The nature fix, why nature makes us happier, healthier and more creative. Pdf book download Author: Florence William

(All Credit To Go Real Hero The Author of this book 📖)
🙏 Please buy this book hardcopy from anyway.)

In This Book_____________________________

I was hiking in Arches National Park when the Mappiness app in my phone

pinged me. Some people would be annoyed, but not I. Finally, I was somewhere

outside and beautiful and could tell the app how happy, relaxed and alert I was.

Very, very and very. I told it so by tapping on the screen. Then I victoriously

took a photo of the smooth,

salmon-colored cliffs in front of me. Small

topographies of lichen poked through a crack. A few perfect white clouds

pottered across a French blue sky. Let Big Brother, toiling away in some

windowless university lab, eat that for lunch. After many months and 234

interactions with this app, I almost always got pinged when I was indoors and

working, which didn’t seem very helpful to either the Mappiness project or to

my own. (And it didn’t seem fair, because I was outside fairly often, wasn’t I?)

Mappiness is in the midst of a multiyear big-data grab, asking tens of thousands

of volunteers to record their moods and activities twice a day at random times.

Then it matches those responses to an exact GPS location from which it extracts

information on the weather, amount of daylight and other environmental

characteristics. The aim is simple: What makes people happy? Does place

matter, or not so much?

Big Brother—or Big Scientist, really—is George MacKerron, a young and

congenial economist at the University of Sussex. As he explained it to me, much

of the happiness data out there involves relationships, activities and economic

behaviors, and much of it is familiar: people are happiest when they are well

enmeshed in community and friendships, have their basic survival needs met,

and keep their minds stimulated and engaged, often in the service of some sort of

cause larger than themselves. But MacKerron wondered about the people who

already have these things going for them, or, for that matter, about the people

who don’t; are there other factors that could make meaningful differences in the

march of their days?

To find out, he launched Mappiness in 2010 and within a year had gathered

20,000 participants and over a million data points (by the time I joined a few

years later, he was up to 3 million). Here’s what the data shows: People are least

happy at work or while sick in bed, and most happy when they’re with friends or

lovers. 

Their moods often reflect the weather (most live in the UK, so that’s not

surprising). But one of the biggest variables, the surprising one, is not who

you’re with or what you’re doing (at least for this iPhone-using crowd, which

tends to be young, employed and educated). It’s where you are. As one of

MacKerron’s papers concludes: “On average, study participants are significantly

and substantially happier outdoors in all green or natural habitat types than they

are in urban environments.” (And, in case you’re wondering, the data didn’t just

reflect a vacation effect, since he factored that in.)

The difference in joy respondents felt in urban versus natural settings

(especially coastal environments) was greater than the difference they

experienced from being alone versus being with friends, and about the same as

doing favored activities like singing and sports versus not doing those things.

Yet, remarkably, the respondents, like me, were rarely caught outside. Ninety-

three percent of the time, they were either indoors or in vehicles. And even the

app’s definition of “outside” could mean standing at an intersection or collecting

the mail. My own personal data was pretty pathetic. The app caught me

exercising or relaxing outside only 17 times, or 7 percent of the pings over the

course of a year. Most often I was working, followed by number two, doing

childcare, followed by commuting, doing housework and eating (well, at least

something was fun). In the midst of a flirtation with meditating, I was caught

doing that exactly twice.

What Mappiness reveals—our epidemic dislocation from the outdoors—is an

indictment not only of the structures and habits of modern society, but of our

self-understanding. As the writer Annie Dillard once said, how we spend our

days is how we spend our lives. Why don’t we do more of what makes our

brains happy? Are we just too knackered by life’s demands, too far away from

greenery or too tempted by indoor delights, especially the ones that plug in?

Partly, but not entirely. In a revealing set of studies at Trent University in

Ontario, psychologist Elizabeth Nisbet sent 150 students either outside to walk

on a nearby path along a canal, or 

underground to walk through the well-used

tunnels connecting buildings on campus. Before they left, she asked them to

predict how happy they thought they’d feel on their walks. Afterward, they filled

out questionnaires to gauge their well-being. The students consistently

overestimated how much they’d enjoy the tunnels and underestimated how good

they’d feel outside. Social scientists call these bad predictions “forecasting

errors.” Unfortunately, they play a big role in how people make decisions about

how to spend their time. As Nisbet rather dejectedly concluded, “People may

avoid nearby nature because a chronic disconnection from nature causes them to

underestimate its hedonic benefits.”

So we do things we crave that make us tetchy, like check our phones 1,500

times a week (no exaggeration, but I will point out that iPhone users spend 26

more minutes per day on their phone than Android users, which may be a good

reason to marry an Android user), while often neglecting to do the things that

bring us joy. Yes, we’re busy. We’ve got responsibilities. But beyond that, we’re

experiencing a mass generational amnesia enabled by urbanization and digital

creep. American and British children today spend half as much time outdoors as

their parents did. Instead, they spend up to seven hours a day on screens, not

including time in school.

We don’t experience natural environments enough to realize how restored

they can make us feel, nor are we aware that studies also show they make us

healthier, more creative, more empathetic and more apt to engage with the world

and with each other. Nature, it turns out, is good for civilization.

This book explores the science behind what poets and philosophers have

known for eons: place matters. Aristotle believed walks in the open air clarified

the mind. Darwin, Tesla and Einstein walked in gardens and groves to help them

think. Teddy Roosevelt, one of the most hyperproductive presidents of all time,

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