Ep. 778: Foundations - Touch Grass, Bro

but it's not something we can actually achieve. I have some theories on this, and while I don't have the answers to all the world's problems, I do think if you're a hunter, you at least have some options for how to be a little happier and learn to just let some shit go and live your life. That's what I'm going to talk about right now. The phrase touch grass is an insult that you can lob at someone

for spending too much time online. It implies that too much doom scrolling and random hours spent looking at tiktoks is bad for us, and that if you do that too much, you're missing out on the real world. It's hard to argue with that. Honestly, I feel that more and more every day, and I feel like all of us pretty much need to touch a little more grass. These days. People are edgy and in some ways, you know rightfully so the world just feel like a powder

keg right now. There are some serious wars going on in case you haven't been paying attention, and global tensions feel like they are real high. It's not a totally irrational thought to believe that Russia's invasion of Ukraine could be viewed way in the future as the event that started World War Three. If that seems a little nuts, do a little research on how the Second Great War came to be and the events that led up to it. This stuff doesn't happen overnight. Generally, it's a slow boil

and then suddenly it's not. I sure, hope I'm way wrong, But to definitively say that's not a potential route we as a species are headed down would probably be a mistake. We are four years out from the start of the pandemic, too, and it sure seems like that changed us in a lot of ways. There are probably a lot of reasons for this, but I'm starting to wonder if it's not at least partially because for a lot of us, that was the event that showed us we aren't as free

as we thought. The idea that the government could shut down your business or take away your job had never occurred to a lot of us, Or that our kids would suddenly not be able to get on a school bus and go away for eight hours to fill their brains with reading and writing and arithmetic, but instead would have to stare at screens all day to get some

level of their education. Hell, until about twenty twenty, I think it's safe to say that a lot of us always thought we'd have enough charman to wipe our butts with, and we found out that some people really value that, and we're willing to buy up copious amounts of toilet paper on the off chance that supply chains got so disrupted that they would have to resort to using I don't know, dish towels or something. I think we thought of ourselves as more free than we really are, and

we're facing that reality. You know, it changed, and it didn't make us any happier. We've always known, you know, that we better pay our taxes or we'd go to jail. It just didn't feel all that real. It's just something we did. I think it kind of does feel more real now, and that's weird. It's unsettling. It's weird to feel that the agency we have over our lives isn't quite what we thought. Those feelings only get worse with the widespread phone addictions that pretty much all of us have.

We're just feeding ourselves rage inducing nonsense because we can't help it. And that's just so bad. Like recently, my wife called me to ask me if I had heard what happened in a park maybe three miles from our house. I told her I hadn't, and she filled me in on a mom who shot her two young children and herself in the park. I don't need to know that, and none of us need to know that that kind of thing is happening all over the world every day,

and you know, far worse things are happening. It is said that all knowledge is power, but I don't know. Knowing the bad news of eight billion people seems to make us feel powerless. It's a weird time to be alive. But maybe humans have been saying that since humans have been able to say that, who knows? I don't. I do know that life is hard for everyone, and that there is a silver lining to all of this. Instead of being hold to touch grass in a derogatory way,

you and I probably don't really need a reminder. We don't need an insult to get us outside and to feel the sun on our skin and maybe tuck our doom machine into our pocket or our pack, and experience the real world as it exists, as it exists naturally. I guess I should say there's also no small amount of good stuff that comes from being productive. As I get older, I'm starting to realize how important productivity and

momentum really is now. I've talked about this a few times, but this mild winter allowed me to be real productive and keep my dear work momentum going in a way that I don't think I've ever experienced before. I'm not feeling a whole lot of anxiety about this fall which is unusual, especially when I start to figure out my travel schedule. Now, I know the anxiety will come as the summer progresses, but it will likely be subdued and not as nerve racking as it could be. You know,

sometimes that's the best we can hope for now. Look, I'm pretty far from a mental health specialists, although I have spent some serious time and money with people who are. The thing you often find if you go see one of these folks is that you're looking for someone else to fix your problems. But really they are more in line with a coach who will help you fix your

own problems, if that makes sense. And you know what's wild about me and you and anyone who has the luxury of listening to a deer hunting podcast in their free time, we already have one hell of a prescription for boosting our mood and making ourselves feel better. It's not the answer for everyone, but it sure can be

