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I strongly encourage viewers, readers, and interested friends to visit Tara’s website Tara Brach – Meditation, Psychologist, Author, Teacher. So much of what I consider to be true and helpful is the wisdom I have learned from Tara Brach, an American psychologist, author, and proponent of Buddhist meditation – but more than that, she is authentic, compassionate and honest.

Retrieved and edited 06/12/2021 from “Voice of Experience: Three rules for identifying abnormal child sexual behaviors” by Gregory K. Moffatt, a veteran counsellor with more than 30 years experience. If you are a survivor of sexual trauma at any age, I encourage you not to read this article.

From the perspective of Moffatt’s professional experience, childhood sexual behaviours can be grouped into three categories: 1. normal behaviours, 2. behaviours that are not normal but not unusual, and 3. behaviours that are abnormal or statistically rare. For the purpose of this post, I will be replacing the word “normal” with “natural” and/or “common” moving forward.

Rule No. 1: Natural or common sexual behaviours in children are never forced. The exploration is mutual. While one child likely had the idea first, both children must participate freely. This doesn’t mean that two children might willingly agree to engage in abnormal sexual behaviours, however, therefore read the next to rules for clarification.

Rule No. 2: Natural or common sexual behaviours in children are never painful. Children who behave within cultural and developmental norms will stop what they are doing when they realise they have caused pain.

Rule No. 3: Natural or common sexual behaviour in children is never invasive. Natural childhood curiosity does not include inserting objects or one’s own body parts into the cavities of others — anus, vagina, mouth, etc.

I’m unsure why Moffatt didn’t make this a 4th rule – he did add that most of the time, this type of childhood behaviour occurs between children of similar age. It is highly unusual for a young child to sexually engage with a teen without violating one of the three rules above. That behaviour definitely calls for further investigation. And, certainly, any sexual interaction between an adult and a child is cause for mandated reporting.

Author: Lori Gottlieb

Maybe you should talk to someone is a genuine, funny, touching, and realistic memoir of one therapist, as she navigates a difficult time in her professional and personal life. I couldn’t put this book down. As a therapeutic counsellor myself, the book gave me a greater understanding of psychology and human behaviour. It is a vulnerable portrayal of a renowned psychotherapist, her therapist, and the clients lives that she discusses in the book – and how they influence her life. If you have any preconceived bias about the therapy profession, this book might give you a new perspective. I laughed whole-heartedly and I blinked back the tears on one occasion. I’m really pleased I read Maybe You Should Talk About Someone. If you’re a busy person, the audio version may be more practical for you.

Human-Kind. Isn’t that lovely. We have moved away from the patriarchal term mankind – ‘man’ who has not always been ‘kind’, necessarily – toward equality between the sexes and acknowledging gender fluidity. Noah touches on this. If you’re interested in the evolution of humanity and how we are capable of co-operating as a global community, give this book a go. You may experience information overload – but when condensing 2.4 million years into less than 500 pages, Harari goes alright. I’m someone who didn’t pay attention to history at school so I found this book enlightening, empowering and also disheartening at times. Harari writes about the breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions. The power of human imagination, math and language has been instrumental in the development of humankind into an apex predator, and the destruction of everything else.

I was recently browsing some of the units I completed for my counselling diploma – for revision. The human memory has not evolved to store, organise, categorise and recall all the large amounts of information we collect every day, nor is our memory always accurate. It’s important for counsellors and therapists to keep up to date with new approaches to counselling, and it doesn’t hurt to read over learned materials from college days. I thought I’d provide some learning about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for readers.

Just to acknowledge the work of others, most of what is written below, I have retrieved and paraphrased from ACCEPTANCE AND COMMITMENT THERAPY Published by: Australian Institute of Professional Counsellors Pty Ltd.

Acceptance and commitment therapy, known as ACT (pronounced as the word ‘act’), is an approach to counselling that was originally developed in the early 1980s by Steven C. Hayes, and became popular in the early 2000’s through Hayes’ collaboration with Kelly G. Wilson, and Kirk Strosahl as well as through the work of Russ Harris. You can look them up on Youtube or Google if you’re interested in what they might have to say about ACT.

