Ok, Todays a short video compared to some I have shown on Monday’s videos. This is a talk by David Strayer and he is explaining why you are able to restore your brain.
He first sets up a scene of this stock trader who doesn’t see the beauty in the national park he in. He is too busy with a phone stuck to her ear to allow for nature and all her glory to the needed work on her.
The details that David gave on the studies of the human brain and how they react and start to fix themselves when they are out in nature are simply awe-inspiring.
David states that we are in front of electronics so much that we have a type of digital hangover and that the average 30 minutes a day we spend out in nature simply isn’t enough.
He also talks about how we try way too hard to multitask and that we are terrible at it. When we multitask we overexert our minds and doing so we decrease our performance. That decrease ends up being about 25% of our day is wasted as we switch from one task to another. The fact that we are not quickly jumping to other tasks gives us an increase in stress. Yet our attempt to do multitask gives us a small dopamine hit when we slightly succeed. Therefore we are fooling ourselves into thinking we are good at switching tasks.
So all of this overwork wears out our brain and that may be the lead to many of the different anxiety and stress-related illnesses our society is facing these days.
He does also talk about the 3-day effect he has seen when being out of technologies reach for a minimum of 3 days. You start to become one with nature as you slow down and start noticing details you often are missing because your brain is still trying to do a hundred things at once.
Now David calls this the 3-day syndrome and I would disagree because a syndrome has a connotation of an illness. I like the name 3-day effect because it shows that nature has an influence on us. It isn’t infecting us.
So sit back an see how you can get away from technology this coming weekend.