for a lot of us. And it's just waiting out there in the deer woods, and it's waiting out there in the Turkey woods, and it's waiting out there in the trout stream and the bay and your favorite lake where the crappies spawn. This is where I'm going to

take a slightly weird turn. As someone tasked with coming up with some way to teach people how to hunt deer or turkeys over and over, I've had to focus a lot on mission specific con you know, the stuff like three ways to make sure you kill your biggest buck this season, or how to hunt a buck in the cattails, or why your trail camera strategy is hurting you. That kind of stuff. Those are linear pieces of content that pose a problem and then a solution to that

problem that the audience might not have thought of. That stuff performs well because we like solutions to difficult things. We like shortcuts to our own thinking. This is why we like religion and auto investing and the idea that Andy may can say the right words and suddenly your tags will damn near fill themselves. But there's another way to look at this stuff that isn't so linear, but is probably far more important than finally wrapping your tag

around the antlers of a mature buck. It's also just good for you to meet a challenge head on and try to figure it out. It's why you feel differently when you go mobile for a night in a question mark spot than when you go to the Old Faithful Stand to look at the same food plot for the seventeenth time of the season. It's why some of the best deer hunters on the planet share a simple trait that they like being in nature, and they facilitate that

desire as much as possible. Sure, on paper, the idea might be to go scout a creek bottom on some public land, or maybe hike a few ridges that look cool on on X, But that's sort of a trick we play on ourselves. It's like when I bank a podcast I'm really interested in so that I can listen to it when I go for a run instead of burning through it while I'm distracted and cleaning the garage. We use little tricks to keep ourselves in the game,

so to speak. But in the case of going into the woods or getting out on the water, the benefits extend far beyond us increasing our chances to kill a deer or catch a fish. The act of being there, touching grass, if you will, is really good for us. I know I can just say that, and you will probably agree with me because you know it is well as I do. But listen to this. According to the Mayo Clinic, which is sort of the gold standard for medical care not only in our country but the world,

that stress stimulates our sympathetic nervous system. With that comes elevated blood pressure and an increase in heart rate and blood sugar. That's one of the ways your body reacts to stress, and in small doses it's fine. The system evolved for a reason. Too much stress, though, and you're gonna have issues. I think it's safe to say most of us are stressed out on a daily basis to some extent, which means we are probably all at risk

of the negative repercussions from stress. Studies have shown that an antidote to that sympathetic nervous system stimulation is you guessed it gulf. Actually, that one might be true unless you have a bad day on the links and you go, I don't know, full happy Gilmore and break clubs over your knees and toss them into a water hazard. The real answer is time and nature as little as five minutes of it can calm us down. The benefits of going into the woods or wet waiting a small MoU stream.

They're nearly instant and nearly all positive. Think about that this literally lowers your risk of having a major chest grabber or developing certain chronic diseases. In this case, that environment deer live in is actually medicine for us. Let me frame this up another way. Do you know why it's more expensive to book a hotel room with a sweet view versus one overlooking a dingy alley where you might get to watch people shoot heroin into their veins.

The better view is in higher demand. It's worth more money because we are genetically drawn to nature. This is an evolutionary thing. Studies have shown that hospital patients with another nice view of trees and green space tend to heal faster than those with no view or those with a shitty view. Believe what you want about why nature is good for us, but at least believe that it is. Studies have shown that nature is beneficial to our eyesight

as well. People who spend more time in nature can literally see better on average than people who spend more time indoors. Time in nature is correlated to lower body mass index, which is a measure of physical healthiness. It's good for depression, and that one I believe with all my soul. It helps us focus and concentrate. It improves problem solving skills. Humans who participate in nature tend to be more spiritual, and that tends to have a more

positive impact on their mental health. If you want to treat yourself better and treat your loved ones better, and you know, avoid wanting to strangle your coworkers because even though they've never seen a wild whitetail, they think they should be able to tell you, one of the most successful whitetail hunters in the country, what kind of content you should make because it'll get more clicks, you know, if you just talk about the rut one more time, But then you're like, I swear to all things holy

