How celebrating Earth Day can improve your peace of mind

Explore why celebrating Earth Day can benefit mother nature and your mental health. Plus, 10 mindful activities to try on Earth Day to improve your peace of mind.

It’s no secret that our relationship with Earth supports our mental health. Research has shown that connecting in nature can boost our mood, reduce stress, and even give us a better night’s sleep. In celebration of Earth Day this April, take some time to think about how you can have a positive impact on the Earth and celebrate everything that it does for us.

What is Earth Day, and why do we celebrate it?

Every year on April 22, people around the world celebrate Earth Day to demonstrate support for environmental protection. Since Earth Day celebrations started in 1970, it’s grown to include a wide range of events coordinated globally by EarthDay.org, involving over 1 billion people in more than 193 countries.

Earth Day celebrations help raise awareness about key environmental issues, such as pollution, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and climate change. It reminds us how important it is to actively protect the planet and encourages people, communities, and governments to take concrete steps toward sustainable living.

Earth Day has played a significant role in environmental advocacy, leading to policy changes and the establishment of environmental laws. It's a day for learning about environmental challenges and for mobilizing toward making the Earth a cleaner, greener, and more sustainable place for future generations. On Earth Day we can also show our individual commitment to preserving the environment and to inspire positive change in our daily habits.

How celebrating Earth Day can benefit your mental health

Celebrating Earth Day reminds us of the importance of taking care of our planet and ourselves. This can lead to a range of benefits to our mental health and overall wellbeing.

Connection to nature and Earth can improve mental health 

Spending time in nature has been proven to reduce stress, anxiety, and depression. Earth Day activities often involve being outdoors, whether it's planting trees, cleaning up local parks, or simply appreciating the world around you. This connection to nature can improve your mood and overall sense of wellbeing.

Nature can give you a sense of purpose

Participating in Earth Day events can give you a sense of purpose and belonging. Knowing that you are contributing to a cause greater than yourself can boost self-esteem and provide a sense of accomplishment. This collective action toward environmental conservation can make you feel part of a community, combating feelings of isolation.

💙 Jay Shetty’s We Are Nature meditation provides insight into how you’re connected with the world around you.

Celebrating Earth Day can encourage physical activity

Many Earth Day activities involve physical exercise, such as walking, gardening, or cleaning up beaches and parks. Physical activity may release natural mood-lifting chemicals in your body, sometimes helping to reduce feelings of stress and depression.

💙 Mindful Walking will help you get the most out of your time outside by combining mindfulness, meditation, and physical movement.

Nature allows learning and growth

Earth Day provides opportunities to learn more about environmental issues and what you can do to help. This learning process can be empowering and offers a sense of control. Engaging in educational activities keeps your mind active, contributing to your overall mental health.

Mother Earth can promote mindfulness and reflection

Celebrating Earth Day encourages mindfulness and reflection on our impact on the planet. It can be a day of gratitude for the Earth's resources, leading to a more thoughtful approach to how we use them. This mindfulness can extend to other areas of life, promoting a more balanced and reflective mindset.

Getting involved in nature can reduce eco-anxiety

For those concerned about environmental issues, taking action on Earth Day can help alleviate feelings of eco-anxiety. Being proactive in environmental conservation efforts can provide a sense of control over environmental concerns, reducing feelings of helplessness and despair.

10 mindful activities to celebrate Earth Day

Each of these mindful Earth Day celebration activities offers you a way to promote sustainability and build a deeper sense of connection with nature. 

1. Learn patience by planting a garden

No matter what you’re growing, gardening connects you with the earth. It's a mindful practice that teaches patience, care, and the cycle of life. Invite friends or family to join you in planting something new, turning it into a communal and educational activity.

2. Stop and stare at the world around us

Organize a nature walk in a local park or nature reserve. Encourage participants to observe the flora and fauna, breathe in the fresh air, and appreciate the beauty around them. This activity can serve as a reminder of the natural wonders we're working to protect.

3. Refresh how you recycling

Spend a day learning about and organizing your recycling. This could involve setting up a more efficient recycling station at home or hosting a community workshop on the importance of recycling correctly. Invite neighbors to join in and share tips on reducing waste.

4. Clean-up your community as a group

Organize or participate in a clean-up event in your neighborhood, local park, or beach. This not only helps the environment but also strengthens community ties. Working alongside others for a common cause can be a powerful bonding experience.

5. Get crafty to avoid landfill

Host a workshop or a small gathering to create upcycled crafts from materials you might otherwise throw away. This can be an engaging way to spend time with family or friends while also promoting the idea of reusing and repurposing.

