informational purposes only, are not meant to diagnose or treat any condition, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC.
Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.