The last time Arianne Rohmann heard the words “heart rate, “lung capacity” and “oxygen deprivation” was in 2015. She was standing in an intensive care room at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., as her husband Robert died of pulmonary hypertension, a rare condition that causes elevated blood pressure in the lung’s arteries, restricting blood flow to the lungs.
The year that followed was the hardest of her life. She struggled with crippling anxiety and depression and battled frequent panic attacks, all while trying to take care of the two young daughters her husband had left behind.
“My mind was exhausted,” said Rohmann. She succumbed to what she could only describe as a type of “chaos.” She kept remembering something different about Robert in the days leading up to his death.
“I felt like he wasn’t there with me,” she said. “I’m just watching him look at the trees blow. I’m watching him watch everything around him and the birds and everything, and that kind of stuck with me for a really long time.”
“Being in the present” was her husband’s last gift to her, but it wasn’t until a year later, that she would truly understand its benefits.
Rohmann was taking part in a freediving certification course in Florida’s Northern Central Pine Flats, learning about what happens to our bodies when we are submerged in water – how our heart rates drop to preserve oxygen, how blood is redirected to the lungs to protect them from the extreme pressure they will be subjected to at depth.
As she prepared for her very first dive, she was reminded of Robert struggling for air in his final days at the hospital. She cried as she emerged from the crystal-blue water of the natural Florida spring.
But this time, hers were tears of joy. “It was a transformational moment,” Rohmann said. For the first time in a year she had been free of the anxiety that was plaguing her. “I wasn’t present in the chaotic world that was my mind at the time,” she said.
Freediving, she says, gave her a strength that would guide her through anything that would ever come her way ever again. “It saved my life,” she said.
Although Rohmann’s story is an extreme example of how nature can positively affect mental well-being, she believes that it may offer a glimmer of hope for those struggling to overcome the stress, anxiety and grief experienced over the past few years. A growing body of research shows that spending time in nature can improve our mental and physical health, but some experts say there are benefits beyond that.
“People always underestimate how good nature can be,” said Lisa Nisbet, PhD., a professor of psychology at Trent University in Ontario, Canada. “There is tons of evidence that nature is good for both our physical and psychological health.”
A recent review of the literature on the topic has found evidence that nature exposure has been associated with physical benefits like improved sleep, physical activity and immune function while decreasing rates of anxiety, stress, cardiovascular disease and other chronic illnesses.
“The question is what medical condition isn’t made better by nature?” said Dr. Melissa Lem, president-elect of the Canadian Association for Physicians for the Environment. Lem is also the founder of ParkRX, an organization that promotes and enables physicians to prescribe nature time to patients struggling with a variety of health disorders.
And studies from University of Chicago’s Environmental Neuroscience lab show nature exposure can improve cognition and mood, even for people with diagnosed mood disorders like major depressive disorder.
But both Lem and Nisbet acknowledge that these “hedonic” benefits don’t fully capture the more existential benefits experienced by Rohmann and others in the diving community.
“There’s also that deeper sense of purpose and meaning in life,” said Nisbet, “it’s something we can measure.
Dr. Melissa Ilardo, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Utah, has spent the last 10 years studying physiological and genetic adaptations in fishing communities.
Her research has helped others working in the field understand how subsistence dependent on breath-hold diving contributes to adaptations in humans, like the mammalian dive reflex.
“It’s this extraordinary thing that happens in all mammals,” she said. The physiological response is triggered when we hold our breath and are submerged in water, prolonging the amount of time we can spend beneath the surface.
“It points to this evolutionary history of being connected with the water,” said Ilardo.
But she says years of work with the Bajau people of Indonesia have taught her that humans’ relationship with the ocean cannot be explained by “physiology or genetics” alone.
“I think what’s really unique about humans in terms of how we adapt to these unique environments is culture,” she said, speaking on behalf of the Bajau, “they share this really deep, emotional connection to the water, it’s really deeply part of who they are.”
Freediving instructor Nathan Minatta feels the same way. “The ocean has given me a purpose that I never felt I had before,” he said.
Growing up in Colorado, Minatta spent his childhood surrounded by vast, beautiful landscapes, but never felt a deep emotional connection with nature until he moved to San Diego, Calif., and found freediving.
“It’s like each dive is a different journey both in my mind and in the water,” said Minatta, “it's the closest I've ever come to religion or spirituality.”
Rohmann is appreciative of the water in a similar way. “Every time I dive, I am surrounded by this beautiful liquid source, a liquid source of love,” she said.
“It feels like peace and gratefulness,” said Rohmann, struggling to come up with words to describe what that “love” is.
At the core of Nisbet’s research is a concept she calls “nature relatedness (NR).” “It’s the pervasive sense of connectedness with nature that you carry around with you, even when you’re not outdoors,” said Nisbet, “and it’s something we can measure.”
In her studies, all participants fall somewhere on the NR scale, whether it’s 0 or 1. She views NR as a character trait in the same way we view other qualities like “agreeableness” and uses it to evaluate what that connection with nature means for people’s well-being.
One study she authored found that participants who scored higher on the NR scale felt happier and were more likely to identify with feelings of “belonging,” “growth” and “purpose,” while another study found participants were more likely to identify with items like “I feel alive and vital” and “I have energy and spirit.”
“So, in other words, they have better emotions and they feel this greater sense of meaning and personal growth,” said Nisbet, but even she is unsure if her studies convey, in concrete terms, how those qualities affect people’s lives.
