Wonder Woman on the Appalachian Trail
Happy to discover the power of nature in increasing gratitude
Grateful to walk on a nature trail and see how it affects my body and mind
Lucky to discover that green makes us grateful
All the evidence about white blood cells and inflammation, about stress and the hormones of emotions, convinced me that living gratefully would make me healthier. But I got intrigued by the idea of turning the equation around. Might some physical action increase the gratitude I felt? This month, I wanted to find out if I could get a gratitude boost through exercise, meditation, or a walk in the woods.
Mind-body connections work in both directions, and sometimes your body gives the directive to your mind about whether to feel happy or sad or grateful. For example, researchers have uncovered a very simple (albeit temporary) way to cheer up, without any of the side effects of Prozac. If you’re in a bad mood, take a pencil and put it horizontally between your teeth. Bite down gently and hold it for ten seconds. Feeling better? The pencil forces your facial muscles into the same position as a smile. In the constant interplay between mind and body, your brain gets the message that you’re smiling, so voilà, you must be happy.
I wanted to think that my brain was clever enough to distinguish between real happiness and biting a pencil, but even geniuses like the ones I met at the World Science Festival can’t outsmart their biofeedback loops. So how could I use those loops to improve my gratitude quotient? I kept a gratitude diary as a reminder to find the positives in life, and I regularly talked to myself (quietly, with nobody around) about seeing the bright side. But maybe the embodied gratitude I’d learned about needed to start from the bottom of my toes rather than the top of my head. If there came a day when my current mind-focused techniques didn’t work, I could use a physical fallback—the gratitude equivalent of biting on a pencil.
I read everything I could find about mind-body connections, but nobody had yet described a physical trigger for gratitude. Okay, I’d figure one out for myself. I started with a fascinating study done by Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist and associate professor at Harvard Business School and an expert on body language. She knew that how we present ourselves affects how others see us and how we perceive ourselves. Humans and other animals express power through broad, expansive gestures—peacocks spread their tail feathers and chimpanzees puff their chests and if you watch business people at a conference table, the guy with his feet sprawled in front of him and his elbows spread wide is probably the boss (or wants to be). The person sitting with his legs tightly crossed and his arms at his sides, taking up as little space as possible, is signaling that he doesn’t have much power (and isn’t getting any).
But Cuddy also wondered about sending the biofeedback loop in the other direction. Could taking a high-powered pose actually produce power? If the body sent an “I’m powerful” message, maybe the mind would hear it. To find out, Cuddy and two colleagues invited a few dozen men and women into their lab and randomly assigned them a “high-power pose” (taking up lots of space) or a “low-power pose” (contracted, with limbs closed). Afterward, they tested for various hormones, including testosterone, which is closely associated with dominance. The results were stunning. When people spent two minutes in a high-power pose, their testosterone levels went up by 20 percent. And their levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol dropped some 25 percent.
Amazing! Your entire neuroendocrine system can change just by how you hold your arms! And that wasn’t all. The high-power posers said they felt more powerful, and in a simple game (keep two dollars or gamble it on a double-or-nothing roll of the dice) they were dramatically more likely to take a risk.
Cuddy’s personal story backed her theory that beyond “fake it until you make it,” you could actually “fake it until you become it.” As a nineteen-year-old college student, she was in a serious car accident and was told she’d never walk again. Now she strides—in high heels. She also suffered a brain injury in the accident, and even after she ended up as a graduate student at Princeton, she felt like an imposter, not worthy of being there.
Cuddy got encouragement to continue and eventually started urging others to find ways to believe in themselves too. She told women that before they went into an important meeting or interview, they should find a private place (the ladies’ room always works) and take a “Wonder Woman” stance—feet apart, hands on hips. She talked about the value of “making yourself big” and the confidence that men could get from stretching their arms overhead. A talk she gave at the TED Global conference in 2012 was one of the most watched ever—seen by twenty million people who wanted to find out how the body could send a positive message to the mind.
I understood that power and gratitude differed in source and substance, but it intrigued me that if you put yourself in a certain place, pose, or position, your whole hormonal balance might change. Your body could send messages that altered how you felt and behaved. So I seemed to be on the right track in looking for a physical state that would also set up a gratitude loop.
