In a bustling world, forest bathers trade to-do lists for the stillness of nature | Canada Voices

When artist Amos Marsters thinks about his happy place, the spot he feels most at peace, his mind floats to his parents’ farm in Quebec’s Gatineau Valley. To the woods and the fields, the wind and the light there.

The scene feels a world away from his phone, his downtown Toronto condo, the subway ride to his day job in tech, in user experience design.

“I’ve been trying to spend more time in nature and not even really knowing why, other than knowing that I feel better when I do,” Mr. Marsters said. “There is less distraction, the kind of life we’ve told ourselves we need to live – to be busy all the time.”

This spring, he decided to try forest bathing – a guided practice that sees people immersing themselves in nature.

Originating in the eighties in Japan, shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing, has become a pillar of preventative medicine in that country. The practice has since gained traction around the world, with a growing community of nature bathing guides and ecotherapists inviting harried people to engage with nature in slower, less productive ways. Not for fitness, where the natural world is a backdrop, but to restore more deeply.

In this culture of overwhelm, more people are trading in speed, multitasking and distraction for respite in green environments. For simplified time.

Health care providers, too, are giving the natural world more serious consideration. Some are issuing nature prescriptions, sharing national park passes and clear instructions, drafted on medical pads, to get outside as a balm for stress, anxiety, depression and a host of other ills.

“When you’re in nature, you kind of feel like the guest. It humbles you,” Mr. Marsters said.

“It reminds you that this human thing we’re doing, the society we’ve decided to build and make really complicated and stressful – we’ve done this to ourselves.”

On a sunny Sunday in April, he gathered along with other forest bathers at Toronto’s Evergreen Brick Works, a quarry-turned-greenspace connected to a system of serpentine ravines. Leading them was Emily Pleasance, founder of Forest Bathing Club in the city.

The session would span a languorous three hours. Ms. Pleasance asked everyone to stow away their phones, and the group sat in a circle in a clearing.

Early in the outing, she invited her forest bathers to take in sensory details around them. Red-tailed hawks gliding overhead, ducks waddling in a pond, different languages burbling through the woods. The scent of cedar warmed in the sun. City sounds beyond this oasis – police sirens, the hum of a nearby highway.

Rousing from their meditative states, the bathers shared their impressions, worries and thoughts; the mood grew lighter.

Later in the afternoon, Ms. Pleasance invited the group to stroll nearby boardwalks and trails as slowly as they could muster, then touch the murky edges of a pond. As the hours passed, the forest bathers grew closer, their laughter rippling through the trees.

The day saw no to-do list checked off, no step count tallied, nothing filtered and posted to Instagram.

“I’ve never had someone leave a session and be more stressed,” said Ms. Pleasance, who’s led free and paid sessions across the city’s green spaces with all kinds of forest bathers – families, people on first dates, corporate executives, bedbound clients gazing out a window.

Ms. Pleasance, a qualifying psychotherapist, finds people feel more quieted after the experience. “They’re saying, ‘I feel more clear-minded. I’m ready to go back to my life. I feel like I’ve just kind of gone away for a little bit.’”

Across Canada, people are pausing the busy churn of their lives to join these rituals. In Montreal, organizers are planning a series of eco-somatic walks focused on the sensory relationships between nature and the body. Forest therapy sessions have woven through conservation areas in Ontario’s Kawarthas. At the University of British Columbia’s botanical gardens, nature bathing took up residence alongside a hatha yoga session last August. In Newfoundland, clubs have met on forest trails, ending the day with tea ceremonies and foraged snacks.

Beyond these communities, a growing body of research is backing the idea that time in nature is good medicine. People living in or near green spaces had lower rates of anxiety and depression, according to one meta-analysis that also found residents reported better overall health and physicians diagnosed fewer illnesses. A separate study found cortisol dropped after people spent just 20 minutes exposed to the natural world.

This January, another meta-analysis showed that time in nature lightens mental overload, hones attention and quiets the chattering mind.

Mar Estarellas, a post-doctoral researcher in psychiatry at McGill University, and co-authors reviewed 108 studies on how nature affects the brain. All involved neuro-imaging scans of people who’d been exposed to nature, from walking in a forest to looking at images of natural environments.

Across the board, researchers observed a cascading effect in the brain. It starts with sensory ease.

“The natural sights, sounds, trees, waves or birds singing have simple and repeating patterns, which we call fractals. Simple, repeating patterns are very easy, even pleasurable, for the brain to process,” said Ms. Estarellas, a forest bathing guide who’s led sessions in Montreal.

“It’s visually and sensorially gentle, so the brain has less work to do and can relax. Versus in the city, we’re always filtering chaos and noise.”

Next comes a calming of the alarm centre within the brain’s amygdala, which processes emotions. The body’s fight-or-flight response eases, heart rate slows, breathing deepens and digestion improves.

After that, attention starts to sharpen and self-obsessed thoughts ramp down.

“You’re on a big cliff and suddenly you feel really small, like you’re part of something much bigger than yourself. There’s less self-criticism and rumination because you’re this tiny speck of dust in a bigger system,” Ms. Estarellas said.

“This sense of awe is what makes us feel small. That’s a good thing for us because all our problems also feel very small.”

People fully immersed in nature experienced these effects the longest. But even three to 10 minutes of looking at images of natural environments stimulated this positive cascade in the brain.

