5 Minute Facts - Nature

This is episode 164 of the Empowered Team podcast. Psst. The zenith is coming. The most incredible life changing retreat in Sayulita, Mexico. That's right, the zenith is coming. To learn more, head to www.theempowered.ca zenith. Learn more. It is life Chang. Welcome to the Empowered Team podcast where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport and life. And now, your host, executive coach and life strategist, Kari Schneider. Okay, so here we go. Today's topic for performance power is the beautiful, incredible outdoors. Nature. We love it. So we're going to do some five minute facts on it. And to lead in, I love looking up the research on this type of stuff. So to lead in, I want to tell you about a study with 20,000 people. It's great to have a large group of people to study 20,000 people. The people who spend two hours a week in green spaces all at once or separated. So two hours a week have substantially, significantly, that's what we would say in research. Significantly more likely to report good health and psychological well being than those who didn't. So those of us who get in the outdoors, we're more likely to be psychologically have that well being, but also that physical side too. So we're going to go into the top five, five of our five minute facts. Number one, nature outdoors increases memory and concentration. Now, if we don't all need a little more memory and concentration, I don't know who does. But I think it is fantastic. Memory and concentration with only a 20 minute walk in nature. Those who did the 20 minute walk in nature had a 20% increase in memory on their test that they did following the 20 minute walk. Those who didn't do the 20 minute walk were that much less, their scores were that much less on their memory and concentration. So that's number one, memory and concentration. Number two, who does not want to feel happier? Number two is that those who have nature walks have increased mental health. And a finished study showed that Those who did 15 minutes of outdoor time or walking were more psychologically restored than those who didn't. And we also know that time and nature decreases your resting heart rate, just decreases your heart rate overall and decreases stress. Thereby increased heart rate is one sign of increased stress. So the number two is feeling happier. We all want to feel a little happier. Number three, this one is kind of awesome, especially for those of us who have injuries or those of us who even have emotional or psychological things to heal from because nature heals. And if we even just Want to go into the injury side of things. Patients who were exposed to more natural light healed faster from spinal surgery and reported less pain than those who were not. So just going to say that one again. Patients who are exposed to more natural light report healed from their spinal surgery faster and had less pain than those who were not exposed to natural outdoor light. The other study on this topic on the nature of healing is there is less pain for those who are a group who are 70 years old. They have less pain than their counterparts who don't go outside daily. So the 70 year olds who went outside daily had less overall pain than the 70 year olds who who did not go outside daily. So that's number three. Number four, coming at you fast is promoting weight loss or weight maintenance, especially altitude. Altitude especially speeds metabolism and lowers appetite. But the outdoors overall promotes overall healthy weight and weight loss. And number five, strengthens the immune system. If that's not a hot topic right now, I don't know what is. But strengthening the immune system. Being outdoors increases your white blood cell count. So even a Japan study, the Japanese have done a lot of studies and they have what's called forest bathing, going out into nature, just being within nature and they look at the results of that blood work, all sorts of things, stress measures. And one of the studies from Jap, from Japanese women found that for just six hours in the woods that was the stimulus, six hours in the woods, the increase in white blood cells which fight virus that extended even over into a two day period. And they've done more studies with that on business, people who are very stressed out and seeing that some of those markers are increased even longer than that, weeks and into months. So that boost can happen up to two days to two weeks after the exposure. So that is number five. But we are going to give one more as a bonus and this one's the bonus because we've done this as a topic already and it's vitamin D. Vitamin D is so critical to us and being outdoors improves and increases our vitamin D stores this fat soluble vitamin, you can get exposure and then it will stay in your body. So this time in the sun. And vitamins is good for increasing that Vitamin D And vitamin D may prevent cancer, osteoporosis and heart attacks. There's lots and lots of evidence for vitamin D being an amazing, amazing thing for our body. So Those are your 5 minute facts on outdoors and nature, the research, pulling it all together on the top five things that I think are most important to you. And now I want to open it up to question questions, questions on the outdoors, on nature and anything else. Training, nutrition, performance, sleep recovery, whatever is there for you. So bring it. And I also have some questions that people have brought into me as well. So go for it. What questions do you have? Pop it in the chat or unmute? I'm not sure it's a question as much as it's funny. With all those things that we get from being outdoors, we didn't talk about sleep and that really, as we all know, especially exercising outdoors or just being outdoors for an extended length of time, whether it's summer or the middle of winter, when you come in, you have this resurgence of energy that lasts about an