if you do this one more time, I'm going to put my hands around your throat and cackle like a horny rooster fresent in the spring while I watch the light in your eyes get dimmer and dimmer until you finally swump to the floor and I walk away to eat a bollo of lucky charms without care in the world or whatever. It'll make you nicer if you spend more time in nature, is what I'm saying. This is one of the things that we have control over and

it's important. It's important to take care of yourself and acknowledge the behaviors we get into that make our quality of life worse, just as it's important to recognize the things that will be good for us, like going to take a walk through your deer property without any real objective or any worry that we might spook some bucks

out or whatever. I think it's good to take a holistic view of this stuff, to not distill it down just to time scouting, and you know, hunting as a soul mission to kill a big deer, that's a good way to drain the fun from it, and to be honest to not be a very good deer hunter. The wild card trips into the woods or on the water are the ones that we often enjoy the most. And do you know why that is because the bar is low.

My friends, if you go take a walk in the woods in May, you're not going to be stressed out about your presence in the woods. You're not going to be wondering if you should have stayed out because you haven't got a picture of one of your hitlisters in three days. Hell, you might not have a real purpose to your time in the woods at all, which is honestly the best way to go about it, at least

some of the time. I don't know how many times I have found a cool place to fish or hunt simply because I felt the gravity of life getting a little heavier, and I took the natural escape, which is to sprint to the woods, which, if I'm being that's holy honest, is a hell of a lot better remedy for being anxious and depressed and stressed then I don't know, sprinting right to the liquor cabinet to chug what can only be described is definitely not a good fix for

most of my problems, other than I guess the temporary leaf that comes before things get worse because well, I made them worse. Find an excuse to go into the woods, whether that's a scouting mission you've been thinking about, or better yet, some other simple reason like maybe you just want to look at a property, or maybe you want to find some fossils, maybe you're gonna hopefully stumble across somewhere else. Figure out what kind of trick you need

to play on yourself to get out there. When you have the chance, maybe you'll get lucky and find something deer wise, that will really help you out this fall. If not, who cares? You're going to be better off just for going. Maybe that trout stream you don't fish anymore because it's full of dinks is actually the best spot for you to be, because, after all, who really is going to be disappointed with a couple hours on the water catching ten inches just for the hell of it.

That environment's going to treat you pretty well, even if you don't come away with a single grip and grin of a twenty seven inch brownie with a great big hook jaw. Maybe most importantly understand this, everyone you know is struggling. I mean that the folks who have tons of money and the folks who have nothing. Sure, their struggles are different, but everybody is carrying more weight on their shoulders than it appears from the outside looking in. The world is like this right now, and I don't

think it's going to get better. But the good news is in all of that doom and gloom, you and I already have the answer to some of these problems. Now, Sure, a walk in the deerwoods in May won't cure your bipolar disorder, just as it won't suddenly make your next rent payment, but it'll take you from the edge of despair to a place that's more tolerable and might help you settle down enough to sleep better or make more informed decisions about changing the things in your life that

you need to change. That's powerful shit, even if it's really easy to ignore while we stay home and doom scroll while our spouse is negus about something we're definitely going to do on our own time when we're damn well ready, get out there amongst the trees and the grasses and the bugs and Mark's butterflies and take your medicine. My friends, It'll help nullify the sharp edges of everyday life, and if you make a habit of this, it'll help

you understand that natural world in a better way. I know that's not as cool as some dude telling you exactly how to snoret wheeze, you know, to blind call in every buck in the woods, but it's honestly a better way to get better at this stuff, and it comes with a hell of a lot of welcome side benefits. Do that and come back next week, because I'm going to talk about you know, kind of a similar topic,

but not really. I'm gonna talk about hunting buddies or how to find great ones and recognize the ones that you just might not be compatible with. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by

First Light. I know you know this. I'm gonna tell you anyway if you need more hunting content, whether you want to learn something from an article, or maybe you just want to watch a I don't know, random turkey hunting show where yours truly and Sam Soholt get totally crushed by public land gobblers in Nebraska. You can find that in a hell of a lot more over at themeadeater dot com. While you're there, if you need to pick up some new gear, you can find a hell

of a lot of good stuff that way too. Thank you so much for listening. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. I hope you come back next week. Thank you