Reflections During Quarantine: Correlating Happiness with Time in Nature

In the last decade, the increase in mental illness has climbed into the public awareness. I argue that this is due to our increasing addiction to technology and our decreasing exposure to the natural world. Regardless of what's happened in the last decade, the COVID-19 crisis has put American anxiety and unhappiness back in the spotlight. This scary AP News Report shows that survey participants who are "very happy" plummeted to levels unseen since the survey started in 1972. It's worth noting that this survey was taken before the George Floyd murder. The cohort that switched from "very happy" to "not too happy" could be those who lost their jobs, lost their companies, had a loved one with COVID-19 or had it themselves—all logical explanations for this shift.

However, the part of the graph that is most interesting to me is the uptick in people who are "pretty happy" in the midst of a global pandemic. Who are these people? After some reflection, I realize I myself am happier than I was a year ago. I wonder why that is—as I look out on a sunset over Lake Michigan on Beaver Island with my computer on top of my outstretched legs.

With the work-from-home phenomenon, professionals like myself have exercised some creativity in where they call "home" during these unprecedented times. I count myself as one of the lucky ones who has been able to get away from my regular urban environment. I've escape to both my family's farm in Wisconsin and my fiancée’s cabin in Michigan for weeks at a time, while some of my friends report cabin fever in their relatively small Chicago apartments. Admittedly, I don't have any data backing up the following statement, but I'm pretty sure the difference between the haves and have nots of happiness during quarantine has something to do with access to a getaway in the open spaces of nature.

Beaver Island

The angst of those cooped up in their city apartments was palpable on the Bucktown 606 (where I live) and the Chicago Lake Shore paths on the first sunny spring day this year. Mayor Lori Lightfoot turned off the green light on access to those spaces pretty quickly after floods of people threw COVID-19 cautions to the wind and packed the paths. It was poor timing to try my first outdoor intervals run on my Peloton app trial. I was either going to disappoint the woman yelling at me through my headphones or the one I almost knocked over when prompted to break into a full sprint through the sea of people. I walked home with lots of questions, mostly about whether risking the spread of COVID was the right thing to do to give in to the biophilic urge to get outside.

I write this simply to ask the question of whether it is our increased disconnect from nature that's causing some of our unhappiness as a society. Furthermore, as someone who studies nature, I pledge to find an answer. I'm planning to use technology to study the effect on myself. That is, I'm going to use my new Whoop band and Timeular. Whoop will be used to track my Resting Heart Rate (RHR) and my Heart Rate Variability (HRV). Both measure health and overall fitness. HRV in particular is a unique metric that will decrease with constant stress. This article will do it more justice than I can here. Timeular is a just a cool, convenient tool for tracking time, mostly for productivity purposes. I will correlate time spent outdoors or in nature with those health metrics and write about the results. Stay tuned by signing up for blog updates below!