“I thought, how incredible it must feel to our body and our brain to be closer to nature, that three minutes looking at a picture of a beach makes you feel better,” Ms. Estarellas said.

More health care providers are becoming aware of the connections between well-being and the outdoors.

Sehjal Bhargava, an Ottawa family physician, now views nature as the fourth pillar of health – along with sleep, diet and exercise.

“It’s like another magic pill,” she said. “When it comes to stress management, chronic disease management, physical inactivity, sedentary behaviour, screen time, it’s in line with the rest of the lifestyle counselling family medicine provides.”

Dr. Bhargava is president-elect of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment – doctors, nurses, pharmacists, social workers and other health care providers concerned about climate change and its effect on patients’ health.

“We are trying to connect those dots between a healthy climate and a healthy person, looking at climate change as a risk factor for ill health and exacerbation of health conditions,” she said.

As part of her practice, Dr. Bhargava tries to give her busy patients permission to go outside for the sake of their health.

“There’s evidence that shows people are more likely to spend time in nature if it’s recommended by a health-care professional,” she said. “When I talk about time in nature with the patient, I write it down on a prescription pad, sign it and give it to them.”

For financially strained patients, Dr. Bhargava can share free discovery passes for national parks and special memberships for AllTrails, an app with guides and maps for various outdoor activities.

It’s all arranged through partnerships between participating organizations and PaRx Connectors, a national program that helps pair patients with forest therapy guides, horticultural therapists who use gardening to promote wellbeing and other resources. The cost is covered by the partner organizations. PaRx Connectors has more than 20,000 prescribers registered, with more than 1.8 million nature prescriptions issued.

“I love how accessible it is. It’s not, ‘Go climb a mountain.’ It’s not even, ‘Go exercise.’ It’s, ‘Go spend time in a natural environment that you find meaningful.’ It could be your garden plot, your balcony, house plants. Anything where you derive meaningful time from nature, you begin to accrue health benefits,” Dr. Bhargava said.

“This is a way to take a step back in a world where we’re progressively zooming in on our own lives, constantly under the barrage of acute stressors, and overwhelmed trying to get through the day. Giving people permission to go be in nature doesn’t add more to the plate. It’s an accessible lifestyle intervention that doesn’t add cognitive load or burden to their day.”

There appear to be other offshoot benefits to all this forest bathing: Researchers have found that people who connect regularly with the natural world tend to take better care of it. Multiple studies have linked “nature connectedness” to environmentally protective behaviour.

“It helps us recognize that our natural surroundings are a privilege, something we need to protect,” Dr. Bhargava said.

Forest bathing practitioners hope people will start treating nature as more than a resource for their own well-being. Through her sessions at Evergreen in Toronto, Ms. Pleasance hopes to instill more reciprocity.

“A lot of our recreation is human-centric,” she said. “We’re going out into nature with this point of view of, ‘I’m getting the benefits, getting sun, moving my body.’”

Forest bathing is different, she said: “This is more of a relational practice.”

During her April session, Ms. Pleasance raised the concept of climate emotions. She described a sensation, solastalgia, the grief people feel for a place being damaged, sometimes experienced as homesickness felt while still home. Another notion: soliphilia, empathy and solidarity with a place that drives people to try and protect it. Sometimes, connection to nature comes with anger and sorrow, Ms. Pleasance said.

At Patricia Hasbach’s psychotherapy office in Eugene, Ore., climate anxiety comes up frequently – wildfires have ravaged communities throughout the state in recent years.

Dr. Hasbach, who wrote the 2025 book Prescribing Nature: A Clinician’s Guide to Ecotherapy, asks clients about their relationship to the natural world. During clinical intake, she’ll ask whether nature was part of their childhoods and how they use green spaces now.

“What’s our intention when we go outdoors?” Dr. Hasbach asks. “Somebody who goes for a run, their intention might be focused on their heart rate and speed – there’s a place for that. Science tells us green exercise is better for us psychologically than doing it on a treadmill in a windowless gym. But if you do that for the body, what are you doing for the mind? Do you also take time to go out for a contemplative walk, to sit and take in what’s around you?”

Often, she’ll do walk and talk therapy, strolling with clients along a river path near her office, instead of sitting across from each other in a room.

She also frequently prescribes time in nature, asking clients to pick a spot they can return to regularly; it could be their garden or a city park. To help slow their thoughts, she asks them to remove their earbuds, put their phones away and focus on what draws their senses and their attention.

“Being connected with the natural world is healing to many people. It’s always been to me personally, having grown up in a rural setting. I thought, we never include this in the work we do with our clients,” Dr. Hasbach said.

Throughout her book, she tracks a troubling disinterest in being out in the wilds.

“With each generation, we see people more removed from nature. More of us are living in urban centres. We’re getting more instant gratification with our use of technology,” she said.

“As people become more insulated, they show less interest in connecting with nature. It’s a dangerous precedent we’re setting, particularly as people are raising children.”

But the therapist saw some hopeful signs during pandemic lockdowns. With just about every form of amusement taken away, people started going outside in droves. National and provincial park bookings remain high in Canada, and more people have picked up unhurried, green pursuits including gardening and birding.

“It gets people outdoors in unstructured ways that require some patience,” she said. “Nature takes time to observe. It helps us slow our pace.”

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