Nature Is Not A Luxury. It's A Biological Need. | Pillar 3 of The Wild Shift
Pillar 3 of The Wild Shift
Nature Is Not A Luxury. It's A Biological Need.
I spent years observing the natural world before I became a parent.
I worked as a wildlife journalist and filmmaker, writing for the BBC and National Geographic, watching animal behaviour in some of the most extraordinary landscapes on earth. I understood ecosystems. I understood how environment shapes behaviour. I spent a decade paying close attention to the living world.
And then I had children. And I had no idea that all along I had been studying parenting....but it took a few years to truly land.
Not the nature part. I was getting them outside. We were doing the trips. The hikes. The wild places that took planning and packing and an optimistic weather check the night before.
What I got wrong was how I was when I was there.
I was planning the next section of the walk. I was watching the clock. I was thinking about what we'd eat when we got back, whether anyone needed the toilet, whether this was actually doing anything or whether I was just ticking a box. I was there in body. My mind was still at home managing everything else, that mental load isn't easy to put down.
And in all of that nature had become another thing I was trying to get right. Just another thing to live up to as a parent. I fell into the trap I think so may do...thinking that time in nature needed to be epic, wild, adventurous...despite literally speicalising in urban nature, what you can find on your backdoor step city to countryside, and later in my work curating urban wildlife walks in big cities.
Silly me, it took me longer than it should to realise that it was the little moments, sprinkled throughout the day that were the key to their happiness, and mine. The shift came close to home. Not on a hillside somewhere spectacular. Near our house, at a small fountain, where my boys stopped to look for frogs.
I nearly moved them along. We had somewhere to be.
But I stopped instead. And I actually looked. And something in me settled in a way that the big planned trips hadn't managed.
We pass that fountain every day now, and we stop every day. Five minutes seeing if we can spot the frogs, and if not them perhaps someone else, a newt or a tadpole. And I began to realise that it was those moments that had the biggest impact. Every time someone spots a moth on the road through town we stop. A cool beetle, a pretty flower with a bug on it, a shiny rock, a muddy puddle. Just small, repeated moments of actually being present alongside them.
What changed wasn't the nature. It was my relationship with time and attention when I was in it. Something I had spent years doing through my writing and filmaking, sharing with people how to engage with the natural world in small manageable 'anyone can do it' moments, and then when I became a parent that way of being hadn't transferred as neatly as it should have.
But when it did I found myself softening in those moments, and my kids followed. Not because I'd found a new parenting strategy. Because I'd stopped performing nature and started inhabiting it. And they could feel the difference.
In Pillar 1, we explored the idea that behaviour follows conditions.
In Pillar 2, we explored how we are one of the most powerful conditions in our children's lives.
Pillar 3 is this:
Nature is one of the most powerful conditions available to both of us.
Here's what I understand now that I didn't then. The feeling, the proof of the moment led me to look into the why, why is it this way? And why was going outside and actually 'being' outside so wildly different in the way it landed in my body?
I came to learn that going outside isn't the same as letting your nervous system actually land somewhere.
Our bodies weren't built for the pace most of us are living at. Constant noise. Artificial light. Screens. Endless demands. Back to back transitions. The relentless mental load of keeping everything fed, watered and in those early years, bottoms clean.
They were built for something else entirely. Changing light. Wind. Birdsong. Slower rhythms. Moments of high activation, followed by true rest created by the kind of sensory input that has surrounded human beings for most of our existence on this planet.
Your child's body still understands that, and so does your body. Even in a completely modern world.
In one of the most cited studies in environmental health research, recovery patients were split into two groups. Same hospital. Same treatment. Same care. The only difference was the view from the window. One group looked at a brick wall. The other looked at trees. The patients with the tree view recovered faster, needed less pain medication, and went home sooner.
Nothing else changed, just what their eyes could see.
That is how responsive the body is to the natural world. It isn't a nice addition. It's a biological input the nervous system was built alongside.
Researchers have also shown that the brain has two distinct modes of attention. The first is directed attention. That's the effortful kind your child uses all day at school. Following instructions. Sitting still. Moving between tasks. Holding it together. And you use all day managing family life/work etc. It depletes.
The second is something called soft fascination. The brain is engaged but not working hard. And while that's happening, the nervous system gets to recover.
Soft fascination can happen in a few places. Watching a candle flame. Looking at rain moving down a window. Sitting near a campfire. Water, fire, shifting light, these all do something similar. They hold attention gently without demanding anything from it.
But nature gives us the widest, cheapest, and most available version of it. And there's something else. It's the oldest. Our nervous systems didn't evolve alongside screens or cities or artificial light. They evolved alongside birdsong, wind, changing light, and the rhythm of the living world. Nature isn't just one option for soft fascination. It's the environment our bodies were shaped by for most of human history.
Which is why it lands differently. Not because it's magic. Because it's familiar at a biological level our conscious mind doesn't even register.
That's why screens don't restore, even when they look like rest. They demand directed attention. They keep the brain busy. They don't give it the kind of input it actually needs to come back down.
And that's why a rushed walk doesn't do much either. If you're moving through nature the same way you move through everything else, still thinking, still managing, still half somewhere else, the setting has changed but the nervous system hasn't noticed.
What actually changes things is small, repeated moments of real presence.
Not a big trip once a month. Not a long hike when you can finally find the time. Five minutes at a fountain. Stopping for a moth. Watching clouds. Going back to the same ordinary spot again and again because something there keeps catching your eye.
Done with attention, those moments do something a holiday can't. They teach the nervous system to expect something different. And that's when the body starts to change.
I saw it in my own children. Transitions got easier. Arguments got shorter. Not because I'd found a technique. Because I'd changed the conditions we were living inside.
And I've watched the same thing happen in families I've worked with since.
One mum told me her daughter stopped to watch a worm on the path. Normally she'd have hurried her along. This time she stopped too. They watched it together for a moment.
Afterwards she said: "That's the first time in ages I didn't feel like I was managing behaviour. I just felt connected."
That's not a small thing.
That's the whole thing.
Nature isn't a luxury. It isn't a reward for when life calms down enough to make space for it.
It's one of the most direct inputs we have into a dysregulated nervous system. Ours and our children's.
But only if we actually arrive when we get there.
That's what The Wild Shift teaches you how to do.
This is the third piece of what The Wild Shift is built on. Change the conditions, and behaviour follows. Change those conditions with nature as your guide. But conditions don't change overnight. That's what pillar four is about.
The Three-Step Reset is a good place to start. It's free, and it walks you through the first shift.
Read: Change Starts With the Parent | Pillar 2 of The Wild Shift
Read: The Long Game. Why It's Worth Playing. | Pillar 4 of The Wild Shift