hour and then you're just ready for a good sleep. I love late night walks, like 8 o' clock with my girlfriend. It's good for the soul. Those walks, I think I call them a talk and walk. And then you get home and throw a load of laundry in and then you get your nightie on and it lights out and it's such a good feeling. It is amazing. And I love to now know your nighttime routine. So because I am a science geek, I have to throw in some of the things that happens with that. If we go outside, especially first thing in the morning, and we get those low level rays of light into our eyes, our brain's only way to know what time it is is via our eyes. Now, time is just a construct, but it's actually daylight hours that our body wants to align with. So if we get outside time, it can't be done with blue light, it can't be done with artificial light. It has to be sometime in the morning. Getting those specific rays of light with our eyes could be anywhere from five to 15 minutes. That outdoor time will help our circadian rhythm. And same thing in the evening. That evening walk you're talking about, those low level lights in the evening also cues our brain to know our circadian rhythm. And it tells our brain when it's time to really shut down. And that light exposure, there's these things called, I think it's adenosine receptors. What they do is they eventually show us, show our body when to feel fatigued. There's so much involved with our eyes to know when we feel fatigued and when to sleep and when to be on our circadian rhythm. So absolutely huge point. This would be number 6, 7 with big stars around it is. And the only reason I didn't put it in this one is because we've done so much on sleep lately and it's so true. And actually there's a. I'm going to open this up. But there's another question regarding sleep before we go forward, and that is someone brought in a question. It was Paul who was on crazy weird hours for the Olympics and questions around him were all about melatonin. The people who were pulling crazy hours for the other time zone in Japan, some of them were asking about taking melatonin. I looked into melatonin several years back and I have melatonin and I've tried it for jet lags, jet lag trips, and I now don't recommend melatonin. And the reason I don't recommend melatonin is because there's only one place in the body that we produce melatonin and if we ingest melatonin, it can be a little off putting for our production of melatonin. The other part of melatonin is that it only helps you fall asleep, it doesn't help you stay asleep, it doesn't help you get a quality sleep, it only helps you fall asleep. And more does not do better. Most humans think that if their half of a dose didn't work, then they might try a full dose and if it didn't work, it just didn't work. And so it's hard for people to use it appropriately and then it may disrupt their own production of melatonin. So that is why for my clients who are experiencing jet lag, I don't recommend melatonin anymore. I used to because it was shown in research to be effective. But not everything that is effective is necessarily the best choice or good for us. So right now, based on some of the neurology scientists that I follow, I would steer clear of melatonin because I like to default to what our body can do and support that instead of trying to skip that step. So that's the melatonin thing. What else do you have any other questions for the physicality, the nutrition, what else do we have? So is it better to sleep with the blinds open? So the daylight, morning sun, the a.m. the morning daylight tells you the time to wake up or keep them closed? Fantastic question. Because this comes into the logistics of most of us not having auto timed blinds. So here's the thing. You want the room at night to be as dark as it possibly can. If your blinds being open means that street lights come in or means that a bright moon comes in, then that can disrupt your nighttime sleep. However, if the blinds closed are really, really dark blinds and you don't see any daylight coming in, then that can also cause you not to wake up the way you would. However, most times, even with darker blinds, most times the light will still come in. So what I would say is, if you've got any sort of nighttime light, especially city light, then keep those blinds closed at night, because there's still going to be some daylight that comes in on the outside of the blinds in the morning, and you will still get that effect of your body starting to become sensitive to that in the morning. Now, I'm going to point to some other research, and this is pretty powerful for children right now. Children who have night lights on at night have an increased likelihood for myopia, which is nearsightedness. What happens in children is that their eyes, and not only everything that happens with children's eyes, affect the development of their brain. And with night lights, which you don't want to traumatize a child, they may still need to get to the bathroom. There's all sorts of other issues or logistics to work through, perhaps until a night light can be taken away. But night lights have been shown to. It's because if the child has thin eyelids, that light still is coming through the eye. It's the eye exposure. And that to the brain, there's another component to that, and that is that the exposure children have now to screens and not as much horizon work, then that means that children are far more likely to be nearsighted. Now there's a massive increase in nearsighted children now because they're not outdoors as much looking at horizons as much. And that points to. I know I can go on and on about this. Clearly that points to. For those of us who are in front of screens a lot of the day, what happens is that our eye muscles, our retinas have to constrict. And then that's how it's focused on something close to us. In order for our eyes to relax and