There’s often a gap between what we know and what we do. For example, we know that taking time to be in nature is crucial for our mental and emotional well-being, boosts creativity and problem-solving, and overall highly restorative.
According to an article in The Atlantic
A lack of nature can lower the quality of your work. In a 2012 study in the journal PLOS One, researchers showed that four days immersed in nature without technology increased people’s creativity and problem-solving abilities by about 50 percent.
If nature is absent from your life, you are likely unhappier, more neurotic, and less productive than necessary.
This likely isn’t news to you.
Yet when was the last time you spent four days in nature without technology?
When was the last time you spent four days in nature, period (technically, question mark, but you know what I mean)?
When was the last time you spent even a half a day without your phone within close range of your body?
We don’t need to do more research or read more studies about this; the experience of even a few hours without our technology is the best research.
Try it and you will experience it for yourself.
And yet even having had the experience of it for a half day, it’s still hard to put it into action.
What explains the gap?
I can’t speak for everyone, but in myself I notice it is an issue of trust.
I can see all the ways in which I’ve been conditioned to not trust what I know, to believe that I must conform to expectations to be responsive within certain time frames. A lifetime of conditioning to believe that stepping away from the work to be done is irresponsible or selfish.
Trust — in myself, in others, in the basic goodness and benevolence of life — is a muscle.
Reconditioning that trust muscle is just like reconditioning any other muscle: it takes time and daily practice.
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