Episode 12: The Therapy of Nature: How the Outdoors Supports Chronic Illness

In Episode 12, Kari explores the therapy of nature and how time outdoors can support people living with chronic illness, pain, fatigue, and nervous system dysregulation.  Kari begins the episode by reflecting on a familiar moment in nature, using sensory details to model what it means to slow down and simply be present outdoors. 

Kari reflects on how nature offers something rare in modern life: non-demanding, predictable sensory input. She explains why this can be especially regulating for chronically ill bodies and for people experiencing anxiety, depression, or emotional overwhelm. Nature, she says, doesn’t ask us to push, improve, or prove anything, it gives permission to exist as we are.

The episode explores how nature supports the nervous system, including parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) activation, reduced stress hormones through visual exposure to greenery, and regulation of breathing and heart rate through natural sounds. Kari connects these effects to chronic pain, fatigue, migraines, and autonomic dysfunction, emphasizing that regulation—not exertion—is often what the body needs most.

Kari reframes accessibility by expanding the definition of “nature time.” She reminds listeners that nature doesn’t have to mean hiking or physical activity. It can be a porch, houseplants, sunlight, bird sounds, or simply opening a window during a migraine. She emphasizes that passive exposure still counts and encourages listeners to let go of doing nature “the right way.”

The episode also touches on the emotional healing that nature can offer, particularly during grief, sadness, anger, or frustration. Kari reflects on how nature helps people feel smaller in a comforting way, offering perspective, continuity, and a reminder that life moves in cycles without urgency.

She shares her own journey of redefining her relationship with nature as chronic illness changed her physical capacity. Through sitting still, nature photography, and watercolor painting inspired by the outdoors, Kari discovered new ways to connect that felt even more therapeutic than the high-exertion activities she once loved.

Kari closes with a gentle reminder: nature doesn’t cure chronic illness, but it can make living with it more bearable. Healing isn’t always forward motion, sometimes it’s settling, resting, and allowing yourself to be held by the world around you.

Episode links:

https://rosaliehaizlett.com/

https://rosaliehaizlett.com/collections/books

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to both sides of the couch. I'm Carrie, a therapist who also happens to be a human navigating chronic illness, which means I see life from both sides. This is where I share honest stories, lessons, and little reminders that you don't have to have it all figured out to keep showing up. Let's get into today's episode. I am sitting on a bench in Black Waterfalls State Park. I can hear birds. I'm not a pro bird identifier, but they sound familiar and I listen to see how close they sound. If I see one. I try to identify it. I watch what it does, how it's gliding in the air over the river. I smell pine, an earthy dirt type scent, and this freshness, I'm not really sure what to call. I'm looking at the river down below. Seeing the water flow, I see a kayaker going over some rapids. They stop in a pool, take a drink and look around too. I hear the water flowing. I hear the rapids. I feel the rock. My feet are touching. I touch a leaf on the tree that's hanging over me. I think about the wild berries on the trail that aren't ripe anymore, but the tart tastes. That a wild barely has. It's peaceful and relaxing. I lose a sense of time. For some reason when I leave, I just feel better. Today it's episode 12, the Therapy of Nature and how the Outdoors supports chronic illness. I described one of my favorite places to be where I can just simply be, I don't have to do anything, although there are a lot of options of activities around me. I don't have to do any of them to enjoy nature, and nature kind of feels like the one place that doesn't ask us to perform. Yes, we can choose to go hiking. We can choose to mountain bike, we can choose to ski, we can choose to do those things, but nature is not asking us to do those things. Nature's just giving us permission just to be, just as it is all around us. So I find nature to be very regulating, especially for chronically ill bodies, but also for anyone struggling with mental health issues, anxiety, depression dysregulation. It's predictable. I think that's one of the biggest things about nature is that like we know pretty much what we're getting into. Right? Especially if it's a familiar place. Sure there are exceptions to that, but I'm not talking to those right now. But I really feel like it's the non-demanding sensory input that we don't get from a lot of other things. I think that nature can provide a really gentle stimulation that can help your nervous system. I don't think there's much social pressure when I'm in the outdoors. There's definitely fewer expectations from people or society around me. 'cause a lot of times there's nobody around me and I think about how. Our bodies have evolved in relationship with the natural world. I think that's why, for me, like connecting with the simplicity of nature is something that I really lean towards. I like to be somewhere where I don't see signs of human life quite as much. I know some people really enjoy sitting in like a city park and seeing the bustling of the city around the nature. I like that too. But my preferred place to spend time in nature is somewhere where I don't see anybody or any structures around. There has been a lot of links to nature in our nervous system. Nature supports parasympathetic activation that rest and digest activation. It. Has been shown to calm your body when you're feeling really stressed or in fight or flight. The visual exposure to greenery actually reduces our stress hormones and the sounds of nature regulate breathing in our heart rate. So if you notice, if you do any like deep breathing videos or audios, often there are sounds of water rainstorms, birds, like nature is usually included in that 'cause it just naturally regulates our breathing and heart rate. And I think this really matters for pain, chronic pain, fatigue, and autonomic systems. It needs all of these things to regulate itself and teach itself to feel. Calm, peace and relaxation. I do think a lot, this is talked about a lot too. Nature as a therapy there's a term called forest bathing. I believe it was introduced in Japan and it's something that people actively do where they just go outside and sit in the forest. They don't have to do any activities other than like walking to where you're gonna sit or driving to where you're gonna sit and just like. Sit there, like you sit in a bathtub and feel nature and experience it. I think particularly when normal self-care is too much, like when you're feeling excessively fatigued or struggling through a situational illness on top of a chronic illness or just too stressed out to do your regular self-care routine. Nature is a really easy one to go to. 'cause you literally can just sit there. There's nothing you have to be doing to experience the benefits of that. And actually you don't even have to be outside in nature. You can look out a window and that is just as effective. I think some people even will find good effects from just watching a live stream of nature. For me, screen time kind of negates the benefits, so I have to actually be looking at real nature. But yeah, you don't have to feel good to be there. You can feel really tired. You can feel very sick. You can feel in a lot of pain, but you're just there. Right? It's the same as if you were inside. You're still feeling the way that you're feeling, but you're having the benefits of being in nature. I think even if, like, let's break it down too. Like say you have a migraine, it's too bright outside. You can't look just listening, like crack a window open. Hear the sounds outside your window, maybe even like, feel the breeze. Like smell the outside. There's a lot of modifications you can make to be in nature. I'm even thinking of like a lot of the trails or parks that I go to, there's a lot of accommodations for different mobility too, like having trails that are paved. Or have some sort of decking so people who are in a wheelchair or another mobility device can easily navigate the trails and still be able to experience it too. And then I've seen like handicap accessible kayak launches. There's lots of stuff out there, right? But there's ways that we can modify it for other types of disabilities or chronic illnesses too. I find nature to be. One of the best things that I can do during a flare are like very low energy days that CNI described in the beginning was actually from a day where I was just, and I had been in a really bad flare for weeks and I was like, I got to get out of this. So even though I'm so exhausted after work and I have. Minimal time left where the sun's gonna be out. I'm just gonna drive myself to the park and just sit there and like, look at stuff. I really like the park because it really changes like week to week in the seasons. Even if I went two weeks ago, I could see like a completely different scene, hear different birds, see different animals. The temperature can be drastically different day to day because it's at a higher elevation. And actually on my way home realized that I felt better than I had felt in those weeks of having a flare. And I didn't like actively do anything other than drive myself to get there. I think I mentioned this earlier, but like accessibility and redefining what nature time can look like. 