“Unlike more traditional cognitive-behaviour therapy (CBT) approaches, ACT does not
seek to change the form or frequency of people’s unwanted thoughts and emotions. Rather,
the principal goal of ACT is to cultivate psychological flexibility, which refers to the ability to
contact the present moment, and based on what the situation affords, to change or persist
with behaviour in accordance with one’s personal values. To put it another way, ACT
focuses on helping people to live more rewarding lives even in the presence of undesirable
thoughts, emotions, and sensations.”
(Flaxman, Blackledge & Bond, 2011, p. vii)

ACT interventions tend to focus around two main processes:

• Developing acceptance of unwanted private experiences that are outside of personal
  control.
• Commitment and action toward living a valued life (Harris, 2009)

In a nutshell, ACT gets its name from its core ideas of accepting what is outside of your personal control and committing to action that improves and enriches your life.

Cognitive Defusion is the process of learning to detach ourselves from our thought processes and simply observe them for what they are – “transient private events – an ever-changing stream of words, sounds and pictures” (Harris, 2006, p. 6). I think this component of ACT is incredibly beneficial if we practice it daily. I like to say, just like the function of the heart is to pump oxygenated blood around the body, one of the brain’s functions is to have thoughts. We can observe thoughts without taking them to mean more than what they are. Some thoughts are automatic, some are subconscious, and some are unconscious or preconscious beliefs that we consider to be true and factual and “rules” about how the world operates and how we have to operate in it. If someone is defused from their thought processes, these processes do not have control on the person; instead the person is able to simply observe them without getting caught up in them or feel the need to change/control them.

Acceptance is the process of opening oneself up and “making room for unpleasant feelings, sensations, urges, and other private experiences; allowing them to come and go without struggling with them, running from them, or giving them undue attention” (Harris, 2006, p. 7). Practicing acceptance is important because it encourages the individual to develop an ability and willingness to feel uncomfortable without being overwhelmed by it (Flaxman, Blackledge & Bond, 2011). It’s important to acknowledge that to accept something doesn’t mean we like it or have a passive attitude. It is to accept something exactly as it is and then we choose what to do with it. Think of the Serenity Prayer: Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

Contact with the present moment is the concept of being “psychologically present” and bringing full attention to the “here-and-now” experience (Harris, 2009). I’d also argue that to psychologically present, we must also be aware of our physical body and the sensations within it and outside of it. Because we have the ability to think about the past and about the future, sometimes it can be difficult to stay in the present (Batten, 2011; Harris, 2009). Having contact with the present moment is essential because that it where we find out anchor and power. We have the ability to pay attention in a flexible manner to the present moment and connect with that experience rather than ruminate on past events or future possibilities (Lloyd & Bond, 2015). Some of you might say “What if I can’t stand the present moment?”. True. If you have extreme emotional experiences or have a history of trauma, it may be functional for you to use distraction or talking to someone when the present moment is “too much to take”. What we want to work towards is using healthy coping strategies in the present moment mindfully, instead of behaviours that no longer serve us.

Values, and identifying them, (i.e., what is important to the individual) is a central element of ACT because it assists clients to move in the direction of living and creating a meaningful life. One of the central goals of ACT is to help clients to connect with the things they value most and to travel in “valued directions” (Stoddard & Afari, 2014).

Committed action is the process of taking steps towards one’s values even in the presence of unpleasant thoughts and feelings (Harris, 2009). Behavioural interventions, such as goal setting, exposure, behavioural activation, and skills training, are generally used to create committed action. The ACT model acknowledges that learning is not enough, one must also take action to create change.

Self-as-context, or what I prefer to call “the observing self” or simply just our self-awareness, creates a distinction between the ‘thinking self’ and the ‘observing self’ (Harris, 2009). The thinking self refers to the self that generates thoughts, beliefs, memories, judgments, fantasies, and plans, whereas the observing self is the self that is aware of what we think, feel, sense, or do (Harris, 2009). “From this perspective, you are not your thoughts and feelings; rather, you are the context or arena in which they unfold” (Stoddard & Afari, 2014). Being aware of the observing self allows an individual to have a greater ability to be mindful and in the present moment, as they can separate themselves from the thoughts, beliefs, and memories they have.

Hello readers! A few of the cognitive styles below were mentioned in my last post. As humans, we have a tendency to forget things so a bit of revision can be useful.

Many people have cognitive processes that result in overall unhelpful thinking styles that they tend to apply globally across situations and which may result in emotional distress (such as depression or anxiety) or unhelpful behaviours (such as anger or avoidance). Some of the most problematic thinking styles are listed in the extract below.

Mental Filter: This thinking styles involves a “filtering in” and “filtering out” process – a sort of “tunnel vision”, focusing on only one part of a situation and ignoring the rest. Usually this means looking at the negative parts of a situation and forgetting the positive parts, and the whole picture is coloured by what may be a single negative detail.