also to relax our brain, we want to focus on something as far away as possible, something that is on the horizon. If we can get a far horizon, if we have a cityscape and it's skyscraper after skyscraper, it's very hard to get that far horizon. In that case, then what we do is instead of looking as far as we can, we try and unfocus and bring in as wide as we can. Our eyes dilate and that relaxes. We feel the relaxation and the eyes relax, and they're little tiny muscles within our eyes actually start to get relaxing and then constricting. Even people who go through concussion therapy will be working on even a two minute set of working on close focus and then far focus and then close focus and then far focus. There is nothing wrong with us working on that, especially if we're in front of a computer for a long period of time. It's really a great idea to focus on that just to exercise not only our eye health and our vision health, but also our brain health. It is easy, something to add in. You could be relaxing or finishing a meditation and then add in a minute or two of focusing close and then focusing far. And not only are you helping your own vision because it's the little muscles of focusing in the eyes, you're also helping your brain as well. I wasn't intending on going in that, but clearly that these. I obsess about these things, so. Okay, another question. Bring it on. What else you got for me? Performance training, mental acuity, sleep, nutrition, what do you got? I have another one that was one from a client. This person was looking to. They'd gained a little bit of weight over Covid. I was working on their program. They were looking for something that they could do, but they didn't want to do it too long. I was up against this conundrum of if this person wants to lose some of the body fat that they gained, but then at the same time they don't want their workouts to be as intense as they used to be or as long as they used to be. Well, in that case I have to be really frank and honest about the scenario and say, well, it's not the workout that's going to do it because if you're not going to add enough intensity in or enough duration in, then it has to be from something else. An additional walk and adjusting some of the intake of food or especially alcohol because for this person the alcohol consumption had gone up. In that case, oftentimes people are looking for the exercise to be the magic bullet. But then if we know that someone's not going to do the exercise if it's too hard or too long. And so we're trying to keep within the parameters of enjoyable exercise and really feeling good about their exercise, then we have to look beyond that and see what else can be done. So like you've said as well, the enjoyable evening walk we're killing, the walk you described is killing three birds with one stone and expanding an experience of quality of life. There's the walk for the physicality. There's the improvement of sleep, there's the social dynamic and just feel good and filling up that Serotonin and that oxytocin for overall well being. So that can be something that's added in for this person who wants to change body composition slightly without turning their workouts into something they resent or don't like, keeping it within the realm of something they really love doing. They're honoring their body, adding in the walk, maybe cutting out a couple of glasses of wine, and then it all comes together in a way that they feel like they're filling their cup instead of punishing themselves for gaining a little weight over Covid or whatever that looked like for them. So that was a specific client conundrum or request that I was dealing with lately as well. Other questions for you, what else do we have? Anything come up? Gretchen's our runner. Right, Gretchen, you're our runner in the group. You always love to run. Are you okay with walking? Are you one of those runners that I'm not going to walk, I need to run. Or do you enjoy nice big walks as well? We just took the dogs out in the woods yesterday for a nice long walk. Yeah, I walked too. I'm trying to get back to running with the smoke here. It's been really hard because that's really. I don't know if I've developed allergies or whatever, but it's been a struggle. I'm still doing my skips and a little bit of running, but yesterday it was a good walk and I think we're going to do that again, too. But, yeah, I love it. It's just anything outdoors is fine. Yeah. And then we're getting to a point where we're being asked to not go outdoors because of air right now. Yeah, air quality. Yeah. Up north. So Gretchen's in Minnesota and I've been in northwestern Ontario. And the air quality in some points has gotten so bad that it looks like a really dark, cloudy day when it's actually not a cloudy day. It's that intense. The fires are so bad. In that case, what people are experiencing are the scratchy throat. They're experiencing a little more congestion in the nose even if it's not developing allergies. Overall, an inflammatory response as the body is filtering through the nose and in the throat and in the lungs, filtering the particles that are coming from that smoke and the eyes, all the smoke that's in the air. So sometimes it's things like even a saline solution through the nose can sometimes help. If you've got salt, warm salt water in a pot and you ingest some of that in, sometimes that can help Just not only support the tissues but also support the throat as well. I almost lost my voice from a period that was really, really smoky because it was just my throat was what was responding. I'll feel a little more phlegmy. I'll be careful not to do a very intense run on a day that's exceptionally smoky and just kind of decide when and how I'm going to do a run that way. So those are some, some scenarios where we've got this outdoor environment that's so good for us and then we are in a scenario where it's