If a gratitude hormone existed, I had the feeling that exercise would bring it out. I had started my career as a broadcaster for CBS Radio, and I reported on fitness and health for years after that. My first book, written the year I graduated college, was called Women and Sports, so maybe I had a built-in bias about the positive effects of activity. But I also knew that intense exercise releases a flood of endorphins (the naturally occurring opiates) into the bloodstream that changes our emotional state. Marathoners often describe the euphoria they feel as a “runner’s high,” and I had written many articles describing how exercise wards off depression and makes people more emotionally resilient.
New studies of the chemical causes and effects of emotion also show connections to exercise. A substance called kynurenine builds up in your bloodstream when you’re stressed, and it can pass into the brain and cause the damaging inflammation that leads to depression. Researchers in Sweden recently found that when you exercise, your muscles create a large amount of a chemical that breaks down the kynurenine. (It’s called PGC-1alpha1, but no quiz later.) So moving your muscles sets up a chemical cycle that can ward off feeling down.
Scientists have long suspected that the brain fires differently before and after a run, and new research using PET scans proves that runners’ brains actually change after a run. The endorphins that increase in the blood during exercise do indeed cross into the brain. Other neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine also come into play when you exercise and perform their magic on your mind.
Excited by the idea that exercise might increase gratitude, I started going to the gym again. I used the elliptical machine one day, the exercise bike the next, and the treadmill after that. I even lifted a few weights. I felt vaguely virtuous, but the flood of gratitude I’d hoped for just didn’t happen. Maybe I didn’t exercise hard enough to get the endorphin flow, and the gym didn’t exactly have a gratitude-inducing atmosphere, either. I have friends who manage to get to the gym daily and seem to love it. But for me, the emotional focus of gym exercise is all about the future—getting thinner or lowering your blood pressure or building your biceps. Appreciate the moments on a treadmill in the here and now? Not so much.
Dr. Liponis had told me that he did ten minutes of meditation every night before bed, which helped him be more centered and grateful. He pointed out that back in the 1960s, when the Beatles hung out with the maharishi, “transcendental meditation” became popular as a way to find nirvana. But in today’s world, you meditated to control your mood and quiet the stressful voices in your head. It served as the one time in the day when you could focus on the present moment without being bombarded by thoughts about what you should do, could do, might have forgotten.
I’d never meditated, but I understood the value of being in the moment. It struck me that any activity that got you fully involved and focused could also get rid of the distracting voices in your head and set up ripples of positivity. Maybe that was the problem (for me) with going to the gym. Instead of getting rid of intrusive noise, the gym just added more, both figuratively and literally. With the TV blaring and music blasting as distractions to get people charged, exercise felt like a chore rather than a release.
So I thought again about physical situations where gratitude seemed to flow naturally and made a list. I quickly noticed that, for me, they all involved being outside and part of nature. I remembered a day when my husband and I, newly married, walked hand in hand along a mostly empty beach. With the soft sand underfoot and the warm sun on my back, I felt a surge of joy and an inexplicable connection not just to the man I loved but to the whole world. I stopped to gaze out at the horizon, and as the waves lapped at our feet, I had an epiphany.
“This is why people come to the beach—so they can contemplate the vastness of the universe!” I said, gesturing poetically.
Ron looked at me dubiously, a practical guy uncomfortable to think that he’d just married Sylvia Plath. “I’m guessing they come because they like sun and sand.”
“But standing here, you feel the vastness of the universe, don’t you?” I asked, not to be dissuaded.
“Mostly I feel like I’m getting a sunburn,” Ron said.
Fortunately, poetry and prose can laugh together, and “the vastness of the universe” became our private joke.
Some of my rush of feeling that day could be attributed to having a hot (if slightly sunburned) husband, but the combination of sunshine and scenery and expansive ocean had also given me a rush of cosmic gratitude. I appreciated the whole world and felt connected to the universe in a new way. Maybe any walk in nature that let my mind float free would inspire that same surge of physical gratitude.