Jumping to Conclusions: I’m sure you’ve heard people say on television, “Don’t jump to conclusions” or “The truth is we just don’t know yet”. We jump to conclusions when we assume that we know what someone else is thinking (mind reading) and when we make predictions about what is going to happen in the future (predictive thinking).

Personalisation: This involves blaming yourself for everything that goes wrong or could go wrong, even when you may only be partly responsible or not responsible at all. You might be taking 100% responsibility for the occurrence of external events.

Catastrophising: Catastrophising occurs when we “blow things out of proportion” and we view the situation as terrible, awful, dreadful, and horrible, even though the reality is that the problem itself is quite small. A helpful restructuring of this cognition is to ask yourself if the situation will still be awful, terrible, or dreadful in a month. There may be ongoing consequences or stress involved if you lose a job or a relationship ends, so validate the experience you are having but also take a look at the big picture. What’s the worst that could happen? Why is the worst so “bad”? And if you are being realistic about the issue, reach out for some help if you can.

Black & White Thinking: This thinking style involves seeing only one extreme or the other. You are either wrong or right, good or bad and so on. There are no in-betweens or shades of grey.

Should-ing and Must-ing: Sometimes by saying “I should…” or “I must…” you can put unreasonable demands or pressure on yourself and others. Although these statements are not always unhelpful (e.g. “I should not get drunk and drive home”), they can sometimes create unrealistic expectations.

Overgeneralisation: When we overgeneralise, we take one instance in the past or present, and impose it on all current or future situations. If we say “You always…” or “Everyone…”, or “I never…” then we are probably overgeneralising.

Labelling: We label ourselves and others when we make global statements based on behaviour in specific situations. We might use this label even though there are many more examples that aren’t consistent with that label.

Emotional Reasoning: This thinking style involves basing your view of situations or yourself on the way you are feeling. For example, the only evidence that something bad is going to happen is that you feel like something bad is going to happen. I live with anxiety and it can be debilitating at times. I use my “wiser thinking” or “rational thinking” to evaluate whether I am operating from an emotional mindset. You might ask yourself: “What’s the evidence?”, “Does the past necessarily predict the future?”, “Am I angry or fearful right now because that might be clouding my judgement?”. It can be helpful to talk to someone who isn’t caught in your emotional headspace, or perhaps wait for the emotion to subside to think about the situation again.

Magnification and Minimisation: In this thinking style, you magnify the positive attributes of other people and minimise your own positive attributes. It’s as though you’re explaining away your own positive characteristics.

(CCI, 2008)

Well, hello and good morning, afternoon, and evening readers. I truly hope you’re swimming in the pleasantries of life rather than keeping your head above water in the unpleasant swamp. HOPE = Hold On Pain Ends. And there’s generally a learning or personal growth that comes after the storm of every painful experience, even if it’s simply greater empathy and compassion for others.

Today’s the day to learn or remember the fallacies of the human mind. I am not as smart as I look, haha. Have you heard of heuristics before? In cognitive psychology, a heuristic is a mental “shortcut” that allows people to solve problems and make judgments quickly and efficiently. They can be very helpful in many situations, but they can also lead to cognitive biases, errors in thinking, and even perhaps without the mental shortcut, our thinking is often filled to the brim with cognitive distortions, assumptions and fallacies (faults). Awareness raising is probably the first step to identify our own cognitive traps and also identify them in others. Cognitive errors are natural – we all have them. Below are some cognitive distortions/errors to be aware of when we reflect on our interactions with people, during personal reflection, and when making meaningful decisions or judgements.

• ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING (aka. POLARISED THINKING, SPLITTING, and BLACK-AND-WHITE THINKING: is extreme thinking i.e., the error in a person’s thinking to bring together the dichotomy of both positive and negative qualities of the self and others into a cohesive, realistic whole. It is a common defense mechanism. Before you think “I must have really shitty thinking because I do this ALL the time”, give yourself a break. If you’re thinking in black and white, you probably internalised this from social media, television and movies, your family of origin and the broader society. Be mindful of using extreme, dichotomist terms, such as “failure”, “success”, “best”, “worst”, “freezing”, “boiling”, “everything”, and “nothing”. If you think “I’m a terrible person”, that is bullshit and inaccurate. You may have behaved terribly for a period of time towards yourself, to someone else, or towards some “thing”, but we cannot discount all the NON-terrible qualities about you. We must THINK in DIALECTICS i.e., the ability to view issues from multiple perspectives with reason and wisdom or in other words being able to have two contradictory viewpoints, where a greater truth emerges from their interplay. The truth is, if you think you’re a terrible person, there’s also virtuous person in there too.

