Are You Nature Deficient?

Take a look around the room you are sitting in right now. The floor is likely perfectly flat, the walls meet at precise right angles, and the temperature hovers comfortably around 21 degrees Celsius. You are sheltered from the wind, the rain, and natural predators.

In many ways, you inhabit an exceptionally safe enclosure. Modern life has brought extraordinary improvements to our health and well-being: sanitation, vaccines, antibiotics, and protection from the elements.

Yet the environments we have built also change what we ask of our bodies. Screens and mechanical noise compete for our attention, while chairs, lifts, and level surfaces reduce the demands on our muscles, bones, and sense of balance. We can spend a day mentally overwhelmed while barely moving.

Overstimulation and underuse can exist side by side. Over time, aspects of this way of living can contribute to physical deconditioning, discomfort, and stress.

Richard Louv popularised the term nature-deficit disorder in his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods, exploring the consequences of children’s growing separation from nature. He describes it as a metaphor, rather than a medical diagnosis.¹

Here, I use Nature Deficiency to explore a related question in adult life: how do the environments we have built meet some of our biological needs while neglecting others?

To understand that tension, we need to look at the bodies we inherited—and the environments that shaped them.

The Weight of Deep Time

To understand why comfort does not always translate into well-being, we have to look at deep evolutionary time.

Our bodies carry a history far older than our species. For our ancestors, finding food, building shelter, and moving across the landscape required physical effort. Walking, climbing, lifting, and carrying were necessary and served a purpose in everyday life.

That history remains visible in our living tissues. Our muscles and bones respond to the demands placed upon them. Regular physical activity helps preserve strength and function; prolonged inactivity contributes to their decline.²

Consider your skeleton. Bone is living tissue, constantly renewed. Repeated mechanical loading can produce microscopic cracks or damage. Cells embedded within the bone help detect this damage and coordinate its repair: osteoclasts remove damaged tissue, and osteoblasts replace it with new bone.³ This response can also involve local reinforcement. In an animal experiment, bone formation after damaging repetitive loading restored strength and increased resistance to further fatigue.⁴ Mechanical loading can also stimulate bone formation without detectable damage.⁵

The opposite matters just as much. When a limb is immobilised, the loss of normal physical stress can increase the formation of bone-resorbing osteoclasts. With prolonged inactivity, removal can outpace replacement, leaving the skeleton less dense. Maintaining bone health is one reason physical activity remains important as we age, including in the prevention and management of osteoporosis.² ³

We therefore inherit more than a particular anatomy. We inherit tissues that continually adapt to what we ask of them.

In a remarkably short stretch of human history, we have made much of the movement once required for survival optional. A meal, a conversation, and a day’s work can now take place without leaving a chair.

Our bodies remain adaptable. But the environments we create influence what they adapt to. Removing physical demands can make life easier while gradually reducing our capacity to meet them.

Pain is also widespread: a systematic review estimated that chronic pain affects between one-third and one-half of adults in the UK.⁶ The causes are complex. Physical inactivity is associated with chronic musculoskeletal complaints, while repetitive physical work is a recognised occupational risk factor.⁷ ⁸

What Happens to Our Senses

We don’t use our hearing to detect a sabre-toothed cat but to avoid a semi-truck. Our eyes spend less time scanning distant landscapes and more time fixed on an increasing variety of screens. Let’s look at our various senses.

• Staring at Squares: A working day can pass with our gaze fixed on a screen within arm’s reach. Sustained near work demands continued focusing and coordination between the eyes. Screen reading can also change how completely we blink, affecting the renewal of the tear film.⁹ Looking outdoors offers a different visual experience: depth, movement, and patterns unfolding across different scales. Research on fractal patterns—the branching and repeating forms familiar from nature—has found changes in alpha brain activity associated with relaxed wakefulness. These findings suggest that the structure of what we look at matters, alongside the information it conveys.¹⁰
• Noise vs Nature: Traffic, ventilation systems, alerts, and conversations can fill the day with sound we have little control over. We’re constantly alert for auditory prompts from our phones and wearables. A quieter natural soundscape offers a different setting for recovery. In an experiment comparing sounds after a stressful task, skin conductance—a measure influenced by sympathetic activity—tended to recover faster during natural sounds than environmental noise.¹¹ The sound around us can be part of the conditions that help us unwind.
• Flat Earth: Keeping our balance involves coordinating information from the inner ears, eyes, muscles, joints, and skin. A woodland path asks us to vary our steps, negotiate slopes, and adjust to roots and stones. Experimental research shows that uneven terrain changes stepping patterns and increases activity in several leg muscles compared with level ground.¹² Chairs, lifts, and smooth floors reduce many of these demands. We can move through an entire day with relatively little variation in how we challenge our balance and coordination.
• Tapping Glass: Consider the surfaces your hands encounter during an ordinary working day: glass, plastic, a desk, perhaps the fabric of a chair. Outdoors, the possibilities widen—a rough branch, shifting sand, moving water, the resistance of soil beneath a spade. These encounters invite us to explore, grip, manipulate, and move. Gardening, climbing, and walking bring sensory experience and physical activity together.
• The Underrated Senses: Smell and taste tend to take a back seat to vision and hearing in our conscious attention. “Is this milk drinkable?” can easily result in several family members sniffing it and looking uncertainly at each other. We may trust the printed date more than our own assessment. For early hunter-gatherers, smell and taste were important tools for assessing whether unfamiliar food might be edible. Smell remains important to food enjoyment, social experience and our well-being.¹³ Outdoors, it adds another dimension to our surroundings: wet soil, pine needles, seaweed and the changing seasons.

