Caring for Our Dogs, Caring for Ourselves
I recently got together with my friend Luis from Two Dads Dog Training, and had a great conversation about some of the overlaps between caring for our dogs and caring for ourselves. It turns out there’s a lot of overlap!
For example, our dogs’ lives have changed dramatically over the course of their history. From wild wolves, to eventually domesticated dogs, to being bred for specific jobs, and more commonly now to being parts of our families. The everyday lives of most dogs now look very different from how they did for much of their history. They now typically spend much more of their time indoors, often without specific work to do like they may have had in the past.
We as humans have also been through similarly dramatic changes. Or really the same changes, as the changes our dogs have been through are alongside of our own changes.
Humans depended on connecting with nature for survival for the huge majority of our history, such as finding food and water, navigating, or predicting weather conditions. We evolved outside, and so our brains and nervous systems are wired for that environment. It is just within the past century or so that we have largely moved into cities, with around 80% of the world population now in urban environments. We spend much of our time indoors or commuting in our cars.
There is a fundamental mismatch in how we’re wired and the way our modern daily lives look. Our nervous systems evolved to deal with temporary concrete threats, like a bear or a lion, where we can fight, run, or freeze to try and survive. But now most of the time we’re faced with abstract and chronic threats like epidemics, political tensions, or financial problems, resulting in a chronically active nervous system for many people. Also known as anxiety or stress.
Our brains evolved in an outdoor environment where our attentions can move about freely and effortlessly as we physically move through that environment. But now we often spend hours a day in one spot, working on things that require us to focus intently on a single task while tuning out distractions also demanding our attention, leaving our attentions drained and overworked.
But because so much of our history has been spent in connection with nature, it turns out that connecting with nature is still very good for our brains and nervous systems.
Like our dogs, we benefit from being outside. Several decades of research have repeatedly shown that engaging with nature calms down our nervous systems, lowers our stress levels, and helps us restore our drained attentions. Whether walking outside, sitting outside, or even just smelling the scents of the outdoors, our cortisol levels drop, our heart rates go down, and our blood pressures decrease.
If your dogs are like mine, they know well enough about the benefits of being outdoors to demand a walk every day, if not multiple. While taking your dog out for a walk, just know that you are also doing your mental health a favor, giving yourself some much needed time to soak in the outdoors as you and your dog navigate a rapidly changing world.
If you’d like to try focusing on your mental health in an outdoor setting you may be interested in Hiking Therapy. Feel free to contact me to learn more.