Have you taken advantage of our recent wonderful June weather? I don’t mean necessarily taking a day off but maybe just looking at the great sky. 

Going outside can be really good and healthy for you. We, especially young people, are spending more and more time inside and it may be hurting our creativity. A recent paper cited in this interesting article in The Wall Street Journal, gave hikers a standard creativity test before a multi-day hike. After four days of hiking and enjoying nature (and the sky of course) hikers immersed in natural surroundings showed a 50% increase in performance in the creativity test. Other studies have found that some people and young children suffering from stress and emotional problems get much calmer just lying in the grass and watching the sky for a while. Other studies have shown that even a patch of grass within inner city housing projects can have beneficial emotional and intellectual benefits. As the Journal article author Jonah Lehrer writes, “Cities are here to stay; so are smartphones. What this research suggests, however, is that we need to make time to escape from everyone else, to explore those parts of the world that weren’t changed for us. It’s when we are lost in the wild that the mind is finally at home”. Give it a try and watch the sky and nature for a bit and get lost in something that may be good for your health in many ways.