“I think it would probably be termed self-transcendence – this idea that you are part of something bigger,” she said. “You transcend beyond just your sense of you as this individual, unique identity.”
Scott Claassen is familiar with the concept of transcendence. As the episcopal chaplain to the University of California Santa Barbara, he uses the ocean to inspire those feelings in his students.
Every Wednesday morning Claasen leads a group called “Surfing and Spirituality,” in which he takes students to the ocean to surf, hoping they will experience a sense of connection to nature, to one another and to themselves. He believes the ocean is unique in its ability to make us feel small.
“You have that visual stimulation of the vast water, a huge expanse, even just what is within our view, whatever is visible is so much larger than in other contexts,” he said.
Claassen embraces the mystical concept of the “apophatic,” which emphasizes the “unknowability” of God, and believes the ocean can inspire similar feelings in us.
“It's coming into that vastness and knowing that we will never fully understand it. But also putting ourselves right next to the darkness of our understanding,” he said, “people who have never been in the ocean before experience that joy, and they don’t need a degree in theology to articulate it.”
Ilardo approaches the concept of vastness from an evolutionary perspective. According to her, the “sense of peace” we feel when looking out over vast landscapes might be because “evolutionarily, it’s a safe place to be because you can see everything around you.”
Researchers in other fields have proposed their own theories as to why spending time in nature makes us feel so good, ranging from evolutionary mechanisms that reward us for being in certain environments to separating ourselves from the sensory overload brought by modern life.
Humans have an innate preference for natural environments because that’s where our species first evolved. Biodiverse areas reduce stress because they offer opportunities to hunt and gather while clear fields of view allow predators to be spotted.
Human brains get overwhelmed in modern environments. Nature provides a source of “soft fascination” that relaxes people because they are not constantly engaged with bright lights, busy streets, and big crowds.
When our species is stressed, spending time in nature can help people eliminate and recover from that stressful state faster than spending time in urban environments.
Human brains have an easier time processing the “fractal” patterns that occur in nature. Processing the straight edges of urban environments requires more mental processing, leading to decreased focus and negative affect.
But for Claassen, the experience of diving is more complex than clear fields of view or visual processing.
“You are physically immersed in something that is greater than yourself,” he said, “it’s living into a greater connection. It’s about us recognizing our place and role on this planet.”
Minatta describes the experience of being underwater as feeling like he’s part of something bigger – an entire universe that he says he never knew existed.
“When you’re underwater, there’s nothing but the ocean,” he said. “Each dive is a different journey both in my mind and in the water, and there’s no way to describe exactly how that feels.”
For Rohmann, the journey was about finding a place of peace in her mind. “The water was a portal to my journey,” she said. “My mind is still now.” When she’s underwater she’s “at one with nothing.”
Nisbet believes a big part of the reason these immersive experiences in nature make us feel so good is that “we are constantly overwhelmed and experiencing nature gives us a chance to disconnect.”
Eric Martin, owner of Lost Winds spearfishing and freediving shop in San Clemente, Calif., said the shop has been busier over the past two years than ever before. He attributes the interest to the stress faced by Americans in recent years.
The American Psychological Association’s (APA) most recent “Stress in America” poll revealed that Americans are just as stressed as they were at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and more adults rated inflation and issues related to the invasion of Ukraine than any other issue asked about in the 15-year history of the survey.
“Americans have been doing their best to persevere over the past two tumultuous years, but these data suggest we’re now reaching unprecedented levels of stress,” said Arthur C. Evans., Jr. PhD, APA’s chief executive officer in a press release related to the poll. The APA has described our current situation as a “mental health crisis.”
But according to Dr. Melissa Lem, there is a silver lining — the pandemic helped people understand the role of nature as a tool for stress reduction. “COVID gave people a chance to explore what’s important to them,” she said. “People are naturally finding their way back to nature.”
Martin agrees. “People need an escape and there is nowhere better than the ocean for that,” he said.
That sense of escape is what motivates Minatta to dive, regardless of the conditions. “The whole point is to slow down, to shut everything off, to slow your heart rate as much as possible so you can stay under the water as long as possible,” he said. Like Rohmann, diving gave him what he calls the gift of peace.
“You immediately get that disconnect of sound,” he said. He believes diving has a unique ability to facilitate a meditative experience, and it has something to do with the way your senses change when you are underwater.
“It’s just nature, you are fully immersed in nature, the feeling of water,” he said, “it just kind of forces you into absorbing it, you know?” When he’s underwater he is just in the moment, appreciating life as it is.
For Rohmann, freediving is a way of taking care of herself. The water taught her to appreciate what she has in the moment. And although she no longer has Robert, every time she dives she is reminded of her husband’s last lesson — that the present is all we truly have.
“When you get there, there’s no gravity,” she said. “It’s like the weight of the world is now gone.” She wasn’t just referring to the physical weight of her body, she was referring to the weight of the stress and anxiety she had been carrying with her since her husband’s death.
“I think I needed no noise,” she said, struggling to hold back tears.
“We all grieve, we all put up blocks,” said Rohmann. She now teaches freediving hoping her students will learn that they don’t have to live in their feelings, that our circumstances do not define us, because we are so much bigger than that.
Her goal for them is just to be relaxed, and the water will do the rest, because “when you’re underwater you have two choices – come up or enjoy the ride.”