The therapeutic benefits of forest bathing
When my editor asked if I’d be interested in writing about “forest bathing” for Rotary magazine, I assumed I heard him wrong. Florist raving? Tourist baiting? Some other goofy trendlet I was too old to know about? Had the editorial focus of Rotary shifted dramatically without my knowledge?
No, he assured me. Forest bathing. I envisioned something like a polar bear club, with more privacy and fewer clothes. I also envisioned increasing my freelance fee. But before I could respond that, when it came to matters of personal hygiene, I was just fine with my own bathroom, thank you very much, my editor proceeded to educate me. It’s not bathing, nor is it hiking — or even exercise, per se — but rather an experience in which people immerse themselves in nature, often guided as a group through meditation and sensory exercises that make use of all five senses. Think of it as outdoor mindfulness, he said.
Forest bathing, also known as forest therapy, started in 1982 as part of a national campaign in Japan that promoted visiting forests as a way to reduce work-related stress. The concept was called shinrin-yoku (yes, it translates as “forest bathing” or, if you wish, “bathing in the forest atmosphere”). The ritual has grown into a movement sparked by Japan’s Forest Therapy Society, which has certified 65 forest therapy sites in the country. Meanwhile, forest bathing has spread like gentle ripples in a pond, with thousands of guides leading retreats and themed events around the world. Eco-hotels catering to forest bathers have popped up everywhere from the Barrenjoey Peninsula near Sydney to the Pocono Mountains in eastern Pennsylvania. Closer to my home in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, organizations from the Morton Arboretum to the Chicago Park District offer some kind of forest therapy outing.
Some people have incorporated shinrin-yoku into their daily routines. “I work right next to a park with a famous shrine where there are lots of trees,” writes Qing Li, a leader of the forest bathing movement. “From my office window I can see beautiful scenery, and I walk in the shrine at lunchtime almost every day.”
Those comments appear in Li’s 2018 book, Forest Bathing: How Trees Can Help You Find Health and Happiness. The 310-page volume has become something akin to a holy scripture among forest bathers. In it, Li, a doctor at Nippon Medical School Hospital in Tokyo who has spent 20 years studying forest bathing’s benefits, implores readers to leave their phones behind and find a spot where they can open their senses to nature. If you don’t have a forest handy, any small green space will do. “It will improve your mood, reduce tension and anxiety, and help you focus and concentrate for the rest of the day,” he promises.
None of this feels entirely new. We’re living in an existentially fraught moment in time when the need for “self-care” is a constant refrain. The idea of self-care has evolved into a catchall encapsulating any pastime unrelated to work, from ballroom dancing to journaling to petting puppies. Not long ago, this was called “me time,” but now everyone — doctors, teachers, bartenders, barbers — recommends self-care interventions far and wide. It’s not hard to imagine the guys in my pickup basketball game recommending forest bathing the same way one might suggest, say, paintball.
I’ve always been wary of the line between self-care and self-indulgence, so before the knee-jerk cynicism kicked in, I had to see Dr. Li for myself. In a YouTube video, he appears as an unassuming middle-aged man in an orange North Face jacket strolling through the woods, periodically stopping to caress and sniff various moss-covered trees. In between, he warns viewers that Japan has a word, karoshi, that means, basically, “death from overwork.” As he lists the medical perks of forest bathing — reduction of stress hormones, lowered blood pressure, strengthened immune and cardiovascular systems — the whole enterprise gives off the vibe of a benign self-help video. But the message is clear: Unless you want to die at your desk, you need to take care of yourself.
Point taken. I’ve been living in Chicago for 26 years now, and I have raised three children here, with all the glories and miseries that entails. For nearly half my life, my brain has been bombarded with construction noise, horns honking, car stereos blaring, the dog barking, kids needing. The sound of sirens is so persistent from my home office that I don’t even notice it anymore until I’m on Zoom and someone asks if everything’s OK. I exist in a state of heightened stress and agitation. Of course, I’m not special: Nearly all of us are in danger of losing ourselves in the intermittent boops and bings of beckoning technology, a daily onslaught of headlines and deadlines and responsibilities that never end. Li would probably say we’re all candidates for a slow-motion karoshi.