'cause I think traditionally people think of like hiking or forests or parks like I described, but. As I said earlier, it can be a window, it can be your front porch. It can even be house plants that you have in your home. I actually have a lot of house plants. I never thought about the connection of that. Why I like them so much is 'cause it reminds me of being outside bird sounds or even like sunlight. And we can replicate those inside without. Actually having to go anywhere. There's lots of, recordings of bird sounds like I said in those videos and audios, but also just like informational educational to help birders identify birds. You can just listen to videos like that and then we have those sunlight replicating lamps that can be super helpful for people that live in environments where they get very little sun in the winter. So you can have that even if you have lots of sun and you just can't get outside, you're really meeting your body where it is. You don't have to accommodate necessarily to get there. If all your body can do is sit in bed in the dark, there's still ways that you can find a connection with nature. I really encourage you to let go of doing it right. There's no right way to be in nature. There's no goal that has to be achieved. There's no metric there. It's really just how you experience it and the way that you prefer or the way that you can at this time. I do think there are a lot of emotional benefits to nature too, like when you have big, heavy emotions that are hard to process a lot of people lean to nature. I'm thinking specifically of like grief. There's a lot of rituals around grief that connect to nature for me, even if we're just thinking of it in like the traditional grief from death scenario. Having the graveside service your outside in nature, like a beautifully landscaped area. While you're grieving putting this person in their final resting place. And also when we think about people scattering like cremains, they're usually doing that in nature, in the ocean, in water, on a mountaintop in the person's favorite place to be outside. I think of those things. I also think sometimes when you're sad, just sitting outside and being sad can be healing. It's like nature. It takes what you don't need to keep. In a sense, it absorbs some of that heaviness for you. At least for me it does, but I also think like it works for other, more like anger and frustration type feelings. Like I talked in the beginning, it's calming, it's regulating to be outside and that naturally eases some of those feelings. And also like positive feelings too. We have celebrations outside. Lots of people choose to get married outside kids' birthday parties, they're often at parks. Summer barbecues where we get together with our families rituals around going to the mountains for Christmas. A lot of people do this naturally. Another aspect of the emotional, I think the emotional benefits are because when you're in nature, you kind of get a sense of feeling smaller. And I think it's comforting. It's comforting for me. It doesn't make my problems feel so big when you see the perspective of you and this like big, vast experience. And even if I'm looking out my window, just thinking about everywhere, not just what I can see out my window, but all of the nature in the world, everywhere. It makes me feel small in a good way. And then I think there's also the reminder of I, life continues in cycles without urgency, right? The seasons change at a predictable rate. Watching the tree out in my front yard. The leaves fall. In the fall. The tree looks dead in the winter, but it starts sprouting new buds every spring, even with snow still on the ground, and then is fully back to its prime self in the summer and repeats all over again. Think about that with my. Cut flowers, my wild cut flowers that I plant. Even though we're in the dead of winter right now, I still have flower stalks, in the flower beds that have the dried out flour on them. They haven't fallen over in the snow or the wind or anything. They're still there. And reminding myself that those seeds will eventually fall and new flowers are gonna come every single spring. Even flowers that were planted long before I lived here, I remember the first time I saw them was in the spring. I was like, oh, wow, where did these come from? Who knew they were here all along? I also find like rivers and bodies of water, like they just flow on no matter what. They just go, they don't have a choice. A rock falls, it reroutes a drought. Those puddles still remain. They're small, and then after rain, the rushing of it, they just go with the flow. There's no stress about how fast or how slow the water is. It just is. So this year in particular, I think I found two new ways for me to be in nature while I was dealing with the idea that I may not be able to experience nature in the same way that I have in the past. I've always been a big hiker nothing like extremely crazy or strenuous. But mostly I'm just doing day hikes and the occasional rock scramble and small creek crossing. But when I realized I wasn't able to do the trails I had used to be able to do. I felt like nature was being taken away from me. Because that was the way I was used to enjoying it, and I got really stuck in that vision of loss. Instead of finding a new way that I could experience it, it was like I didn't see any other way. Oh, I can't do this, I can't be outside. And it was really frustrating, but I don't know, it just like came to me one day like, oh, there there are other ways that you enjoy nature. I was reflecting on, I think this was late summer in a park I go to very frequently. All these mushrooms had bloomed. Bloomed, is that what you say? It's browned that I had never seen before. This was like a new area that we moved to this past year in a very ecologically unique. Place for lack of better words. Sorry, I'm having a Monday. Anyways, I just like pulled out my phone and was taking pictures of these mushrooms at the time. I'm actually like rarely taking pictures. 