• OVERGENERALISTION: The words “always”, “every” and “never” come into play here, and you have an unshakable “rule” or “conviction” about yourself, something, or someone, based on one or two incidences. Overgeneralising is “a cognitive distortion in which an individual views a single event as an invariable RULE, so that, for example, failure at accomplishing one task will predict an endless pattern of defeat in all tasks.” Coming into the present moment and being specific can be helpful if you are someone who overgeneralises. You may also want to ask yourself if what your saying is the really the truth. Is it really accurate or correct. There’s an assumption that because something has happened once or a few times that it’s like going to happen every time. Remember, the words “always”, “every”, and “never” frequently appear in this cognitive “trap”. I encourage you to look at the big picture and ask yourself if what you’re saying or thinking is accurate. Overgeneralisations tend to be vague and board statements e.g., “I always get every red light”. Perhaps this is part of our evolutionary negativity bias. We tend to notice the so-called “bad” and overlook the so-called “good”. If you find yourself using overgeneralisations that suggest a future prediction (e.g., “I’ll never get a partner) … use some humour – you may have big balls but neither one of them are crystal – VEEP. If there is some truth to unusually frequent and specific situations that are making your life unpleasant, validate them, talk to someone, and brainstorm some solutions. We humans have plenty of blind spots that others can see sometimes.

• MENTAL FILTER: is considered to be the opposite to OVERGENERALISATION the mental filter takes one small event and focuses on it exclusively, filtering out anything else that’s relevant. Filtering out the positive and focusing on the negative can have a detrimental impact on your mental well-being. Filtering out the so-called “negative” can also make one a bit hubris (excessive pride or self-confidence), arrogant, vain and conceited – and then you’re just a stone’s throw away from narcissism.

• PERSONALISATION AND BLAME: Personalization and blame is a cognitive distortion whereby you entirely blame yourself, or someone else, for a situation that in reality involved many factors that were out of your control. I think this is a symptom of our wounded ego, or simply just the ego. As human’s we are egocentric, like children, and we often think that circumstances in our environment are solely because of our influence. For example, your friend isn’t behaving like they usually do, so it must be because you have done something.

Again, personalisation is an egocentric error in cognition. “Of course it has to do with me”, we think. It makes sense that we personalise things. We are the star of our own show, our own narrative. If you personalise something, it means we’ve directly influenced it – we are the primary cause. This may elicit internal pain, shame or guilt, so what’s the pay-off? Personalisation is a cognitive error that offers us the illusion of control e.g., “If we caused it then we will learn how to not cause it again, and maybe even undo what we have caused”. If you think about it, personalising something is something children do. Remember, there are infinite variables in any situation to take full credit of the outcome. That being said, it is responsible and mature to reflect objectively on the influence of our behaviour and what we can learn about our shortcomings.

Blame deserves it’s own blog post but in short, it can be defined as a defence mechanism to protect the self from feeling some unwanted emotion or thinking something unacceptable in relation to the “self”. Blaming provides a way of devaluing others, an the pay-off or reinforcement the blamer receives is a sense of superiority. It protects our ego from feeling responsible for something, and protects us from feeling guilt or shame. Perfectionists are very good at blaming others, and themselves. Even if you genuinely think faulting someone or something is valid, remember that no one is perfect. Recognise that you are human and others are fallible humans. As they say in recovery, “there is a bit of bad in the best of us and a bit of good in the worst of us“. We may have internalised from society and culture that we couldn’t make mistakes (because we receive “punishment” for making mistakes) but we must move beyond that now. As adults, we need to get real. Validate your experience because it may be very disappointing when we don’t meet others or our own expectations. We must nurture and care for the wounded child. Lets attend and befriend to our shortcomings and accept we are not superhuman. Learn to expect you will make mistakes. Failure is kind of an illusion, isn’t it? Or maybe a social construct? “Failure” is really learning – replace ‘failure’ with the word ‘feedback’. Would a cat or dog blame them self for a “mistake”? In the minds of animals, there’s no such concept as failure or a mistake.

Here’s a link to website “simplypsychology” that discusses a theory called Attribution Theory, an idea about how people explain the causes of behaviour and events: Attribution Theory – Situational vs Dispositional | Simply Psychology

Adapted from Australian Institute of Professional Counsellors, Institute Inbrief, Edition 359.

