Being In Nature Is The Greatest Problem-Solver

When you want to find the greatest problem-solver in existence, it's not inside a screen, but out there.

After arriving from traveling for half a year, my room was still sublet for another month. I went home to live at my family home. All my friends were working and I wasn't. So I had a lot of time on my hands, which isn't the best for someone with my brain's wiring: my mind eats itself alive when it doesn't have anything to do.

So mind and body regulation it was. Meditation, running, breath work – I even tried Yoga! (which means I did a ten minute YouTube Yoga routine twice, don't judge)

None of it worked. My mind just kept babbling, going on and on about the perils I was facing, for it was convinced I had just forfeit my life: no job, living at home, with no clear direction.

But imagining every horrible outcome gets dull after a while (apart from the scare sweats and sleepless nights), so I needed something to do that would actually feel good for once – what my friends call "chill a little". Just one problem, though:

I hate to chill a little.

Sitting still is one of my great frights, so I had to do something that was active but wouldn't fry my body, since whenever I felt anxious, I'd work out. But you can't do athletics all the time because (sadly) the human body has limits. So my main coping mechanism was off the proverbial bench press. So I did what every movement addict would do: I went hiking.

"Wait, isn't this cheating?"

Yes, you're correct. But we come up with the best lies when we lie to ourselves, so my mind equated hiking with "chill a little in nature". Don't hate the player, hate the game.

There was one rule I couldn't break, though: no running up the mountain. It had to be at a nice pace. But I made it even harder for myself: no AirPods.

Why would leaving the AirPods at home be such a problem? I realized how dependent my brain became to some sort of stimulus. Something was always talking, all the time. Whenever I would go somewhere, a podcast would be my companion. As I found out, my greatest addiction wasn't sports, but content consumption.

This all changed during my first hike.

It was mid-summer, so I left early in the morning. It's a five-minute drive to the nearest hike from my home. I got out of the car, grabbed my backpack, put my phone somewhere into its depths and started walking.

At first, it felt a little uneasy. What if the answer to all my problems were just in the next podcast? What would I deprive myself of the endless wisdom available on Spotify, just for $12.99 a month?

But then, true wisdom showed up.

When your brain is on autopilot, surrounded by the natural environment, magic happens: my thoughts were clearer, more joyful, and, most of all, less anxious. It was as if the trees surrounding me had cleared the thicket of my mind.

I knew what I wanted. I knew what I had to do.

But herein lies the problem: the mind is a phenomenal problem-solver, but not a great information storage. The further away we are time-wise from some insight we gained, the harder it is to remember, the less likely we are to actually do it. Naval Ravikant says "inspiration is perishable".

So I forgot. When I left for the "big city" again, my mind started rationalizing again, drowning out the insight I gained during my walks in nature.

When you know what to do, don't wait. It's become fashionable to preach agency, but it's the only religion I'd truly subscribe to because it works. So go into nature, let your mind wander, and experience the sorcery yourself. But also act on insight immediately. Otherwise, we fall into our automatic thought patterns again, and we have to regain the insight. When we go into action, just like ourselves, our problems take a hike.