'I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately," wrote the 19th-century philosopher Henry David Thoreau, describing his two-year exile to Walden Pond, Massachusetts. He wanted, he said, "to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach". It slightly spoils Thoreau's lovely book, Walden, when you visit the pond and find it's just a short hike from the nearest town, or when you learn - though he never mentions it - that someone did his laundry. And all on a private income: bloody trustafarians. Yet his point stands - there's something fundamental, something transformative, about spending time in wild nature.
This may seem so obvious that there's no reason to say anything more about it, and self-help authors rarely do: when you've got 300-odd pages to fill, complex systems for achieving happiness are more appealing than a simple instruction to put down the book and get on a train to somewhere where the sky is bigger. But the question of why nature makes us feel better turns out to have puzzled psychologists for years.
"The wilderness inspires feelings of awe... one's intimate contact with this environment leads to thoughts about spiritual meanings and eternal processes," one survey ventures. Polls show that 82% of us have "experienced the beauty of nature in a deeply moving way"; 45% report an "intense spiritual experience" in such settings. These are astonishing statistics, given that we're generally held to be rushed off our feet and out of touch with our emotions: wilderness experiences seem to slice through all that. I can tell you, for example, about an encounter with a herd of deer, in Skye, on a late-autumn afternoon last year, and you'll know how I felt even without having been near the place.
But why? One part of the reason for this universal response seems to be about control. We spend our lives swinging back and forth between believing we have more control over the world than we do, and feeling, just as wrongly, that we have none. The former delusion is the root of much stress: why would you bother feeling stressed if you truly knew how little you controlled your future, or others' behaviour? The latter is a cause of depression, as the researcher Martin Seligman has shown: he calls it "learned helplessness".
Nature seems to reset this wild pendulum, restoring realistic balance. On one hand, elemental landscapes drive home how tiny we are, and how powerless. On the other, any encounter with nature, even a two-mile stroll, requires self-reliance, and demands that you take responsibility for what you can control: you have to not get lost, not fall off cliffs. Even a pot plant on your desk - a wilderness in miniature - requires careful tending (which you can control) but might die (which you can't). Psychologists refer to this realistic sense of our own powers as "hardiness". That seems a worthwhile state to aspire to - and if the prescription is spending more time amid mountains, moors and oceans, who would decline the treatment?
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
