4 Simple Ways to Bring Nature Into Your Busy Life

Three garden experts share how they connect with nature and offer some tips on how you can bring a little greenery into your life.

Adobe Stock/annanahabed

Can you see a tree from where you’re sitting right now? How about a plant? Anything living, besides other people? Can you open the window and take a big breath of fresh air?

If your answer to these questions is no, if you’re one of those people who spends all day breathing the lifeless output of a building-ventilation system, then you may be encountering a nature deficit. And it’s making your life less enjoyable, less healthy, and more stressed.

We know intuitively that we need green. Here are three ways to reconnect with nature in the midst of a busy modern life.

4 Simple Ways to Bring Nature Into Your Busy Life 1) Make a Relationship

“I have a daily practice where I sit in silence for 20 minutes and watch my breath,” says biologist David Haskell, author of The Forest Unseen. By painstakingly observing—every day for 12 months, sometimes for hours at a time—the trees, bushes, flowers, birds, and animals of one patch of forest, Haskell broke down the all-too-common perception that nature and humanity are separate.

We don’t have to take it to the lengths he did, but Haskell believes everyone…