REBEL MIND – The Nature Reset

REBEL Rundown

Key Points

Attention is a finite resource. Emergency medicine heavily taxes directed attention through interruptions, task switching, threat monitoring, and constant high-stakes decisions.

Nature gives directed attention a chance to recover. Natural environments engage “soft fascination”. That’s referring to the effortless, bottom-up attention- which allows our effortful, goal-directed attention systems to rest and recharge.

Nature helps downshift the stress response and may reduce stress physiology, support parasympathetic activity, improve mood, and potentially improve emotional regulation.

Exposure can be brief to reset: even a 40-second view of greenery was associated with improved sustained attention in one study. Windows, plants, nature imagery, and brief outdoor breaks can make a difference. We can even design nature into healthcare.

Nature is a tool but not a treatment for broken systems. Nature exposure shouldn’t become another individual “wellness” obligation or substitute for fixing understaffing, moral injury, or other structural problems. And it’s also okay to go outside simply because being outside feels good, without optimizing anything.

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Previously Covered and Related Content:

REBEL MIND: Rest is not Sleep: 7 Dimensions of True Recovery

Introduction

Welcome to Rebel MIND, the podcast where we explore concepts that help us understand our minds so that we can take better care of our patients and ourselves. MIND stands for Mastering Internal Negativity during Difficulty. In this episode, Dr. Kim Bambach talks with emergency physician and neuroscientist Dr. Adrienne Taren as well as emergency physician and wilderness medicine expert Dr. Linda Keyes about the Nature Reset: how exposure to nature can restore attention, downshift our stress response, and help our brains recover from the cognitive demands of medicine. Dr. Adrienne Taren is an emergency medicine physician, clinical neuroscience faculty at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research, and adjunct professor at Oklahoma State University in medical education. She completed her MD/PhD (Neuroscience) at the University of Pittsburgh-Carnegie Mellon University. Her current research focuses on the neural circuit function underlying occupational traumatic stress symptoms in frontline healthcare workers. Dr. Linda Keyes is a board-certified emergency physician, an adjunct professor at University of Colorado, Vice President of the International Society of Mountain Medicine, and past-president of the Wilderness Medical Society. Since she was a medical student at Yale University, she has travelled the globe in pursuit of science. Dr. Keyes has partnered with researchers and clinicians on five continents to understand the effects of high altitude on the human body. She has authored of scores of original research articles and international guidelines on high-altitude medicine with a focus on women’s health and understanding acute mountain sickness. The mountains are her happy place. She believes in wilderness as medicine and in conservation for the health of the planet.

Cognitive Question

How can nature help us recover during or after a difficult shift?

How does nature exposure affect our cognition?

Clinical medicine keeps our brains in a near-constant state of cognitive and physiologic activation. We sustain attention despite interruptions, track multiple patients simultaneously, make high-stakes decisions with incomplete information, and continuously scan for threats and changes in our environment. This heavily taxes directed attention, the effortful, top-down attentional system we use to deliberately focus on a task. Importantly, attention is a finite neurobiological resource that fatigues with sustained use. Nature provides a unique form of cognitive recovery. Rather than demanding directed attention, natural environments engage what researchers call soft fascination: our att