I decided to try it out. The next weekend, I drove two miles down the road from our house in Connecticut and parked at the edge of a trail that ran next to the Housatonic River. White blazes announced that it was officially part of the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail, the rugged and mountainous footpath that goes from Georgia to Maine. This stretch happened to be flat and peaceful, so simple to navigate that my husband jokingly called it “Granny’s AT.” But coming to this beautiful and serene spot always made me feel good. It seemed a perfect place to test the connection between nature and gratitude.
I walked away from my car and stood by the river, touching my toes and stretching my muscles. I liked running outdoors but had never been very good at it. When I went to a jogging workshop in the Bahamas years ago and wrote about it for The New York Times, my dad called me up, very proud of the article but not so impressed by my athletic prowess. “Did you have to admit that your great triumph was a ten-minute mile?” he asked.
Now I ran even slower. But happy to be outside in shorts and sneakers, ready to move, I slipped on headphones to listen to a podcast I’d downloaded and started to warm up by jogging slowly along the road. But after just a few minutes, I realized I wanted to get rid of distracting voices, not add more. I tucked the headphones into my pocket. Now as I moved along, I could hear the chirps, whistles, and trills of birds all around me. I picked out the flutelike melody of the wood thrush, the only one I could identify, and the sound made me unaccountably happy. A line from author Joan Walsh Anglund popped into my head: “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”*
Suddenly brimming with grateful energy, I picked up my pace and started to jog. I focused on how my body felt as I moved and felt lucky to have muscles that worked and feet (even slightly achy ones) that carried me along. The river sparkled alongside me and the green-leaved trees formed a luscious canopy overhead. Dipping through the sun-dappled shadows, I felt a burst of gratitude, and like that day on the beach, I had a sense of being connected to the sky and the earth and all around me.
I kept going for nearly an hour and got back to my starting point, flushed and happy. Catching my breath, I walked slowly by the river for a few minutes with my hands on my hips, thinking about why the experience had been so emotionally transporting (less geographically transporting, given my speed). I had been open to the experience, but I honestly didn’t think it would be possible to run or walk on that trail and not feel gratitude for the glories of nature. On a physiological level, if the Amy Cuddy–described two minutes as Wonder Woman upped your testosterone level, who knew what sixty minutes of cruising through nature had done? Maybe the exercise released a brew of positive chemicals that made me appreciate every sound and sense. After his stay at Walden Pond, America’s favorite naturalist, Henry David Thoreau, implicitly understood the healing powers of nature. Without knowing a thing about neurotransmitters or stress-related hormones, he concluded that “an early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.” My walk had been in the late afternoon, but it also felt like a blessing. A reason to be grateful.
Maybe the secret involved simply being outside. The next day, I went back to my research and found that famed Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson used the word “biophilia” to describe the intense connection we have to nature. He saw the attachment as biologically determined, an instinctive evolutionary bond that we feel with other living things. Wilson declared that we needed to affirm our affinity for the natural environment because “our spirit is woven from it, hope rises on its currents.”
Less lyrically, studies have found that nature serves as a natural stress reliever and goes a long way toward keeping us well. Lots of evidence is gathering to show that being in a natural environment—the mountains, the woods, a flowering meadow—has a positive influence on our physical and emotional health. Japan has some fifty trails all over the country for what the Japanese call shinrin-yoku—or forest bathing. This “Forest Therapy” is supported by the government, which has plans to fund at least a hundred of these trails. City dwellers come to disconnect from technology and be immersed in nature—they listen to the birds, breathe the fresh air, smell the woodsy scents. Though the therapy is inspired by Buddhist and Shinto practices of letting nature into your life, there’s no particular spiritual ritual involved. You can simply walk, listen to ducks quacking, rest by a rock, and enjoy the greenery. Scientists are using the trails for medical research, and the “bathing” has been found to lower blood pressure and ease depression. And it’s not just the physical exercise, because one study found that an amble in the woods reduced the stress hormone cortisol significantly more than a similar stroll in an urban environment.