Easter reminds us that renewal is always possible — not just for nature, but for us, too. 🌿 Whether it's a fresh mindset, a new boundary, or a tiny habit that brings peace, every step counts.

Small steps, big impacts! This Stress Awareness Month, let’s embrace the #LittleByLittle approach to self-care and stress reduction. Prioritizing your well-being, one small action at a time!  #StressAwareness #SelfCare #MentalHealth

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How Creativity Positively Impacts Your Health

Creativity helps us perceive the world in new and different ways. It helps us create works of beauty, problem solve, and refresh our bodies and our minds. It's fun, and when you are having fun, you are positively impacting your health.

Creativity Improves Mental Health

Expressing yourself through artistic and creative activities is like a prescription for your mental health. Turning to creativity has been proven in extensive research to relieve both stress and anxiety. Creativity also helps lessen the shame, anger, and depression felt by those who have experienced trauma.1

The Walter Reed National Military Medical Center has an art therapy program for soldiers with PTSD. Veterans often find it difficult to express their trauma verbally. Art therapy manager Tammy Shella, PhD, ATR-BC, says, “Through art therapy, patients can convey how they really feel on the inside and reveal things that they weren’t comfortable sharing with the world.”1

Creativity Puts You in a Flow State

Have you ever been so immersed in writing in your journal, creating postcards out of your recent photographs, or dancing to your favorite band that you lost all sense of time?

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, one of the cofounders of positive psychology, calls this “flow state.”2 During this time, you’re focused with optimal attention on a task or activity. It’s sometimes called being in the zone.

This is an excellent and often euphoric state to be in. In this state, we are more mindful and relaxed. This allows us to feel more positive and brings a sense of accomplishment. People who experience flow report higher levels of creativity, productivity, and happiness.

How to Enhance Your Creativity

Maybe we don’t think of ourselves as artists or as innovators trained in coming up with bold, new ideas. However, the key traits of innovators include energy, intelligence and discipline, which we all have in varying amounts.

Although we might not be artists or innovators by profession, that doesn’t mean we can’t tap into ways to expand our creativity. We all have the ability to express ourselves and come up with alternate ways of looking at things.

The good news for those of us who didn’t excel at art during our childhood is that the beneficial effects happen during the art process. They are not based on the end product.

Laurel Healy, LCSW, says, “Engaging in a creative process, like singing, dancing, painting or drawing, has full body benefits. When we focus on something that is challenging and/or fun, we make new neuropathways, increasing connectivity in the brain.

"Increased connectivity, especially in the left prefrontal cortex of the brain, makes us more emotionally resilient in a way that is similar to what occurs when we meditate. The release of dopamine brings an enhanced sense of well-being as well as improved motivation,” Healy says.

Draw or Paint 

A growing body of research demonstrates that activities like drawing and painting can relieve stress and depression. Artistic activities have been linked to improving memory and resilience in older adults, even helping seniors with dementia reconnect with the world. Actively making art rather than simply appreciating art has also been shown to stave off cognitive decline.

Sing or Play Music

Music bonds us. According to researchers, when we harmonize or synchronize with others, we have more positive feelings towards them.3 This occurs even if they aren’t in the same room.

Singing raises oxytocin levels in both amateur and professional singers. If you’re not enamored with singing, do you like to just listen to music? Simply listening to music releases oxytocin. Music directly impacts oxytocin levels and oxytocin affects our ability to trust and socially connect to others.

Dance

Dancing is not only fun, it’s actually really good for you to move with music. Studies have shown that dancing relieves anxiety, improves quality of life for breast cancer patients, and lowers the risk of dementia for older people.

What is surprising in the research is that the benefit wasn’t due to physical exercise alone. Compared to other forms of exercise, dancing was the only exercise that made a difference.4

Play

While playing or storytelling might seem in the moment, there are psychological and developmental benefits that accrue and are long-lasting.

Jennifer A. Perry, former VP of worldwide publishing at Sesame Workshop and executive director of Perry Educational Projects Consulting, points to the long-term benefits of play and creative pursuits. 

She says, "By exploring imagination and creativity through art, storytelling, interactive games, music, and all kinds of play, children learn lifelong skills... how to express themselves, communicate with others, problem solve, develop self-confidence, appreciate diverse ideas and cultures, and find things that make them feel fulfilled and happy."