Good day readers! How are you? … Shit? Depressed? Anxious? Angry? First of all, if you’re someone who says “I feel shit”, I would encourage you to use a more accurate descriptor instead of shit. Tell your brain what emotion or feeling you are experiencing. Shit can mean a lot of things. When we’re able to identify an emotion, it’s more likely we’ll be able to regulate or manage it. When I was learning Dialectical Behavioural Therapy, they had a saying: Name it to claim it to tame it. They also encouraged us to distance our identity from our feelings e.g., “I’m having the feeling that I’m angry” rather than “I’m angry”. I know it sounds like simple fluff but there is a profound difference between observing the experience of anger, loneliness, fear, guilt etc. and believing we (the self) are the embodiment or a manifestation of an emotion.

Alright, moving along to the subject of the article. The Australian Institute of Professional Counsellors sent me their monthly (I think it’s monthly) Institute Inbrief. If you’re someone who has lived with a mental health disorder or emotional difficulties for a long time, being in nature is not really a new antidote from the field. And it’s not always as simple as just going out into nature. When I was deep in the abyss of my own depression, there wasn’t a lot that would change my mood or perception of life. But, we do these practices anyway – and that’s kind of the point. It’s a practice. It may have to be initiated using a bit of self-force. Oftentimes, motivation comes after we begin the motion.

So, here are some examples from the article that support ‘nature has a therapeutic effect for the mind and body’:

• One study found that women who looked at pictures of nature for two minutes had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol (Gillespie, et al., 2019).
• Another study showed that people who walked in a forest preserve showed lower levels of hostility, aggression and anxiety than they did before the walk.
• Gregory Bratman, PhD, an assistant professor at the University of Washington, and colleagues shared evidence that contact with nature is associated with increases in happiness, subjective well-being, positive affect, positive social interactions and a sense of meaning and purpose in life, as well as decreases in mental distress (Science Advances, Vol. 5, No. 7, 2019).

How can we most effectively reap the mental health benefits that nature offers?

Why nature?

I’m aware we’re in Covid-19 lockdown and restrictions at the moment (27/09/2021) so you will need to determine for yourself if what proceeds to be written is practical and realistic for you right now.

We need to understand that the psyche of the human-being is linked to the natural world in many important ways. The human brain constantly processes and assimilates incoming information, and it relies on external stimuli for guidance regarding how to think and behave. Not only does incorporating nature into our daily lives help us understand the world better, but it can also contextualise ourselves in accordance with this understanding; humans – as an animal – have evolved in tandem with the natural world, and thus it is able to promote the development of beneficial skills including improved visual–spatial acuity, attentional abilities, and memory (Oddie, 2019). Our world is full of beautiful and intricate natural structures, and even just a simple walk through a park can provide us with moments of joy, awe, and wonder (Fiebert et al., 1980; Lefebvre & Brucker, 2018).

Additionally, the seemingly chaotic stimulus that nature provides us with promotes creativity and abstract thought (Berman, et al., 2012); these qualities have been the cornerstone of our species’ evolutionary development over the past few thousand years, thus illustrating the primacy of our relationship with nature.

Our neurobiology is extremely complex, and as such cannot be reduced to simple terms. However, we can say with some certainty that our brains’ sophisticated processing systems are enhanced by our interactions with nature. Our brain naturally integrates external stimuli into existing mental frameworks—this is referred to as “cognitive recursion” (Oddie, 2019). This means that if we spend our time in environments that were designed and created by the human mind, then we are putting ourselves in an echo chamber of stimulus and will not receive new information to broaden our mental capabilities. If we spend time in nature surrounded by structures and patterns that are born of unfathomably complex and foreign processes, then our minds can assimilate this new content into its existing understanding of reality.

Basically, if you spend your days in a white cube (i.e. a house) then your mental framework will be limited to the creative potential that a white cube suggests. If, however, you spend your days in an ever-changing fractal world of colours and shapes (i.e. natural environments) then your mind will reflect this, and adopt an expanded creative potential in order to perceive and understand its surroundings. This is a powerful reality; understanding how our connection with nature nourishes our minds is where spirituality meets both science and intuition.

What benefits does nature offer?

Perhaps the most important and relevant aspect of an active lifestyle in nature is its ability to reduce stress. Studies have shown that taking a walk in a park could decrease stressful thoughts, and even reduce blood pressure (Bush, et al., 2016; Robins, 2020). This finding demonstrates that simply being exposed to nature can decrease stress levels, and implies that returning to nature may be an effective way of keeping our mental health at its best. And here’s the kicker: any amount of time spent in nature is net-gain for your mental wellbeing (Robins, 2020). There is no threshold or minimum a dosage of nature that will have an effect on you – even just spending a short time sitting in your backyard enjoying nature will likely have a positive impact on your mental health.