There’s an old adage that it’s not the stress that kills us — it is our reaction to it. And even my most positive reactions to my stress — half-hearted stabs at meditation, podcasts, therapy, walking the dog — were obviously not cutting it. Maybe disappearing into the woods for a three-hour forest therapy walk at the Morton Arboretum would help. I called back my editor and signed up.
Located about 25 miles west of downtown Chicago, the Morton Arboretum feels like another planet. Calling itself “the champion of trees,” the sprawling suburban oasis boasts 16 miles of hiking trails, over 200 species of resident and migratory birds, and more than 100,000 live plants across woodland, wetland, prairie, and meadow habitats. It’s hard to imagine a more relaxing setting so close to one of the least relaxing cities in America.
Yet, as I arrive on a recent Saturday morning, late and lost, I am a mess. No amount of natural beauty or mindfulness can tamp down my anxiety as I wind along the botanical garden’s looping roads in search of the elusive parking lot P-29. By the time I find it, I feel my heart knocking against my ribcage like an angry neighbor. Nice start.
Ever forward-thinking, education staff members at the Morton Arboretum learned about the rise in forest bathing a decade ago and realized it dovetailed perfectly with their mission. “These experiences that get folks out into the forest and consciously tap into that power to help with mental and physical health — that’s what we’re all about, finding opportunities for folks to connect themselves with nature,” says Megan Dunning, the arboretum’s manager of adult learning programs.
After working with the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy in 2015 to train and certify guides, the Morton Arboretum launched its own forest therapy program. Now, more than 500 guests participate annually in walks lasting two or three hours. Some are processing grief or trauma, others learning to live with disabilities — people who are at what Dunning calls transitional points in their lives. Many are simply seeking an emotional reboot.
No one asks what issues people are dealing with in my group, which includes 14 women, one man who appears to have been dragged along by his wife, and me. Our leader, the soft-spoken and preternaturally calming Beth Bengtson, describes the forthcoming encounter as a series of invitations to interact with nature and embrace the experience with all five senses. “I’m just a guide,” says Bengtson — actually, a certified forest therapy guide with more than a decade of experience leading education programs at the arboretum. “The forest is the one that provides the therapy.”
We are no more than a few hundred steps into the hiking trail when Bengtson hands out tiny mats and leads the group in a meditation session, right there in the dirt. I find her gentle entreaties to focus on the sounds of nature nearly impossible to carry out. First, a familiar old ache settles into its usual spot in my lower back. Then I feel distracted by noise from nearby traffic on Interstate 88 and the groups of curious hikers who keep passing. Just as I get into a groove, a plane screams across the sky, en route to O’Hare. Such is life when your forest preserve is just a few towns over from an international airport. After that “invitation” concludes, Bengtson passes around a talking stick so we can describe our experiences. I keep my mouth shut as my fellow bathers describe their experiences as grounding and restorative. Sounds like someone drank the herbal Kool-Aid awfully fast.
Forest bathing: What the science says
Scientific research into the practice of forest bathing, or shinrin-yoku, is confirming “what we have always known innately” about a walk in the woods: that it has real benefits for physical and mental well-being.
In his book Forest Bathing: How Trees Can Help You Find Health and Happiness, Dr. Qing Li of the Nippon Medical School Hospital in Tokyo says that what began with a “preliminary … speculative investigation” in 1990 among the pristine forests of the Japanese island of Yakushima has evolved into rigorous scientific inquiries in the decades since.
Li, who is considered a foremost authority on the practice, concludes that forest bathing can boost the immune system, increase energy, reduce stress, and decrease anger, anxiety, and depression. He notes that forest bathing has been linked to measurable decreases in levels of the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline as well as blood pressure. (As an ancillary benefit, it also provides an incentive to preserve and enlarge our forests.)