actually there's some air quality issues. And so I, the way I use to judge is when I get up in the morning and I'm outdoors and I see what my horizon looks like, what the, what the smoke looks like, check the air quality and then I'll decide am I going to run or am I not going to run in that if it's my day to run, I might switch the days of what I'm working out in order to not be exposed to the, in order to not be exposed to that. And yes, you're going to, you're going to find that. So Gretchen mentioned an essential oil, ones that are supportive to your respiratory system too. Combinations of lemon, lavender, peppermint and essential oil on guard supports the immune system really well, but can also open airways a little bit. So those can be great choices for supporting our airways in ways that can help us breathe better, especially if you feel like your nose is really stuffed that way. Any other ones on that? Other questions? Comments? There's one thing that's come up that another there were a couple questions along the same line and I'm not going to go too far into this just on our last little bit, but this has to do with the pelvis. I had an athlete recently who is in a very intense sport, football. They had an osteitis pubis. And what that means is that there's this, this is the pelvis, this is the pubic bone and what they were dealing with. And this can happen to other athletes as well. But when there's a lot of intensity in the sport and the adductors, which are the groin muscles and the muscles that pull the legs together and the hip flexors, if they're all getting really tight with the abdominal wall in front of is getting a little weaker, then sometimes there will be too much pulling on that pelvis in certain ways and the symphysis pubis right here can get very, very inflamed or painful. Now that's what was happening with a football player. But in the same vein, there's another person that I knew was having almost like a hernia rectus diastasis, this little bloop, this little separation in their linea alba, this line in their abdominal wall. People will experience all sorts of things like this, even if they're healthy. Now, some people will have this little hernia up in their abdominal wall or have an inflammatory spot in their symphysis pubis, this whole trunk and core area, and be able to let it. Have a little rest and let it heal and not have any functional differences down the road, not even really need any sort of intervention medically. Others will need to have a hernia repair and need to have rest recovery and have that changed in order to be able to function normally for down the road. The issue is that it's also different from person to person, that unless you see a physician who's familiar with it or you see a couple other diagnostic appointments, you're not. You're not going to know. Because one little change, one little hernia, one little exposure in the connective tissue of the abdominal wall is so much different than the next that someone's going to need to get that followed up on. Diagnostics, ultrasounds, another professional to take a look at. If one thinks surgery, I would suggest to see another one who's seen a lot of hernias before, before they go into the surgical route. So there are some things along that line that I would suggest that when you have a GP who sees that and refers on to surgery or wants to do surgery on that, I would suggest seeing another diagnostic and approaching a few things first to see if it can repair naturally before having to do surgery. There are plenty of hernias that just. Just need surgery right off the hop, but lots of them don't. So that's important to know anything last before we hop off, we lose Gretchen. I think so we're getting thunderstorms here. Are you? I was talking to a lady in Stein. They call it Steinbach. I call it Steinbach, Manitoba, right down. And she said they're experiencing the air quality even where they are. Yes. And that's because they're so close to where we are. So they're so close to that. Northwestern Ontario, if they just go a little further north, that's where all the forest fires are. That's why they're experiencing it. Plus the way the wind blows through the prairie area as well. And further north is where all those fires are. Even in Manitoba, too. Something, isn't it? Hundreds, hundreds of forest fires. Yeah. Very sad. And the forest fires, just from an overall health and human perspective, if we look at us as humans, we're in a situation where they're in Greece, they're in Turkey, last year was Australia, they're in B.C. they're all over the U.S. california, Canada, you name it. This is a massive, massive shift in what our climate, what our world is able to do. So it's key that people pay attention because it's going to be really hard to be healthy when our world isn't healthy. Our own health, our own ability to thrive as organisms, as creatures that is dependent on our environment, period, just like any other organism. So if our world environment isn't healthy, it's going to be very challenging for us to be healthy as individuals. So, yeah, those forest fires will definitely feel it when it comes to the breathing. So, okay, on that note, we're going to wrap up. Have a beautiful rest of your day, everyone. Performance. Have a great rest of your week as well, Tracy. Yep, you too. You too. Bye. Bye. If you enjoy listening to the Empowered Team Podcast, you'll love being on the Empowered Team. The Empowered Team runs year round. It is our group coaching and accountability program where we take mindset and physical performance concepts and break them down to usable action steps that optimize results. To learn more about our Empowered leadership coaching for business, our custom online physical training plans, and of course, the Empowered Team group coaching, head to www.theempowered.ca.empowered learn more. That's www.theempowered.ca.empowered learn more.