I would recognize the sound of the Tipton Lodge screen door slamming anywhere.
And while screen doors slam all over the South that particular screech meant I was somewhere safe.
It meant campfires and cold creek water and night hikes and the particular kind of tired that comes from moving your body in the real outdoors. It meant summer camp.
I was a camp kid long before I was a therapist and the more I’ve learned about the nervous system, stress responses, and regulation and what it takes for a human being to feel safe, the more grateful I am for those chapters of my life.
Ninety Percent Indoors
I see it in my sessions. Women who are doing everything right, the supplements, the sleep hygiene, the journaling and still feel like they’re running on empty. I’ll ask When did you last go outside? Not to run an errand. Not to walk to your car. Outside — in the actual, physical, living world — and just be there for a few minutes?
Too often the response is… not lately. We're moving from one meeting to the next, fluorescent offices to Zoom screens, and our nervous systems are keeping score.
There is a growing mountain of research confirming what many of us already feel in our bones: nature exposure is associated with measurably improved mental health, lower stress hormones, better sleep, sharper cognitive function, and reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression. The research is catching up to something the human body has known for a very long time.
Your nervous system was never designed for indoors. And somewhere, if you’re quiet enough, you already know this.
What the Night Hike Taught Me
Once a week, we’d hike to the top of a mountain — singing silly songs the whole way up, a Vespers service at the summit — and then hike back down in the dark. No flashlights allowed.
Our eyes had already adjusted. Slowly, without any of us noticing, the darkness had become navigable.
I use that image in therapy a lot. Healing isn’t a light switch. It’s your eyes adjusting.
And the outdoors the literal, physical outdoors is one of the most powerful environments we have for that adjustment to begin.
The sound of moving water activates the parasympathetic nervous system — the “rest and digest” branch that tells your body it is safe. Blood pressure drops. Heart rate slows. Cortisol, the primary stress hormone, eases. Walking in nature provides bilateral stimulation — left foot, right foot, a rhythmic alternating activation of both hemispheres of the brain. The same mechanism used in EMDR therapy, one of the most evidence-based treatments for trauma. When you take a walk outside, you aren’t just getting exercise. You’re helping your brain process what it’s been holding.
And then there’s the campfire.
I’m convinced — only slightly joking — that if I could always have the smell of campfire in my hair I could take on anything. Gathering around fire is one of the oldest forms of collective nervous system regulation in human history. The warmth, the light, the shared presence, the quality of stillness that fire creates in a group of people. Your body recognizes this as safe. Deeply, ancestrally safe. The smell is a signal your nervous system reads before your conscious mind catches up.
Seventeen Minutes
Research has given us a number: 120 minutes per week in nature is associated with significantly improved health and wellbeing. That sounds like a commitment. But, break it down and it’s 17 minutes a day — less than most of us spend scrolling before we get out of bed.
The time doesn’t have to be consecutive. A morning walk to the end of the block, ten minutes on your lunch break, a slow loop around Big Spring Park on a Saturday, the Botanical Gardens on a weekday when it's quiet and the light is right.
The research doesn’t require a mountain. It just requires that you actually go outside — and that when you do, you are present while you’re there.
That difference matters though, being outside isn’t the same as being in nature. Standing in a parking lot checking your phone doesn’t land in the body the way sitting near water does, letting the sound actually reach you. The invitation isn’t just to get outside — it’s to arrive there. To let your senses do the work they were built to do.
Sunlight helps regulate cortisol rhythms and mood. Immune function improves with regular outdoor time. Vitamin D, blood pressure, sleep quality — the list is long and the prescription is free. The “silly little mental health walk”? Research calls it one of the most cost-effective, side-effect-free interventions we have.
An Invitation, Not an Assignment
Nature as a healing practice doesn’t require anything from you. A tree doesn’t ask you to have your life together before it offers shade.
So much of what I do in therapy is help people relearn how to trust their own internal signals, sorting noise from what actually needs attention.
To tell the difference between a nervous system responding to real danger and one that has been indoors, overstimulated, and under-rested for too long.
Sometimes I see women who have been white-knuckling their way through the day for so long they’ve lost the thread of what calm even feels like. And what strikes me, over and over, is how quickly the body remembers when you give it the right environment. A session outside, or even just the conversation about the last time someone felt genuinely at ease in their own body, almost always involves nature somewhere in the story.
A lake. A trail. A porch. A sky.
Nature has a remarkable way of doing the work without any language at all. You don’t have to name what’s wrong. You don’t have to understand it. You just have to show up to the right environment and let your body remember what it already knows.
I think about the kids I was with at camp. The ones who arrived anxious or closed off or carrying things they had no words for yet. Something happened on those trails. Around those fires. On the porch at Tipton Lodge under a sky full of stars. Nobody was doing breathwork or processing their childhood. We were just outside, surrounded by people we trusted, in a place our bodies recognized as safe. And somehow, without anyone planning it, we came home more ourselves.
Maybe for you it wasn't camp. Maybe it was a grandmother's back porch, or a particular creek, or the way a certain ball field smelled after summer rain.
That is still available to you. Right now. This summer.
Healing isn’t linear
Anyone who’s doing this brave work will tell you that. It doesn’t follow a plan or announce itself on a schedule.
Sometimes it sounds like a screen door.
Sometimes it’s the smell of sunscreen and pine needles and lake water that tells your body, before your brain has caught up: you’re safe here. Sometimes it lives in the pause between your left foot and your right one, on a trail you’ve walked a hundred times.
I sleep on my parents’ screened-in porch a few nights every summer and I come back to myself a little every time. The screen door still sounds exactly the same.
Your nervous system knows what it needs. It’s always known. We just have to give it 17 minutes to remember.