Another sign of science’s acceptance: More and more doctors are prescribing forest bathing to improve their patients’ overall health and mental well-being.
I got a C in high school biology, but even I know that when a human experiences tension and anxiety, it sends a lightning bolt from the brain through the autonomic nervous system. Waves of stress hormones hitch a ride in your bloodstream until the stressor subsides. But if this happens too often, it can weaken the autonomic nervous system’s ability to stop the stress response, resulting in the production of even more stress hormones. Calling this process a vicious circle is not evocative enough. Imagine it as a traffic jam going in and out of a city in which the driver of every single car persuades another person to drive downtown, until every road leading in and out is a clogged thoroughfare of angst.
That is the image in my head when the next invitation begins. Bengtson challenges us to move at a snail’s pace and notice the world in motion around us, and, as if on cue, a rabbit bounds past, which seems a good omen. I observe a tree waving in the breeze and think about the way my shoes sink into the soft earth. The creeping bugs begin to appear less as nuisances than curiosities. Something is happening.
“Shinrin-yoku is like a bridge,” writes Li. “By opening our senses, it bridges the gap between us and the natural world.” It is during the third invitation that I officially cross the bridge. The goal this time is to find a quiet spot, sit down, and manipulate your surroundings to create a mini work of art in nature. Bengtson’s voice enters my thoughts: Try and access feelings that have always been there, like from when you were a kid, and you’d just play.
I admit that my attempt to stack pebbles does nothing for me, but as I feel the smooth soil in my fingers, something in my brain shifts. Or empties. All other sensations begin to fade, and the tactile sensation becomes everything. Regular life begins to feel farther and farther away, supplanted by the kind of heightened alertness and wonder that ordinary meditation never quite sparks in me. “These are feelings that we’ve lost as we become adults and stop being curious,” Bengtson explains.
Not long ago, my own therapist asked me to visualize myself sitting beside a gently flowing stream with leaves floating along the surface and told me to place every thought on a leaf, one by one, and let it float away. At the time, I protested that the exercise wouldn’t work, that I would always be running on the shoreline alongside the leaf to be sure it made it downstream. But during the next invitation in my forest bathing experience, as I climb onto a log that had fallen across a creek and dangle my feet into the cool water, I can barely remember feeling that way. With every leaf that floats past, I feel my heart rate slowing. It is the opposite of exercise, and I didn’t realize how badly I needed it.
A natural high carries me the rest of the way through the experience, during which I find inexplicable peace in simple observations such as a cauliflower-shaped cloud drifting by and fiery red leaves clinging to the base of a tree trunk as if unwilling to let go. The beauty around me is both granular and enormous at the same time, leaving me both exhilarated and exhausted. I forget the other members of the group entirely.
At the conclusion of a three-hour walk, Beth Bengtson, a certified forest therapy guide at the arboretum, serves a spruce-infused tea to the forest bathers.
The experience ends with a purifying group tea party in a sunny clearing, where Bengtson pours tea made with spruce tips that she had picked from trees a few hours back and brewed in filtered water. As she dumps a small amount into the dirt to “interweave it back into the natural ecosystem,” I feel a bittersweet tinge. I have to return to my regular life.
This time, when the talking stick comes to me, I’m not so dismissive. But I am too embarrassed to tell the truth: that I came in thinking this whole thing was ridiculous, and after three hours, I feel better than I had in years. I pass the stick to the next person and drive home in a state of suspended bliss, hoping it will last.
Did it? Yes and no. When I think back on my morning in the woods, it feels like it happened to someone else. Attempts to recapture those feelings of peace and awe have been elusive.
But sometimes now when I walk the dog, I close my eyes and concentrate on the wind whispering through the canopy of majestic oaks that line my street. It’s an old song, but it’s new to me. And I’m finally listening.
The former chief dining critic at Chicago magazine, Jeff Ruby graduates in June with a Master of Social Work from the University of Missouri; he described his dramatic career change in a November 2021 essay for the magazine.
This story originally appeared in the May 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.
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