Mental Health and the Environment: Connections Between Our Brains and the World Around Us
As we become more and more immersed into our digital worlds, we are faced with the burden of difficult knowledge: The climate is changing, and at an individual level it’s difficult to feel like we can do anything meaningful to change that. We are all just contributing to the problem — guilty to the last man. Young people are particularly aware of this issue, and it’s proven to have negative effects upon mental health. But for some reason, we seem incapable of taking effective measures to reverse climate change. Individuals, societies, and entire nations locked in inaction.
This inaction is startlingly similar to one common symptom of ADHD, known as executive dysfunction. It is an aspect of the lack of control over impulses and behavior that many people with ADHD struggle with. In Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, Richard Louv talks about how many symptoms of ADHD, like behavior control, overlap with symptoms of what he calls “Nature Deficit Disorder”, a multi-faceted problem faced by millions of children now growing up without nature.
He also discusses how nature education has failed children by only teaching them of the destruction of nature, and not introducing them, in person, to its wonder. This lack of contact with nature leaves children pushing it away, only associating it with the fear and destruction they’ve been told about it.
Louv has the same solution for all three of these issues: spending more time outside, in what he calls “nature therapy”. This solution helps decrease the symptoms of inaction due to ADHD, and makes people feel more connected to their environments. This is not by any means a solution to climate change; but I agree with Louv in that in order to reverse climate change, we will need a world full of people ready and willing to act on that goal, and to raise these future environmental stewards, we need to start spending more time with them in nature.
In Last Child in the Woods, Louv discusses the many effects of nature — or lack of nature — upon children. In the chapter “Nature Deficit Disorder and the Restorative Environment”, he discusses specifically children with ADHD, their symptoms, and the effects of nature therapy on them.
The main symptom of ADHD is, according to the American Psychiatric Association, “a persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity, impulsivity… more frequently displayed and more severe than is typically observed in individuals at a comparable level of development.” Though more research into the origins of ADHD still needs to be performed, it appears to be heightened by excessive time spent on screens in early childhood, according to studies performed by the Children’s Hospital of Seattle.
Many methods of treating ADHD exist, with more being invented regularly as rates of diagnosis increase. Many parents choose to medicate their children, particularly boys, who exhibit more signs of hyperactivity than girls with ADHD. Some pushback against medication is building in the US, though, particularly as critics charge psychiatrists of overmedicating children, or medicating them too young. Other treatments include talk therapy, exercise, and perhaps most recently, nature therapy.
Nature therapy simply involves spending time outside in nature, disconnected from the internet, without particular tasks or deadlines to be accomplished. Louv cites the cases of several people who found it to be very effective, including Ansel Adams, and goes on to talk about why he thinks it is so effective. Louv believes that increased exposure to TV is only a small part of a bigger societal shift that is increasing the difficulties that people with attention deficit disorders face — the “rapid move from a rural to a highly urbanized culture.” This move changed the way people live, from an outdoors, agrarian society with frequent physical labor and close contact with one’s surroundings, to an overstimulating, underactive existence in an environment where one must look, but cannot touch.
Therapist Michael Gurian stated that “Neurologically, human beings haven’t caught up with today’s over-stimulating environment. The brain is strong and flexible, so 70 to 80 percent of kids adapt fairly well. But the rest don’t.” These remaining people are those who are diagnosed with ADHD. But Louv offers an alternate diagnosis — not of them, but of society. “If it’s true that nature therapy reduces the symptoms of ADHD, then the converse may also be true: ADHD may be a set of symptoms aggravated by lack of exposure to nature. By this line of thinking, many children may benefit from medications, but the real disorder is less in the child than it is in the imposed, artificial environment.” If nature is the solution, then the lack of it is the problem — children inadequately exposed to nature face exacerbated symptoms of attention deficit and lack of control over impulses and their own behavior.
Most health-related research done on climate change is specifically looking at physical health, but recent studies show that the connection between mental health and climate change deserves more attention. These studies show the connections between increased knowledge of climate change and increased levels of anxiety and depression in both children and adults.
Young people are particularly susceptible to these mental health symptoms, as they are “generally more likely to accept the scientific consensus — widespread agreement — about humanity’s role in climate change.” Generation Z has been exposed to the internet since early childhood, and even young people growing up in communities where climate change is not yet an issue or acknowledged as an issue will feel the pressures people older than them may not. Many young people may feel guilt for their role in climate change, but aren’t sure how to change things, or, being young, lack the control over their lives to do so. This combination of fear for the future and lack of action from those around them can lead to anxiety, hopelessness, and even anger towards those who could have done something but didn’t. In these ways, “climate change can pose a risk to mental health even without a direct physical threat.”
