The Therapy of Nature: When Healing Looks Like Sitting Still

This piece is a companion to Episode 12 of Both Sides of the Couch, where I talk about the therapy of nature and how the outdoors can support people living with chronic illness. In the episode, I explore how nature regulates the nervous system and offers permission to rest. Here, I wanted to slow that conversation down and linger a little longer with what nature has meant to me.

There’s a version of nature we’re often sold.

It’s active, athletic, aspirational, hiking boots, summit photos, or sweaty accomplishment.

And then there’s the version of nature that actually heals me; the one where I sit on a bench, or stare out a window, or notice how the light hits the trees in the late afternoon. The one that doesn’t ask me to move faster, push harder, or prove anything.

When you live with chronic illness, your body is already working overtime. It doesn’t need more demands. It needs regulation, predictability, safety, and permission to exist without performance.

Nature, for me, has become one of the few places that offers that.

Nature doesn’t require participation

What I love most about nature is that it doesn’t ask me to do anything.

Yes, there are trails and activities and adventures available and I do enjoy those things, but they are optional. Nature itself isn’t demanding them. It’s just there moving at its own pace, offering sound, texture, temperature, and rhythm.

When my energy is low or my symptoms are flaring, that matters.

I can sit, I can watch, I can listen, and I can leave whenever I need to.

And somehow, even without “doing,” my body softens.

Why nature is therapy and regulating for chronically ill bodies

From a nervous system perspective, nature offers something rare in modern life: non-demanding sensory input.

There’s nothing I need to respond to, no social cues to track, no notifications, no urgency.

The sounds of water, wind, birds, or leaves moving naturally slow breathing and heart rate. Visual exposure to greenery reduces stress hormones. Familiar outdoor spaces offer predictability, which helps bodies that live in a near constant state of vigilance.

For people with chronic pain, fatigue, migraines, or autonomic dysfunction, regulation not exertion is often what creates relief.

Sometimes the most therapeutic thing we can do is allow the nervous system to remember what calm feels like.

Redefining what “nature time” counts as

One of the most important shifts I’ve made is letting go of the idea that nature has to look a certain way.

Nature doesn’t have to mean:

• hiking

• walking long distances

• standing

• being outside for hours

  
  

It can be:

• sitting on a porch

• opening a window

• watching trees sway

• listening to birds during a migraine

• sunlight through a window

• houseplants

• a parked car with the windows cracked

  
  

Passive exposure still counts.

If all your body can do is lie still, there are still ways to connect with the natural world. You don’t have to earn it. You don’t have to perform for it.

When nature holds emotions we don’t have words for

There are emotions that feel easier to hold outside.

Grief. (death rituals often occur outside), anger (taking a walk or exercising to clear your mind), exhaustion (a nap in a hammock), and acceptance (watching the seasons change).

We instinctively turn to nature for big moments, memorials, celebrations, and rituals because it can hold complexity without commentary. Nature doesn’t rush us through emotions or try to fix them. It just stays.

Being outside often makes me feel smaller in a comforting way, not insignificant but held within something much bigger. My problems don’t disappear, but they soften. There’s a reminder that life moves in cycles, without urgency, without judgment.

Things change, things rest, things return.

When illness changes how you can access nature

One of the hardest parts of chronic illness is grieving the way you used to experience things.

For me, there was a period where I believed that if I couldn’t hike the way I used to, nature was being taken from me. I couldn’t see another way in.

That grief was real.

What I didn’t see yet was that stillness could be its own doorway.

I took up photography and watercolors, which includes watching one small area change instead of moving through many.

Those slower ways of being in nature ended up feeling even more therapeutic than the high exertion versions I missed.

Sometimes loss doesn’t mean something is gone, sometimes it means the relationship changes.

There is no “right” way to be in nature

If there’s one thing I want people to take from this:

You’re allowed to let go of doing it right.

There is no goal, no metric, no achievement.

Nature is not a treatment plan it’s a relationship, one that adapts to you as you are today, not as you wish you could be.

And while nature doesn’t cure chronic illness, it often makes living with it more bearable.

Sometimes healing isn’t forward motion, sometimes it’s sitting, settling, and letting yourself be held by the world around you.

Have some ideas for ways to experience nature? Share them in the comments.