Countries including Finland and South Korea have set up their own Forest Therapy centers and are throwing millions of medical research dollars at them. What Henry David Thoreau implicitly understood about an early morning walk is getting serious research attention in this country, too. A study of veterans conducted at the University of Michigan found that being outdoors significantly boosted their well-being. (Admittedly it was funded by the Sierra Club, which seems unlikely to have concluded they’d be better off at their desks.) A well-known Texas study compared patients who’d undergone abdominal surgery and found that those whose windows overlooked trees needed less pain medication and got out of the hospital faster than patients facing a brick wall. That amazed me. Something about simply seeing green made people healthier and more resilient. Maybe the slightly wilted ficus trees that were a popular part of home decorating for a while had a real purpose. Being at one with nature made you feel calmer and more grateful for the world around you.
—
I gave a call to Marc Berman, a young professor at the University of Chicago who has been studying the neurological connections between nature, cognition, and emotion. His findings are so jaw-droppingly unexpected that if he didn’t have huge credentials behind him (which he does), you’d wonder if he were making the whole thing up. In one study, he looked at how people did on memory tests after a fifty-minute walk in nature versus a walk of the same length through a city. (He even provided GPS watches to make sure nobody cheated.) At the end, those who had been on the nature walks showed a 20 percent improvement in their short-term memory performance.
“That’s a crazy huge amount!” I said when he told me his results.
“Nature seems to change your brain physiology,” he explained.
Being in a pretty environment also improved people’s moods. When he tried the nature walks with people who were clinically depressed, they also got mood and memory benefits—though, interestingly, the two effects didn’t correlate. That is, people weren’t getting the memory benefit simply by being put in better moods. Something else was going on.
In a fascinating project that he undertook while working as a postdoctoral researcher in Toronto, Marc used satellite imagery to “quantify greenness” in the city. He then got regional health reports—including data on diabetes, heart disease, depression, and anxiety—and overlaid them with the environmental views.
“We were able to make direct connections and show that trees do have independent effects on improving health,” he said.
Interacting with nature increases our sense of connectedness. Being surrounded by woods or strolling through a field of flowers is interesting and aesthetically pleasing. It provides sensory stimulation, but as opposed to something like watching TV, it’s not harsh and all-consuming. The combination seems ideal for lowering stress and increasing feelings of gratitude.
The problem with walking in the city, Marc explained, was that it didn’t allow the mind to similarly relax and make its own connection. Many people (including me) get great pleasure strolling through a city and marveling at the architecture or observing the store windows. Sometimes when I walk home through my favorite New York streets late at night, the lights in the buildings seem to twinkle as appealingly as stars. But the noise and crowds in an urban area demand some vigilance—or at least put you on hyperalert. Just crossing the street requires more attention. The extreme example might be Times Square, with its neon billboards and flashing marquees, not to mention strange characters dressed as Spider-Man or the Naked Cowboy. While navigating all that, it’s hard for your brain to achieve the relaxed physiological state that would spin off into gratitude.
I told Marc that living in New York City, I walked a mile or two almost every day. It got me where I wanted to go, but as he suggested, it didn’t seem to do much for my mood. But that hour in the woods over the weekend had been sheer bliss. Was it too big a stretch to think that nature could naturally inspire feelings of gratitude?
“It certainly could. Nature improves well-being, and gratitude is part of that,” he said.
Well, that made me feel better. At least someone with a PhD thought I might be onto something.
The married couple Rachel and Stephen Kaplan (not related to me), two longtime professors at the University of Michigan whom Marc worked with in graduate school, began studying the restorative powers of nature decades ago. They set the stage by explaining that we feel stressed out when our “directed attention” is worn down. We’re pulled in too many directions or concentrating so intently that we get depleted. In nature, our minds can wander and get revitalized. They described a natural environment as having “soft fascination,” which allows us to relax and reflect without feeling overwhelmed. As Professor Stephen put it, “Clouds, sunsets, snow patterns, the motion of the leaves in the breeze—these readily hold the attention but in an undramatic fashion.”
True enough, though it depends on what you consider “undramatic.” Nature lowers stress and improves our ability to focus. New studies show it also increases creativity and may help children who have problems with attention and delayed gratification. Professor Rachel said the right environment could help people become more psychologically healthy by restoring a sense of balance and meaning. In an early study, she found that people who looked out to trees or other natural settings from their office windows were healthier, liked their jobs more, and reported greater life satisfaction than those with less inspiring views.
