In the winter, when many of us are spending less time outdoors, it is the ideal time to reflect on how we can boost our wellbeing by bringing nature indoors. We have an innate affinity with the natural world, known as biophilia, which is why bringing the outside in can have health benefits. We can do that in three key ways: by having natural objects in the home (e.g. plants, wood or shells); by incorporating representations of nature (e.g. in paintings, as sculpture or printed on fabrics); and by creating natural environments within the home (e.g. a safe snug, a vibrant living room or making the most of views). Here are a few ideas to consider…

Colour

Colour can evoke an emotional response in us associated with nature, so soft, natural blues remind us of the sky and water, which can help us to feel relaxed; vibrant greens bring with them the calm energy of forests and meadows; yellows represent sunshine and harvests, so energise us and help us feel sociable; shades of purple are like the mysterious light at dawn and dusk; and oranges and reds excite us like ripe fruit and berries did our ancestors. How does the colour scheme in each room in your home fit with how you want to feel in that room?

Pattern

We are spoilt for choice when it comes to bringing patterns mimicking nature into the home, whether that is in artwork, fabric, wallpaper or floor coverings. The repeating patterns that are so common in nature, for example the ever-branching nature of trees and river deltas, are known as fractals and they can have a positive impact on our emotional health, so we can tap into that when choosing patterns for the home. A recent blog post of mine talks in more detail about fractals, so you can learn more about them in The Healing Power of Fractals.

Light

Despite our modern lifestyles, we still have an internal clock, known as the circadian rhythm, geared to the environment that we evolved in, and light has a strong influence on the timing of that clock. Disrupting it can cause all sorts of health issues: mental health problems, high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, liver disease, obesity and diabetes to name but a few. You can learn more about optimising your circadian rhythm in my blog post Why You Feel Like Hibernating in Winter. To use light in your home to support your circadian rhythm, try a sunrise alarm to wake you naturally, let the morning light in as soon as you wake, have bright natural or artificial lighting during the day, dim the lights in the evening and block out all light sources in the bedroom at night, including from electrical equipment.

Sound

There are several ways to create the right acoustic environment for your home. For a peaceful space, you can reduce unwanted noise with judicious use of soft furnishings indoors or using planting in the garden to screen out road noise or noisy neighbours, and when you come to replace electrical items, you may be able to find quieter alternatives (the Quiet Mark website is great resource for that). And of course you can play the sounds of nature to mask unwanted noise or create a sense of calm.

Air Quality

You may not have much control over the quality of the air outside your home, but you can improve it indoors by choosing toxin-free paints, furnishings and household products, and by tackling any damp or mould problems by ensuring adequate warmth and ventilation. Houseplants can improve air quality too, as well as enhancing the environment in many other ways, all of which I cover in my blog post Houseplants as Part of a Healthy Home.

Introducing natural scents to the home can enhance the space, like herbs in plant pots in the kitchen or cut flowers in the hallway. Be careful to avoid artificially scented products (often described as fragranced), which may contain harmful chemicals known as phthalates (these are often found in air fresheners).

Texture

Tuning into our senses is a mindful practice, so natural textures in the home can help us tune into our sense of touch in an uplifting way. As biophilic interior designer Oliver Heath explains: “If a texture looks inviting, we take this as a ‘haptic invitation’ (an appeal to our sense of touch to have a positive tactile experience). These experiences can create a sense of belonging, and we feel more comfortable if we are surrounded by appealing textures.”

I hope you have found something to inspire you here to optimise your home environment for health by stimulating your senses with the sight, sound, scent and feel of nature. Stimulating your sense of taste I leave up to your culinary skills!

The week between Christmas and the New Year is an ideal time to reflect on the year that has been and to look forward to the one ahead. I have now made it part of my annual routine, which seems to fit with the Chinese philosophy that winter is associated with energy at rest, with stillness and with peace, which lends itself to quiet reflection and meditation.

A practice that I have found helpful for this is the Past Year Review. If you would like to give it a go, you will need to set aside an hour or two of quiet time alone. You can make it a sacred practice, if you like, by lighting candles and playing music to help set the tone. Create two lists, one headed ‘Positive’, the other ‘Negative’. Use your diary or calendar to look back over the year, a month at a time. For each month, list the main experiences under one of the two headings above, especially in terms of how you felt about them and the emotions that they generated in you. No need to duplicate entries, so if it’s on the list already (e.g. the weekly yoga class), no need to add it again.