Play isn’t just kid stuff. It’s also beneficial for adults. The National Institute for Play underscores the research that already exists on play: “A huge amount of existing scientific research—from neurophysiology, developmental and cognitive psychology, to animal play behavior, and evolutionary and molecular biology—contains rich data on play. The existing research describes patterns and states of play and explains how play shapes our brains, creates our competencies, and ballasts our emotions.”5

Spend Time in Nature

A study titled “Creativity in the Wild: Improving Creative Reasoning Through Immersion in Natural Settings" showed how nature affects creativity.6 A group of hikers who spent four days immersed in nature and disconnected from technological devices increased performance on a creativity/problem solving task by 50%.

Nature in this study provided emotionally positive stimuli. By reducing the usage of phones and computers, those in the study weren’t switching tasks or multi-tasking, attending to sudden events, maintaining task goals or inhibiting irrelevant actions. Therefore, spending quality time in nature improved their creativity test scores.

So, when you are stumped by problems, move away from the computer. It helps to think creatively about solutions and alternative options while walking in the garden or hiking in the park.

Happy National Pet Day to the real MVPs of our mental health—furry, funny, and full of love. 🐾

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Have you tried just not feeling sad?” 🙃 Spoiler: That’s not how emotions work! Let’s stop toxic positivity and start supporting real feelings. #FeelYourFeelings

5 Ways to Boost Your Mental Health for Spring

As spring begins and the days grow longer, many people feel a sense of potential. If you live in a place where the winters are particularly cold, warmer weather and the ability to spend more time outdoors can feel like a godsend. Flowers are blooming, birds singing, and in many cultural and religious traditions, Spring brings a sense of rebirth and renewal.

These changes often translate into a sense of increased energy and motivation to make more social plans, along with—in plenty of people—a sense of a chance to start fresh and "spring clean." Perhaps you are driven to clean out a closet or a garage, or start exercising more. If it feels like time is ripe for change, it can also be an excellent time to harness that motivation to do extend the spring cleaning attitude to your mental health as well.

Here are five considerations to help you get a sense of momentum while springing forward.

1. Reprioritize your sleep.

As daylight lasts longer into the evening, it can be tempting to go to bed even later than usual. And as much as more time outdoors can be good for you, and as much as your increased energy might make you feel like you don't need as much sleep, the truth is most of us are still likely underslept and suffering from poor-quality slumber. So, to truly nourish yourself in a way that will allow you to grow and have new adventures this spring, try to recommit to a reasonable bedtime and put your phone away before you go into bed. Building new habits that yield you even a few extra minutes of sleep a night can pay major dividends.

2. Change up your physical space.

The urge to buy some new clothes, paint your bedroom, or clean up your backyard often strikes just as the weather gets nicer. Why not run with it in a way that helps your mental health? Changing up your visual life, even by just rearranging your furniture, or trying a different hairstyle, can provide a burst of novelty that gets you out of a bored rut, and can help improve your cognitive flexibility as you try things that you've never tried before and create new mental pathways.

3. Reconnect socially.

Social support is crucial for our physical and emotional health, and the past two years have been a long haul of increased isolation for many of us. Now is the time to nudge yourself to come out of your cocoon, if you feel up to it. The stress relief, laughter, and mental stimulation that trusted friends and social outings can bring can increase our well-being profoundly. Do be aware, however, that it might be anxiety-producing to expect to immediately resume the social life you had before the disruptions of the pandemic. Be gentle with yourself and take it slowly.

4. Consider growing a plant.

For people who consider themselves gardeners, nothing beats spring's opportunity for getting seeds in the ground and getting your hands dirty. But even if you wouldn't know a pumpkin seed from a tulip, there is plenty to be gained by nurturing a small plant of your own. Outdoor gardening gets you access to more sunlight, and can be a great form of physical movement. Even houseplants are associated with decreased anxiety, there is likely something evolutionarily comforting about being connected to nature. And it can be downright thrilling to watch a flower, veggie, or fruit grow out of seemingly nothing. So, why not make this the year where you try to grow something, anything at all—no perfectionism allowed?

5. Make a new creative goal.

Growth shouldn't always be based on conquering something, and sometimes goal-setting for busy people starts to look too much like an achievement test. To decrease stress, improve your cognitive flexibility and increase your sense of well-being, sometimes a goal should not be at all about the end process but instead, the experience itself. If it's creative, all the better.

Why not try your hand at doing something that you don't necessarily think you'll be good at, but that might be interesting or fun? From painting a sunset to building a model car, from designing a flowerbed to learning to knit, the point is not that you will create something perfect, but rather that the time you spend letting your mind be creative will be valuable in its own right. Perhaps you did this in the pandemic because you felt you had nothing else to do, but you gradually stopped. Why not start again?

Spring Cleaning

🌸Spring cleaning isn’t just for your closet—time to dust off those worries, toss out self-doubt, and make room for fresh, feel-good vibes! #SpringCleaning

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