THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MOUNTAINS
On a foot trail in mountainous terrain, the human brain freewheels. Traveling alone, thoughts and ideas flow like water in fast moving streams. Traveling with companions, conversation flows much the same way. The brain is in its primal element in the forests, above timberline, or down desert canyon folds, and it lets you know by unbridling and running free.
Plentiful research is spilling out of ivy-covered halls, from research warrens, and coughing up from medical cloisters, all of it singing the gospel of walking in the wild. After all, we’ve spent 99 percent of our hominid ancestry tramping miles in the hunt for game and kilometers to find and gather choice wild edibles growing in shady niches and sun blessed intervales. Our paleo-ancestors whose lineage can be traced back two million years and more, built into our DNA over untold millennia the hard-wired coding for trekking long distances in great untamed spaces.
Bottled up in hyper-urban megalopolis corridors that sprawl over thousands of square miles, we modern-day apes are not faring quite so well as our television pitchmen and women would have us believe. Pathologies are building in our lives. We’re infested with party and street drugs, alcohol, anti-depressants and antacids. We’re plagued by bipolar flip-flops, rolls and rolls of fat, pancreases that can’t handle the sugar overloading, and old bones the structure of Swiss cheese. One in four of us suffer at least one depressive episode in life that requires medical intervention. 30,000 souls take their own lives each year in the United States. Depression rules. It must be overthrown.
Therefore, you and I must part ways with silicon-rich Palo Alto, wave off Wall Street, get the hell out of Grosse Point, or say adios to Alexandria and run off to a trailhead in the mountains, if only for an hour a day. There you’ll run headlong into your authentic self. Pace off a few miles in walking shoes or hiking boots and your ancestral persona will show up, most assuredly. When the two of you meet there will be so much to talk about.
Brain researchers, holistic doctors, and those sprouting-like-weeds life coaches are beginning to understand that the wellspring of creativity and clarity of thought lies in methodical physical activity in quiet natural environments. People who walk daily for 45 minutes or more in parklands or forests and those who hike in varied and sometimes challenging terrain are far more likely to be more productive people in almost any setting.
Long walks drop the bottom out of blood pressure, power down anxiety while powering up metabolism, help sort out the clutter and chaos in our daily urban lives, and banish for a time the hyper-stimulation of social media and on-demand-always communications. Stride along for fifteen minutes and the heavy traffic in the thought thoroughfares clears out, synapses start firing on all cylinders, and you get to open the mental throttle up fully. Down that highway lies original thought. All you have to do is put one foot in front of the other to tap it.
“Nature has real, measurable benefits to creative-problem solving,” asserts researcher and author David Strayer. In short, wild places give the trekker a brain-power boost. It also banishes what the psychology community calls “ruminative thought,” that is, focusing unduly on “negative aspects of the self.” Blood flow to the prefrontal cortex increases considerably when an individual is ruminative. Not so in the hiker. Instead, trampers usually report a sense of well being and being at peace with one’s self and this crazy world.
But we’re just at treeline now. Let’s go for the summit. As blood pressure falls, heart rate decreases. Cholesterol levels ease off and glucose tolerance increases in those who make a concerted effort to get out there in the sunshine and get the legs moving and arms swinging. Experts who track and chronicle chronic conditions in the population, such as the editors of the International Journal of Sports Medicine, report that cancer recovery rates and the sense of healing from cancer therapy is aided by a regular jaunt away from urban commotion.
There’s more. Those who lace on the boots suffer far less heart disease, have fewer incidence of diabetes, and are much less apt to succumb to stroke. Older citizens who hike tell of being more mobile and fluid of motion. They are less stiff in the morning and tend to be more active throughout the day. At night, hikers tend to sleep well, waking less often during the night to fret over this ghost or that in the closet.
Interestingly, hoofing it along congested city boulevards and avenues does not reap the same rewards; in fact, there were no measurable benefits recorded, say the researchers. One has to find an uninterrupted leafy space, a quiet backwater, an ocean sand strand, or a steep mountainous track to enjoy the full power of regeneration a good trek can offer.
Concrete and steel is gray, moody. Lose it. Go green as soon as you can. Stick your nose up into the sun. Commune with the plants and the fungi, with the granite and feldspar, with falling water, with ice, frost and snow.
Nature immersion is the elixir, hiking the cure. It should be everyone’s drug of choice.