The Fix

After an intense day at work, I often feel completely beat up. Not because of physical exertion, but the constant stress of managing patients, phones and IT systems that don’t work. If I fall for the temptation to sink into the couch, the evening often slips away. It’s much more satisfying to pack my camera bag, drive to a beach or take the kayak out. The natural sounds quieten my thoughts. For me, water immersion is a reset, and the wind and sun feels like a balm.

If you struggle to get out enough, try to find something meaningful for you. In a limited week, it isn’t always realistic to add another activity. Instead, consider moving some of what you already do outdoors: swapping a gym session for outdoor climbing, or a pool session for ocean swimming where conditions and your experience allow.

My personal favourite is nature photography. It gamifies nature exposure for me. A simple walk turns into a treasure hunt. Wildlife photography offers the excitement of the hunt, landscapes a calm meditation on light.

Thank you for reading this article. Now, put away your screen and step outside. Take a deep breath, close your eyes and just listen. Smell the air and relax.

References

1. Louv R. Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Algonquin Books; 2005. See also Louv’s explanation of the term as a metaphor in How Do We Fight Nature-Blindness?, Children & Nature Network.
2. Izquierdo M, et al. International Exercise Recommendations in Older Adults (ICFSR): Expert Consensus Guidelines. Journal of Nutrition, Health & Aging. 2021;25(7):824–853. doi:10.1007/s12603-021-1665-8
3. Raggatt LJ, Partridge NC. Cellular and molecular mechanisms of bone remodeling. Journal of Biological Chemistry. 2010;285(33):25103–25108. doi:10.1074/jbc.R109.041087
4. Silva MJ, Touhey DC. Bone formation after damaging in vivo fatigue loading results in recovery of whole-bone monotonic strength and increased fatigue life. Journal of Orthopaedic Research. 2007;25(2):252–261. doi:10.1002/jor.20320
5. McKenzie JA, Silva MJ. Comparing histological, vascular and molecular responses associated with woven and lamellar bone formation induced by mechanical loading in the rat ulna. Bone. 2011;48(2):250–258. doi:10.1016/j.bone.2010.09.005
6. Fayaz A, Croft P, Langford RM, Donaldson LJ, Jones GT. Prevalence of chronic pain in the UK: a systematic review and meta-analysis of population studies. BMJ Open. 2016;6(6):e010364. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2015-010364
7. Holth HS, Werpen HKB, Zwart JA, Hagen K. Physical inactivity is associated with chronic musculoskeletal complaints 11 years later: results from the Nord-Trøndelag Health Study. BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders.2008;9:159. doi:10.1186/1471-2474-9-159
8. Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety. Work-related Musculoskeletal Disorders (WMSDs)—Risk Factors. Revised July 10, 2024. CCOHS
9. Chu CA, Rosenfield M, Portello JK. Blink patterns: reading from a computer screen versus hard copy. Optometry and Vision Science. 2014;91(3):297–302. doi:10.1097/OPX.0000000000000157
10. Hagerhall CM, Laike T, Küller M, Marcheschi E, Boydston C, Taylor RP. Human physiological benefits of viewing nature: EEG responses to exact and statistical fractal patterns. Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences. 2015;19(1):1–12. PubMed

     

11. Alvarsson JJ, Wiens S, Nilsson ME. Stress recovery during exposure to nature sound and environmental noise. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 2010;7(3):1036–1046. doi:10.3390/ijerph7031036
12. Voloshina AS, Kuo AD, Daley MA, Ferris DP. Biomechanics and energetics of walking on uneven terrain. Journal of Experimental Biology. 2013;216(21):3963–3970. doi:10.1242/jeb.081711
13. Boesveldt S, Parma V. The importance of the olfactory system in human well-being, through nutrition and social behavior. Cell and Tissue Research. 2021;383:559–567. doi:10.1007/s00441-020-03367-7