Other studies have also shown that exposure to nature has an effect on our emotional outlook; particularly in regards to relieving us from pessimistic and fearful thinking (Lefebvre & Brucker, 2018). Life in the modern world is full of consequential decisions and options, the outcomes of which can dictate the quality of your entire life. Decision making is one of the more neurologically complex and taxing processes that our brains undertake, and research has shown that we make 35,000 choices per day (Huston, 2018).

This process involves assessing each option for its individual merit, sorting each option into a hierarchy in relation to every other option, making predictions about every possible positive and negative outcome of each option, and then weighing each outcome against that of every other option; golly, how exhausting! The fear and pessimism arises because each option invariably comes with the potential for myriad negative outcomes, and we are constantly coerced into assessing these. Thankfully, nature offers respite from all this noise. Spending time in nature relieves us from overthinking by presenting us with very few options, each with relatively inconsequential outcomes; ‘where will I sit while I drink from my water bottle?’ or ‘should I take the path leading towards the lookout, or the waterfall?’ are not taxing decisions to make, and will not prompt fearful or pessimistic thought patterns. There is an easiness to natural environments in which things seem to flow along their own course, and we are able to simply jump into the stream and flow along with it.

Aside from experiential benefits, time in nature can help us orient ourselves in the world in more grounded and productive ways. In today’s society, our attentional abilities are sapped by large corporations who profit from our distractibility, and it seems as though a way to remedy this mental breach is routine contact with nature. Attentional abilities are bolstered by spending time in nature (Ebata & Izenstark, 2017), making you less susceptible to the temptations of modernity (i.e. problematic social media scrolling, binging streaming services, etc).

Thus, making time in nature a priority in our lives – especially when we do not even feel stressed or anxious – can help us orient ourselves to the world around us and find a sense of personal empowerment. Taking time to be immersed in nature can help us regain confidence, ground us in a personal sense of meaning, and re-establish our wellbeing. Being in nature is correlated with increased positive emotions and feelings of control over one’s life (Chowdhurry, 2021), so even if we do not believe we need some sort of mental intervention, the benefits are there for everybody to experience.

How can I fit more nature-time into my life?

For the most part, we only need to reflect on our daily behaviours to see how we can incorporate time in nature into our lives. James Clear, in his wildly popular book Atomic Habits (2018), suggests incorporating a “budding habit” into an existing habit.

So for instance, if you have a lunch break during the work day, you could spend it outside on a park bench instead of in the staff room. If you come home at the end of the day and like to sit on the couch with a book, go outside and sit on the grass instead. These are simply ways to adopt more nature-time into your life, without having to add another separate activity to your schedule. In a 2017 study (Austin, et al., 2017), some participants were asked to take a brief walk in nature once per day, and other participants weren’t. The results showed that those who walked daily had higher levels of positive emotions and well-being than those who walked less. It doesn’t take a lot of time to nourish our minds in the deep ways that only nature offers us, and it seems to be a worthwhile habit to form.

Making the time to experience nature is easy to ignore in lieu of more ‘important’ tasks. That walk in the park you planned on taking this afternoon suddenly seems overshadowed by a looming deadline or a sink full of dirty dishes. For this reason, it can be beneficial to keep yourself accountable by planning nature-time with other people. Planning to go for a walk with friends means there is a lower likelihood of cancelling. Better yet, if you can join a weekly community group or class of some sort then you won’t even have to continually plan your time in nature.

There are volunteer groups who aid revegetation in nature reserves, there are community gardens who need people to tend to plants and crops, and there are clean up groups who dispose of discarded rubbish in bush-lands. If volunteering isn’t appealing to you, then you could change your routine by canceling your gym membership in lieu of outdoor exercise classes or yoga, or even new activities like cycling or rowing. Making scheduled appointments to spend time in nature can assist those who have trouble achieving this with sheer willpower, and your mental health will thank you for it.

Our acknowledgment of the value of time spent in nature is growing each day, which is why more urban living environments are incorporating ‘green spaces’ into their design. Using the latest neuroscience research, we are able to determine which types of natural environments compliments our mental states the most effectively. For example, it has been found that areas with high levels of biodiversity can alleviate symptoms of anxiety and depressions more-so than those with low levels of biodiversity (Wyles, et al., 2019). Similarly, people who watched videos featuring a diverse array of flora and fauna reported lower anxiety and higher vitality than those who watched videos of less biodiverse landscapes (Wolf, et al., 2017).

