Gooday, Hello, thank you for joining us on Healthy Ish Dally Podcasts from Body and Soul. I am your host of Felicity Harley. How much time do you spend outdoors? Perhaps you go a day and you barely walk outside, and then you spend an hour or so the next day, and how much time should we really be spending outdoors each week? Well, today we have the answer. I am joined by lifestyle medicine physician doctor Jenny Brocketts. She's written a new book, she's the best selling author by the way.
This new one is called The Natural Advantage, and she's here today to remind us why spending time outdoors is wondrous for well being and what is the minimum amount required each week. Make sure you're listening to Jenny on Extra Healthy Ish, where she discusses how to create your own personal nature prescription. You can grab that one wherever you get your podcasts. Jenny, Welcome to you Healthy, Thank you for joining us today.
My absolute pleasure, Felicity just.
Joining us off the back of a walk, no doubt, that seems very fitting.
Is you can't keep me out of the outdoors.
It's just even the word even you're saying the word just fills me, you know, fills me with joy. I need to we need to get outside. But tell us why you're spending time in nature. Nature beneficial for us.
Well, there's been a lot of research looking into this, and I think lots of people recognize that we feel better when we go outside, but the research says it's actually good for us on so many different levels. It's good for our mental wellbeing. It helps us to recover if we've been unwell, you know, if people are suffering from anxiety or depression, or just feeling a bit overwhelmed
by life in general. But it's also super important for maintaining mental wellbeing, so it keeps you buoyant, to you able to manage all the stresses of life more effectively. We're more resilient if we go outside more regularly, so
that's one benefit. The other benefit, which I think gets overlooked, is that when you spend more time outside, you're often more physically active, which actually gives you the physical benefit of you're going to be a little bit more physically fit, perhaps especially if you go walking or hiking or cycling or running or any of those sort of things. And the third benefit is the cognitive benefit when you go outside. And I don't know if you ever do this felicity.
I do it quite often. If I'm stuck on something and I'm chewing it over, chewing it over, cheering it over, and I just can't find the solution, going outside for walk will often lead to that insight. Aha, I know what the answer is now. So it really does clear our head, allows us to resolve issues and challenges more easily. Plus it boosts our level of cognition. We're actually more open to new ideas, we're more creative, we learn more effectively. What's not to love about being outside?
How does it do this? Why does it do this? Is it evolution? Is it the fact that we spent millions and millions of years outside and then we came inside and we're on screens and I've got too freaking busy.
I think essentially that probably is the answer. I mean, that's what's being proposed. We evolved in nature, and up until the last couple of hundred years, we spent a lot of time outside, and now we've all moved towards city life, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, city life can be absolutely great, but as a consequence, because of all the stresses that you've mentioned and the frantic pace of life, we've lost sight of the fact that we do better when we go outside a bit more.
And I think the statistic that really blew my mind was one that came out from the States saying that majority of Americans spend ninety three percent of their time indoors eve every single day. And I'm thinking, crikey. If it's true for the Americans, is it true for us? And it actually is. We've become indoor dwellers, if you like, because if you think about it, we live in a house. We might work from home, we might go to an office, but we sit in the car, we sit on public transport.
We don't actually go out and walk places very much anymore for whatever reasons. And that's what's causing what's called the nature deficit.
I think you've read about this in the book, but it was interesting because the pandemic almost made us all realize this. You know, we can talk about the science, but when we all were forced to go for the walks once a day within the five ks, well, not in Perth, but the rest of us to earlier.
Yes, less so in Perth. We were just constrained to stay in West Australia. Wouldn't got allowed to get anywhere else.
Yes, yes, we probably truly realized we didn't need the science to tell us how good nature was for mind, body and soul.
We were desperate to get out. And I think that's that was the realization that we hate feeling constrained and not able to move outside when we want to. And people suddenly got the idea of, oh, let's take the whole family out for a walk, let's get a dog, let's do something outside. And I was really hoping that after the pandemic that we would maintain that healthy attitude.
But of course we went back to our usual way of doing things, and so we didn't always maintain that that happened, even though we recognized how much of a difference it made at the time.
Now, I was almost horrified to read this and equally horrified to ask you the question. But there is a current minimum recommendation for time you should spend outside, Yes, there is.