Young people see the future very differently than those in previous generations. While those older than them saw endless time and possibilities filled with unlimited resources, young people, burdened with the knowledge of current climate change and oncoming climate disasters, see only uncertainty. Younger generations are also spending far less time outside and in nature than previous generations, which may be linked to poorer mental health. Many mental health professionals believe in a link between lack of focus and lack of exposure to nature. One psychologist, Susie Burke, advised young people struggling with focus or mood issues, two key symptoms of ADHD, to spend more time outside. “That can help restore a calm mood. It also can improve someone’s ability to focus on things, she says.”
These issues don’t affect young people alone. Studies show that “Exposure to climate- and weather-related natural disasters can result in mental health consequences such as anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.” These consequences can affect anyone, as can the chronic psychological dysfunction experienced by many who are affected by these events. And climate change is not a recent issue — even though it is now a far more common topic of conversation, it has been known about for several decades, and many people have been concerned about it for years. As psychologist Dr Joseph Reser stated, “Many people think of climate change as a looming threat, when it’s actually something we’re well in the midst of… the psychological implications are occurring here and now.”
Executive dysfunction is a major symptom of ADHD, and plays a big role in the difficulty that many people with ADHD find in school and work, as well as life in general. It is part of the general lack of impulse control that many experience, but often specifically applies to more difficult, scarier, or larger tasks. The process of breaking problems down into smaller, more manageable to-do lists is far more difficult for those with ADHD than it is for others. Often big assignments never get started, as they seem like unsurmountable tasks.
This symptom of ADHD is, like all its other symptoms, made worse by lack of exposure to nature. As Louv stated, our brains are built to live in the natural world, and not all of us made the switch to overstimulating, over-focused urban environments so easily.
This executive dysfunction doesn’t just apply to school assignments — we can also see this same response towards bigger problems. It’s difficult to face huge issues on both an individual level and on a societal level, and there is no bigger issue we face today than climate change. There are many ways we could begin to reduce C02 emissions and reverse the temperature increase of the world — but many governments, corporations, and individuals around the world have failed to act at any meaningful level. It’s easy to pin these faults on older generations and their lack of understanding of the consequences of their past actions, but assuming that younger people can save the planet once they are in charge could be an equally fatal mistake.
Louv claims that American schools have failed to effectively educate children about climate change. Children are taught about climate change, and their part in it; they are taught about recycling their garbage and about how “between the end of morning recess and the beginning of lunch, more than ten thousand acres of rainforest will be cut down.” In theory these children are learning how to take care of the planet — but in practice they may be learning that they want nothing to do with it. If their only experience with nature is being taught about how they are responsible for its destruction, children distance themselves from it. As educator David Sobel says, “the natural world being is being abused and they just don’t want to have to deal with it.”
Additionally, young people are more stressed than ever before. Our knowledge of climate change has not enlightened us, it’s just placed a heavy burden on our shoulders. Gen Z is more immersed in our knowledge of climate change than any previous generation, but our increased levels of anxiety and depression in reaction to the issue are not going to help us solve it. The bigger the problem grows, the more paralyzing it becomes. We don’t see a way out; we just can’t seem to do anything about it. And so, just like individuals with ADHD, or children taught about the horrors that are their responsibility, we ignore it, though it looms over us every minute of the day.
The line that Louv draws between our lack of contact with nature and our inability to save it is a correct one. Children are being exposed to the natural world less and less with each successive generation, often suffering the consequences of this severance with increased symptoms of ADHD, including poor impulse control and executive functioning. Other symptoms of this lack of contact with nature — described by Louv as “Nature Deficit Disorder”, or NDD — include increased levels of anxiety and depression. Another cause of anxiety and depression is knowledge of climate change. As young people know more and more about the effects and scale of climate change, they feel more helpless and trapped, and poor mental health results. This isn’t new — people have known about climate change for decades. And yet the planet’s circumstances have only gotten worse, with no effective action to stop C02 emissions or reduce what is already in our atmosphere.
I know this feeling of inability to act on a personal level. I was diagnosed with ADHD years ago, and I’ve always struggled with executive functioning and impulse control. This has made school especially challenging for me. Big projects and papers have a tendency to never get finished, or sometimes even started — and it’s difficult to not feel guilty or ashamed when I realize I’ve somehow wasted an entire day trying to do homework without actually getting anything done.
In many ways I feel the same way about climate change. I worry about the size of the issue, don’t know where I can even start to help, and feel guilt at my contributions to the problem every time I so much as step onto an airplane. And I don’t think I’m alone in this; many people, both young and old, feel the same way. Louv’s explanation for our lack of action rings true — unexposed to our natural surroundings, we only associate nature with destruction and fear, and so push it all away. Our urban environments only make this issue worse; growing our symptoms of anxiety and lack of impulse control in an overstimulating, distracting world.
But there may be a solution to these issues. A way for us to calm our anxieties, gain back control over our decisions. Louv provides us with an answer: nature therapy. Just spending time in the natural world, especially in childhood, effectively lessens these symptoms of worry and distraction. In order to save nature, we need to get back into it.