Findings like these offer valuable insight into how we can engineer our surroundings to best facilitate the highest levels of wellbeing possible. It is clear that spending time in nature is invaluable for our mental health, but a half-hour lunch break doesn’t give us time to go hiking through a biodiverse mountain landscape; what we can do, however, is have access to green spaces which replicate the stimulus that we would receive if we were in nature. This has proven to be an eloquent solution to the pressing issue of depression rates in urban CBD areas (Ebata & Izenstark, 2017).

Summary

In conclusion, the role of nature in our lives is of paramount importance to our health and should be a priority for us all. Although it may feel like adding a daily walk outside to our schedules would be in futility, the positive mental health benefits outweigh the costs significantly. Making time in nature a priority, no matter how little, can greatly increase our overall sense of wellbeing, and remind us that we are interconnected to the living world around us.

There is no minimum threshold required to reap the benefits of nature, so we can all find a way to capitalise on just a little bit of time in natural environments. As a species, it is our natural disposition to enjoy the outdoors, and the benefits are more abundant than you might expect. So pop on a pair of joggers, Google search ‘hikes near me’, phone a friend, and get out there amongst the fresh air; you can thank us later!

References:

1. Berman, M. G., Kross, E., Krpan, K. M., Askren, M. K., Burson, A., Deldin, P. J., . . . Jonides, J. (2012, November). Interacting with nature improves cognition and affect for individuals with depression. Retrieved from: Website.
2. Bush, R., Dean, J., Lin, B., & Fuller, R. (2016). Health Benefits from Nature Experiences Depend on Dose. Scientific Reports.
3. Chowdhury, M. (2021, February 19). The Positive Effects Of Nature On Your Mental Well-Being. Retrieved from: Website.
4. Clear, J. (2018). Atomic habits: An easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones. London: RH Business Books.
5. Hunter, M. R., Gillespie, B. W., & Chen, S. Y. (2019, March 15). Urban Nature Experiences Reduce Stress in the Context of Daily Life Based on Salivary Biomarkers. Retrieved from: Website.
6. Huston, M. (2018). How Many Decisions Do We Make Each Day? Retrieved from: Website.
7. Izenstark, D., & Ebata, A. (2017). The Effects of the Natural Environment on Attention and Family Cohesion: An Experimental Study. Children, Youth, and Environments.
8. Wyles, K. J., White, M. P., Hattam, C., Pahl, S., King, H., & Austen, M. (2017). Are Some Natural Environments More Psychologically Beneficial Than Others? The Importance of Type and Quality on Connectedness to Nature and Psychological Restoration. Environment and Behavior, 51(2), 111-143. doi:10.1177/0013916517738312

Hello readers. I hope you are well. I imagine some of you are struggling and some of you are flourishing. Life consists of both. As humans, we relish pleasurable feelings and experiences and we tend to dislike uncomfortable emotions and experiences. I get it. I am just like you. We share this. I hope that provides some comfort.

What is human development?

Human development can be described as “systematic changes and continuities in the individual that occur between conception and death, or from “womb to tomb”” (Sigelman, De George, Cunial, & Rider, 2019, p. 3).

Human development involves the continuities (i.e., what remains consistent across time) and the systematic changes (i.e., patterns of change that are expected to come in order across time) that one experiences throughout the lifespan. Based on my education, there are three domains of continuity and change: 1. The physical and biological, 2. Cognitive (i.e., mind processes/thinking), and 3. Psychosocial and emotional. Let’s open these one at a time.

Physical development includes:

• Physical and biological processes (e.g., genetic inheritance).
• Growth of the body and its organs.
• Functioning of physiological systems (e.g., brain).
• Health and wellness.
• Physical signs of ageing and changes in motor abilities.

Cognitive development includes:

Perception: the sensing of stimuli in our environment (internal and external), sending that information to the brain to be identified and interpreted in order to represent and understand our experience of the world and give it meaning. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system.

Attention: the ability to actively (and often, involuntarily) process specific information in the environment while tuning out other details. Attention is a very interesting cognitive process because when we bring mindfulness to our thoughts we become open to the direction and attention of our mind. Remember this: where attention goes, energy flows.