Various lab studies show that being in nature gives our prefrontal cortex (the area responsible for executive function) a rest. Being among those clouds, trees, and fragrant flowers produces a soothing rhythm that connects us to something bigger than ourselves. We feel grateful to be a part of this magical world.
—
The next weekend, I went out for another run on Granny’s AT, and the scientific explanations I’d learned fit how I felt. I didn’t have to think about anything—the positive feelings just came to me. Just as when I wrote in my gratitude diary, I felt connected to the cosmos and grateful to be alive.
I stopped at the edge of the river and stood for a very long time, mesmerized by the little eddies that formed at my feet and the green moss that covered the rocks like bits of velvet. Earlier in the week, I’d spoken to the marvelous filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg, who has had his cameras trained on nature 24/7 for the last thirty years. The resulting time-lapse films he created from years of steady work are breathtakingly glorious, showing flowers blossoming and mushrooms unfurling, butterflies emerging from cocoons and trees spiraling toward the sky.
“The images connect you to the outside world and you feel vibrations of gratitude deep in your heart for everyday wonders,” he said. “The earth puts out magnetic vibrations, and what I capture and share with people freezes those vibrations. The feelings of gratitude occur on a visceral level before the cognitive brain even has a chance to kick in.”
He created one film called Wings of Life (narrated by Meryl Streep), which intimately reveals bees interacting with flowers. “Pollination is a beautiful love story between the flower and the bee—a tiny event that occurs billions of times a day—and if it didn’t, life on this planet would be radically different,” he said. “That’s the magic, this web of interrelated relationships in nature happening every moment, that makes us grateful.”
His work mesmerized me as it unveiled nature’s mysteries, too small or fast for the eye to otherwise see. “It’s the little things that make us grateful,” he said. “The moments people cherish are the small ones with children and family or Sunday breakfast with a cup of coffee. Those open your heart to gratitude.”
Given all he had seen, I asked what images still made him pause with that heartfelt sense of wonder.
“I never get tired of watching flowers open, or slow-motion shots of hummingbirds or butterflies. I’ve seen some of my images several hundred times, and I don’t get bored because I feel that visceral gratitude for what I’m repeatedly observing. Nature’s beauty is a gift that cultivates gratitude.”
The nineteenth-century naturalist John Muir once said that “the clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” Some emotion that I could only call gratitude emerged when I walked in a forest, stood on a mountaintop, or looked out to the ocean. Clearly both Muir and Schwartzberg know what it means to feel at one with the vastness of the universe.
When I got home, I found Ron sitting on an Adirondack chair on our large wraparound deck, staring off to the mountains. He had his iPad on his lap but didn’t seem to be reading.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Just sitting here,” said my usually hyperactive husband.
I plopped down in the chair next to him. “Then I’ll sit here too,” I said.
We sat very quietly, watching the sun settling behind the mountains as the sky lit up with streaks of brilliant orange. I told Ron about my run and my new theory about how being in nature inspired gratitude. We didn’t have to consciously focus on how grateful we were to be here, to be alive, because nature announced its marvels, and we felt it deep in our bodies and souls.
“My soul can find no staircase to heaven save earth’s loveliness,” I said.
“Led Zeppelin?” he asked.
“It’s from Michelangelo, actually. When he wasn’t painting the Sistine Chapel, he wrote a few poems on the side.”
“Nice.” He picked up his iPad, and in a moment, the gentle strains of Zeppelin’s classic song filled the air.
“Are you making fun of me?” I asked.
“Nope. It just struck me that you’re right. Being part of nature is the real stairway to heaven.”
He reached over and took my hand as dusk settled behind the trees. I thought of how many poems and songs have been written about love, and how many about the beauties of nature. When we are in the thrall of either, we feel a gratitude deep in our souls. Maybe it’s oxytocin or endorphins or other chemicals that are released and connect us to the greater world. Maybe it is the joy we feel that makes us grateful. It is the stairway we mount to feel the beauty in the universe.