You should end up with one list of positives and another of negatives, hopefully the former is longer than the latter. If not, it can be helpful to be aware of the negativity bias in our memory banks, which makes it more likely that we will remember negative experiences because in the past, at least, that had an evolutionary advantage in protecting us from danger. In the safer world that we inhabit nowadays, that negativity bias is less helpful, possibly to the point of being unhelpful.

Looking at the list of positives, aim to do more of the same or similar things in the year ahead, so basically aiming to do more of what you enjoy and brings you joy. If possible, plan them into your diary or calendar now. That way you can enjoy looking forward to them as well as enjoying the doing, rather like the adage of wood warming you twice, first from the chopping and second from the fire. Is there anything else that fills your heart with joy that is missing from the list? Is there something that you enjoyed doing in the past that has slipped from your life and you would like to bring back into it? What else do you want to prioritise and focus on in the year ahead? How can you schedule that in too?

For anything in the negative column, consider whether you can avoid repeating that experience next year completely or perhaps minimising its occurrence and, if so, how. If it is something that you can’t or don’t want to avoid, but find challenging, consider how you could reframe it. What would turn it from a negative experience into a positive one? Looking for the silver linings in negative situations can also be helpful, as can doing more for your self care to give you the resilience that you need.

Looking at your lists and your plans for the year ahead now, how have your priorities changed? What does looking at the bigger picture tell you? It can be helpful to meditate or journal on these questions.

To get the most out of this Past Year Review practice next time and to make the process easier, you could try setting a calendar reminder to review and list the positive and negative experiences each week or month in 2023 so that all you need to do at the year end is to look through your lists and plan ahead accordingly. I hope you enjoy the process and the benefits of the practice!

Most, if not all of us, find nature therapeutic in some way. We generally feel better, calmer for time spent outdoors in a natural environment, and one of the reasons for that is the repeating patterns that we see there, which are known as fractals. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot is credited with coining the term fractal in the 1970s. He defines a fractal as “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole.” Research has shown that looking at fractals activates an area of the brain that helps us to process and regulate emotions. Mandelbrot posits that our “visual system is in some way hard-wired to understand fractals. The stress reduction is triggered by a physiological resonance when the fractal structure of the eye matches that of the fractal image being viewed.”

One of the reasons that a visit to the sea can be so healing is the fractal nature of the coastline: the more we zoom in, the longer it gets. “If you look at an atlas of the world, the distance from the south-west tip of Cornwall to the south-east tip of Kent will appear to be about 500 kilometres. But if you followed the coast on foot, you could expect to double that distance, as you followed the twists and turns of each bay and cove. And if you were an ant following every jutting ledge or rock, the distance would shoot up to many thousands of kilometres,” Tristan Gooley in How to Read Water.

Nature is full of fractals, including the ever-branching habit of trees, leaves, river deltas, lightening, snowflakes and frost, as well as the jaggedness of mountain ranges. Inside us the nervous, circulatory and respiratory systems are fractal and, on a grander scale, the universe itself is also fractal in nature. 

If you would like to learn more about fractals, I can recommend this entertaining TED Talk Fractals: a world in a grain of sand by Ben Weiss. Perhaps by understanding fractals, you will notice and appreciate them more in nature and so enhance the benefit that they confer to your health and wellbeing.

It is National Tree Week in the UK from 27th November to 5th December, so it seems fitting to explore in this post the connection between trees and our own health and wellbeing. As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanates from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.”

A wealth of research demonstrates how tree-filled environments can aid our mental and physical wellbeing, including that post-operative recovery rates are higher in patients in hospital wards that overlook wooded settings. Not only do trees enhance our urban and rural landscapes, but they also create connections between people through their planting, aftercare and as a green space to enjoy with family and friends. Tree planting also brings communities together to commemorate significant occasions, important local or national historical events or in remembrance of an important local or national figure, as we saw for the Queen’s Jubilee earlier in the year and more recently to mark her death.