Language: very broadly, Language is a communication system that involves using words (i.e., sounds arranged together) and systematic rules to organise those words into sentences and meaning, to transmit information from one individual to another. I was never very interested in language when I was studying at university however that has changed. We used language and concepts to talk to ourselves, about other people, and it is open to misinterpretation, error, and oftentimes language can be used as a means to hurt people or … bring us closer together.

Learning: very broadly defined as a relatively permanent change in behaviour, thinking, and understanding as a result of experience. Experience is everything from formal education to unique personal experience. We learn from each other, the world around us, books, movies, self-reflection and education etc. All of which are experiences.

Memory: Memory refers to the processes that are used to gather, organise, store, retain, and later retrieve information. I’m sure you’ve all seen a tv show or read a book about a person with Amnesia or Alzheimer’s disease. Imagine what your life would be like if you didn’t have the function of memory. I wouldn’t be able to type this very well, I don’t think. I wouldn’t remember my loved ones or what was dangerous in my environment. I know we all have unpleasant memories too and that may feel like a negative evolutionary by-product – however it is actually designed to protect us. Memory is finite – we actually forget a lot of stuff, or perhaps more accurately, we do not have the capacity to store and recall everything we experience.

Intelligence: I would like to reframe intelligence from what might be a common belief. Intelligence does not mean academically gifted as is considered valuable in Western society. I think Olympians and caregivers/parents have an intelligence that I do not because I haven’t learned their skills. Intelligence involves the ability to learn (i.e., sport, academics, the arts, swimming, survival, interpersonal skills), emotional knowledge, creativity, and adaptation to meet the demands of the environment effectively

Creativity: I consider creativity to be an evolutionary gift of our imagination, providing humans with the ability to generate and recognize ideas, consider alternatives, think of possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others. Creativity can be stunted when we are struggling or caught in reactivity to external pressures or perceived stress.

Problem solving: is a process – yes, a cognitive one but also a behavioural process. It is the act of defining a problem; determining the cause of the problem; identifying, prioritizing, and selecting alternatives for a solution; and implementing a solution. Problem solving can be both creative or stress driven. I like to say whenever I am solving a problem I am also making a decision. A decision of mine is a choice. At university, our problem solving lessons were coincided with decision making which is why I think of it that way.

Psychosocial development involves:

Aspects of the self (i.e., your identity – which may change over time), and social and interpersonal interactions which include motives, emotions, personality traits, morality, social skills, and relationships, and roles played in the family and in the larger society. This is a huge area to be explored. I will endeavour to elaborate on our psychosocial development in later blogs.

In the late 1950’s, a German-American developmental psychologist named Erik Erikson created a theory for human psychosocial development across the lifespan. His theory suggests that human personality develops in a predetermined order through 8 stages of psychosocial development. See the table below:

Age or Stage	Conflict	Example	Resolution or “virtue”	Key Question to be answered
Infancy (0 to 18 months)	Trust vs. Mistrust	Being feed and cared for by caregiver.	Hope	Is my world safe? Will I be cared for?
Early Childhood (2 to 3 years)	Autonomy (personal control) vs. Shame and Doubt	Toilet training and getting dressed.	Will I would add self-efficacy here too.	Can I do things for myself, or will I always rely on others?
Preschool (3 to 5 years)	Initiative vs. Guilt	Interacting with other children and asserting themselves in their environment e.g., during play.	Purpose Taking initiative, leading others, asserting ideas produces a sense of purpose.	Am I liked by others or do I experience disapproval by others?
School Age (6 to 11 years)	Industry (competence) vs. Inferiority	Starting formal education and participating in activities.	Competence	How can I do well and be accepted by others?
Adolescence (12 to 18 years)	Identity vs. Role Confusion (uncertainty of self and role in society)	Developing social relationships with peers and sense of identity.	Fidelity (loyalty) The ability to maintain loyalty to others based on accepting others despite differences.	Who am I and where am I going in my life? What are my personal beliefs, values and goals?
Young Adult (19 to 40 years)	Intimacy vs. Isolation	Developing intimate relationships.	Love	Am I loved and desired by another? Will I be loved long-term?
Mature Adult (40 to 65 years)	Generativity vs. Stagnation	Vocation and parenting, typically.	Care Contributing to the world to demonstrate that you care.	Will I provide something to this world of real value? E.g., children or valuable work, art, a legacy etc.
Maturity (65 year to death)	Ego Identity vs. Despair	Reflection of your life. Feelings of satisfaction and wholeness.	Wisdom	Was I productive with my life? Can I accept my life and have a sense of closure and completeness?