'cause when I'm in nature, I'm, I'm just really looking at things and enjoying it. But I took a picture of probably like 20 different mushrooms. And I was so interested in them look at this. I've never seen this before. See how it's growing? Look at the colors. I was zoned in on these mushrooms. And then later I took the pictures and was trying to identify what they were, and finding out information about them. It was just really cool. I just really enjoyed that. And it wasn't just the time I was there looking at the mushrooms, but I got that time later with the pictures and identifying and then reading up about them. And I thought, you know what, maybe I would really enjoy nature photography, like getting like a real camera, not just using my cell phone. And that would gimme a way to be in nature and experience it without having to use any physical exertion. Because. From what I knew about photography at the time, there's a lot of adjusting the settings in your camera so you could literally sit in one spot for an hour trying to get the best picture or different views. So I made a decent investment and I used camera and started that hobby of nature photography and I found it really enjoyable because it taught me that I didn't have to be moving in the outdoors to really be experiencing it. And in fact, me staying in one place, I noticed things I had not noticed before when I was hiking. 'cause when I was hiking, you know, it was like, I wanna be done at a certain time or, I gotta get up this hill. If I slow down it'll be too hard. But where, when I would just pick a spot to sit pack a little picnic dinner and have a. Sparkling water and stay in that spot until it was finished with those and took pictures as the sun was setting and moving. There's just like a lot of different things that you get to notice and it felt, it just felt really good and peaceful even though that physically I wasn't feeling good during the days I was doing this. So that was really cool. I was really excited just to have like one new thing, but I also, took up watercolor painting. There's this really talented local artist in West Virginia. I'm gonna butcher her name because I don't know how to pronounce it, but her first name is Rosalie Heli Rosalie. I'm sorry, I'm butchering your name. If I am. It's H-A-I-Z-L-E-T-T. And she has this really awesome book. That she wrote. I can't even imagine how much work this had to be, but it's called Watercolor in Nature and it teaches you using nature to learn to watercolor and sketch out. 'cause there's a little bit, I didn't realize there's sketching involved in some forms of watercolor. I thought I'm not really artistic. I'm not good at drawing. So I don't know if this is really gonna be. Something that works out for me. But the book is beautiful, so I thought even if I don't end up, you know, being good at this, I can enjoy looking at the pictures and reading. 'cause she writes about the nature too. She has another book about, I haven't finished it because it is really not a lot of words, but the pictures I look at for so long, they're so much detail to see. But the book is about, she took a significant period of time off, to go to like different places in Appalachia. she painted all these different places and like described what each day was like and kind of like her personal journey. Anyways both. The books are really great. I highly recommend them, but I bought the book at a local shop on a whim after buying some of her art and. Turns out if I have instructions, it's actually pretty easy to figure out how to paint. And like even after the first couple, it's, I think that you, you do it in order to learn the skills. But even after the first couple ones, I was able to like, oh, I wanna paint this. And then I was actually able to paint it. I actually haven't finished all the example instructions in the book yet, but this last Christmas. I painted watercolor, painted Christmas cards for everyone. I actually hadn't sent out Christmas cards in a while, but being able to like paint these cards I don't know, it was just really cool experience and a lot of my cards were outdoor scenes or nature theme scenes. So anyways, that hobby was really cool too, and one of my good friends. Gave me a Christmas present. I haven't used it yet. It's like a little travel watercolor kit. Like it has like mini watercolors and this mini pad of paper and a little thing that you can put water in and a watercolor paintbrush. And it's like packaged really cool so you can like take it with you out. On a hike or pull it out real quick, keep it in your bag and just like paint on the go. And I was like, wow, that sounds really cool. I can't wait to use it. Yeah, so I developed like two new really cool hobbies that involve nature that have really taught me about sitting still in nature. And I find that, sitting still in nature has been more therapeutic and healing for me than the other activities I used to do. So if photography and watercolor doesn't sound like your thing, I still challenge you to find a way to rest in nature. Maybe that's getting a hammock and setting it up and literally taking a nap in nature or getting a. A comfy outdoor chair to sit on your front porch or finding your favorite window in the house and perching there, finding bird sounds that you wanna listen to while you're relaxing, however it looks for you. But I really challenge everyone to find something and just pay attention to how you feel after you've spent this time with your nature, and use that as a motivator to regulate your nervous system a little bit more frequently. So in closing, nature doesn't fix chronic illness, but often can make it more bearable. I do think there's some healing that it can do, depending on your chronic ill illness. But we're not talking about curing, right? And I think any way that you are able to enjoy it, you're allowed to do that and let yourself know that you don't have to go to the park and engage in any of the activities. To be allowed to be there. In fact, that's why they put benches there for people to just sit and be in nature. You can even sit in your car and look out your car windows and enjoy it. You don't even have to get out. But I learned a lesson this year with one of my favorite places to be, and that's, healing isn't always forward mission. Sometimes it's just sitting and settling, and that can be. Just as valuable as the way you feel when you finish that strenuous hike. Thanks for joining me on both sides of the couch. If something you heard today resonated, share this episode with someone who might need it. And if you'd like to support the show or find more of my work, check the links in the show notes. Until next time, take care of yourself on both sides of the couch.