What is it? It's one hundred and twenty minutes.
Oh goodness, a week, a week.
Week a week?
Wow?
So nothing, it's nothing. No, it actually breaks down to seventeen minutes and a few seconds a day. So the question is do you have seventeen minutes and a few seconds to spend outside? And I would suggest you do, but we sometimes need to make that conscious choice to get outside, to open the door, open the window, do whatever, escape and step outside.
It's a great formula or a rule in your book that you that I particularly liked, and it's from doctor Rachel Hotman, twenty five to three rule. Can you tell us more about this?
I like the rule too because it's simple and I can remember it. So it's twenty minutes, five hours and three days. So her suggestion is that we should all be getting outside for twenty minutes three times a week, regardless that we spend five hours once a month doing something a bit more extensive, like go for a long walk or a drive to a national park or something like that, and then once a year go off grid
for three days. Now, the three days is actually important, and I don't know if you've ever done this, but if you go off grid, there's no phones, no laptops. Oh, it's wonderful. It can take you three days for your brain to really unwind from all the busyness. Of life because we've got our phones with us all the time twenty four to seven and we don't go anywhere without them, and so it's actually been shown that it takes about three days to stop looking for the phone and wanting
to connect. Isn't it interesting?
Gosh? That is interesting and also horrifying. How do we work out our own nature prescription? And perhaps you can talk about yours, and how do we actually go about doing it.
I think it's important to work out what your own is. I mean, it's great to have a rule like Rachel's rule of twenty five and three, but I think it's better to have a daily habit, something that you put in place that just becomes part of what you do naturally without having to really think about it, like brushing your teeth. So for me, I know I'm going to have a good day when I've been outside, especially in the early morning. There's nothing I love more than stepping
outside when my first cup of tea. I'm English, so I always drink tea first.
Yes, yes, not coffee like the rest of us.
It comes later. But I just love stepping outside and just looking up, looking at the clouds, just noticing what's around me and just engaging. The Japanese have this beautiful word called com or ab. I don't know if I've said that right. The Japanese listening was saying, oh, she can't say that would but it means scattered light through trees.
Oh, And I think, what a beautiful word that.
I think it's we need a word like that, don't we. And to me, it's all about com rab. I just love seeing that dappled light as it comes through and the shadows being cast. It immediately makes me feel calm. So it's great for me to lower stress, get me ready for the day, go outside, especially in the early morning, because that early morning light resets your circadian rhythm and all this sort of stuff, so you're bright eyed and bushy taid, ready for the day ahead. And then so
I aim to do something every day. It's either walking or I jump in our back pool, which I tell my husband, do not turn the heating on. I want it cold.
Do you want the cold plate?
I like the cold plunge. Or I just take the dogs out. Just something. And so some people tell me they go for a meditation, but that's what I do. Then every week I go for a long walk with some friends. So we've got beautiful national parks around us, so we choose a different place to go and explore. At the moment, we've got beautiful spring flowers out, so we're out in beautiful spaces. We're looking at what's around.
We're noticing the flora and the fauna and having a great time and having a bit of a chat as we go around. So that's what I do. I also love kayaking once a week, that's my other go to. So my five hours is actually something I sort of semi morph into my weekly thing. And then once a quarter I try to encourage my husband to come away with me, so we just go away for a long weekend. And the other thing is we do love to go remote. We go remote camping, far away from the madding crowd.
We pack up the car, we just take all our food, all our water, everything we need and we go off the grid literally into the great outdoors, the great sandy desert, wherever it is, and we just love it. We absolutely adore it.
A great reset. Jinny, thank you for coming Unhealthy my absolute pleasure. Thank you, thank you. Well. If you are not listening to this episode outside, I encourage you. I implore you to get outside today and get that nature prescription. AH. Just makes you feel better, doesn't it. And hey, we've just heard about all the science. Jenny's new book is called The Natural Advantage. It is out now. If you did enjoy this chat, jump on at rate and review it,
or you can subscribe to this podcast. Of course, anything else, head to body andsoul dot com dot you follow us on socials rob Our print edition which is out in your local Sunday paper, and until tomorrow, stay healthysh