Trees can make the urban environment healthier for us all in the following ways:

• Absorbing and filtering particulates given off by car exhausts

• Reducing noise levels and the perception of noise (by as much as six to eight decibels)

• Reducing average traffic speeds along urban roads (apparently traffic goes more slowly along a tree-lined street or road)

• Reducing the risk of surface water flooding by intercepting rainfall, reducing soil erosion and reducing the pressure on the drainage system.

• Cooling the built environment through shade and humidity (one mature tree can have the same cooling effect as five room-sized air conditioners left on for 19 hours!)

And of course, trees are a key part of the puzzle of mitigating climate change. Did you know that we have rainforests here in the UK? Well we do and they are temperate rainforests, which are much rarer than the tropical variety. Our temperate rainforests are on parts of the West coast from Scotland down to Exmoor and Dartmoor thanks to the Gulf Stream. They are definitely my favourite coastal habitat and my favourite type of woodland, literally covered in an abundance of mosses, lichens, ferns and fungi. All that green just feels so therapeutic! You can find out more about them here on the Plantlife website.

If you would like to find out more about all things tree and perhaps get involved, I can recommend the following organisations:

The Tree Council “brings everyone together with a shared mission to care for trees and our planet’s future. We inspire and empower organisations, government, communities and individuals with the knowledge and tools to create positive, lasting change at a national and local level.”

The Woodland Trust protects threatened trees and woodlands, restores damaged ancient woodland and plants native trees to create new wildlife-rich woodlands.

Tree Sisters "is a UK registered social change and reforestation charity that places tropical forest restoration into everyone’s hands. Through individuals and businesses that give back to Nature every month, TreeSisters has so far planted over 26 million trees across 12 locations in Brazil, Borneo, Cameroon, India, Kenya, Mozambique, Madagascar, Nepal and West Papua. We are actively encouraging the cultural shift required to grow from a consumer to a restorative culture. We encourage feminine leadership by providing resources, experiences and communities that inspire personal and collective action on behalf of the trees.”

Life purpose is a key element in health and wellbeing. It is a positive driving force in our lives that can be difficult to perceive, but is keenly felt when it is lacking. As Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl states in his classic book Man’s Search for Meaning: “There is nothing in the world, I would venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is meaning in one’s life. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: ‘He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how’.” Frankl goes on to explain that “...mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.” Life purpose isn’t necessarily set in stone and can change or evolve over a lifetime, although there is usually a common thread if you look for it.

Don’t panic if your life purpose is eluding you! You can become aware of it by opening yourself up to inspiration, by allowing the light to shine on it. Start noticing (and ideally recording) moments of inspiration, those moments of excitement or joy when your spirit is touched. What really resonates with you? What moves you? What energises you? What feeds your soul and makes it soar? It doesn't need to be a big thing. One thing for me is the bliss I feel when I receive a treatment, and it was that feeling that inspired me to become a therapist myself. Another is the thrill I feel swimming in open water, which very often inspires my creativity, which in time I have seen reflects my values and what is most important to me. Clarity on life purpose doesn’t happen overnight, but if you keep looking for the light, you will see it.

Another way of becoming aware of life purpose is by noticing the shadow of inspiration, resistance, so keep an eye out for that. Resistance shows up as: overthinking, procrastination, busyness, perfectionism, planning, seeking validation, distractions, arguments, crises, addictions, etc. Where there is resistance, look for the inspiration above it. You can take the energy out of the resistance by taking action on what created the resistance. “Feel the fear and do it anyway,” as Susan Jeffers’ book of that name says. So for me, that shadow, that fear, showed up as technophobia around setting up my online qigong offering. The trick to acting on inspiration and fulfilling your life purpose without being paralysed by fear is to take baby steps, to build your confidence gradually, one step at a time.

I will leave you with this link to a beautiful TED Talk A Life of Purpose  and with some questions to ponder that have certainly helped me to gain clarity on my life purpose:

• What is most dear to my heart, matters most to me above all else in the world?

• What do I absolutely love to do that fills my heart with joy?

• How have my priorities changed?

• What do I want to prioritise, to focus on?

• If I am being totally honest with myself, what am I being called to do?

May your light shine brightly…