The Mountain Doesn’t Care How You Look

There is a multibillion-dollar industry devoted to helping us feel better about our bodies. It includes supplements, shapewear, apps that count things, influencers who have monetized their insecurities and yours, and the occasional pharmaceutical that literally costs more per month than a car payment. So it is a little funny (in the way that the truth is often funny, because sometimes all we can do is laugh) that one of the largest studies ever conducted on body image points to an intervention that requires none of these, has no recurring fee, and was available to our great-grandparents: going outside.

The study, published last month in the journal Environment International, pulled together survey responses from 50,363 people across 58 nations, speaking 36 languages. (Most “big” psychology studies that we read about ran a few hundred undergraduates through a questionnaire for course credit. This one literally spanned the planet.) The researchers, led by Viren Swami, who seems to have spent the better part of two decades studying how we relate to our bodies, were after a specific question: we already know that time in nature tends to make people feel better. But why? What is actually doing the work?

Their answer is more nuanced than “fresh air is nice.” People who spent more time in contact with the natural world tended to report more self-compassion and a greater sense of being restored by their surroundings. Those two things, in turn, were linked to a more positive relationship with their own bodies. And that, finally, was linked to greater satisfaction with life as a whole. Nature at one end, a more satisfying life at the other, and between them: how you feel about the body you inhabit.

The self-compassion piece is easy to skim past. It’s also the most human part of the paper.

We tend to imagine that liking our bodies is mostly a matter of the bodies cooperating: lose the weight, fix the thing, and the good feeling will follow. But the research on body image points somewhere stranger. “Positive body image,” as the field defines it, isn’t really about thinking you look good. It’s about relating to your body in terms of what it does rather than how it photographs. This means appreciating that it carries you up the stairs, lets you taste dinner, hugs the people you love, gets you from here to there. It’s a shift from the body as an object on display to the body as the thing through which you actually live. That is much closer to self-compassion than to self-improvement. We can think of it this way: it’s less “I look acceptable” and more “I’m on my own side.”

So why would a walk in the woods nudge anyone toward being on their own side?

The mechanism in the study focuses mostly on attention. Think about where most of us do our body-evaluating. It happens in mirrors, in photos, in the artificial glow of a social media feed engineered to show us other people’s curated highlight reels. Places that are built, more or less, to put the primary focus on appearance. Now think about a treeline at dusk, or the particular sound a creek makes, or the way light comes through leaves. Nature is one of the few places left that isn’t turning the lens on you, encouraging you to evaluate how you look (consciously or unconsciously through comparison etc). The mountain does not care about your waistline. The researchers describe nature as offering a kind of effortless, undemanding attention. This is about the gentle pull of a landscape that holds your focus without straining it. And in that unhurried peaceful quiet, people seem to find it easier to be kind to themselves.

In college, one of my sanity-savers was leading backpacking trips for our outdoor program. Every break that we got (fall, winter, spring), I was out in nature with a group of students, most of whom I had just met a few days before the trip began, as we planned our adventure. I can still vividly remember how the stress of school would just melt off with each step as we hiked deeper and deeper into the woods. Not only was there something magical about the smells and quiet beauty of nature, but we connected with each other on a very human level: no phones or social media, just us, sharing the same path, pitching tents and cooking a group meal together. As each day passed without mirrors or showers, the more we sank into our own and shared “stink” as we put t shirts back on that weren’t quite dry from the previous day’s sweat. And by the end of the trip, I had invariably made new friends, and a renewed appreciation for the power, beauty and wonder of nature.

This new study both fits with my own experience, and IMHO is needed in today’s world where we’re being conditioned to live in and for our screens. And of course, there are caveats:

This study is a snapshot, not a stopwatch. Everyone answered the questions at a single moment in time. That kind of design can tell you two things travel together (more nature, more body appreciation), but not which one is pushing the other. Correlation does not equal causation. It’s entirely possible that going outside softens how we see ourselves. It’s also possible that people who already feel at home in their bodies are the ones who head out the door in the first place, while the rest of us stay in. (Or that some third thing is driving all of it: living near a park, being healthy enough to hike, having the kind of life that leaves room for a Sunday walk.) The researchers know this; it’s a limitation and pretty normal for a study this size (which would be nearly impossible to do another way). You can’t exactly randomize fifty thousand people into “forest” and “no forest” for a decade.

But this particular caveat doesn’t tank the results. Especially if we focus on the risk/benefit ratio. Going outside has no side effects, no monthly fee, and no fine print. Even if the arrow points the other way, the worst case is that you spent an afternoon among trees (which is still a pretty good way to spend an afternoon!). That’s remarkably low stakes, especially compared to the medicine commercials that seem to spend more time on side effects than what the medicine is supposed to help you with.

It also helps that this study isn’t standing alone. Of course, the field has its junk, too: be wary of the breathless little papers clocking immune-cell counts in a dozen forest-walkers. But there are other studies that suggest similar benefits of being out in nature (“forest bathing” was trending for a while). For example, A British survey of nearly 20,000 people found that around two hours a week in nature was the threshold where good health and high wellbeing became markedly more likely. Here’s another example: Researchers at Stanford randomly assigned people to walk for ninety minutes through nature or through the city, and the nature group came back ruminating less, caught up less in the looping, self-critical thinking that feeds both depression and a bad morning in front of the mirror, and showed quieter activity in a brain region tied to exactly that kind of thought. And a Danish study that followed more than 900,000 people (!!) found that those who grew up with the least greenery nearby carried up to a 55% higher risk of a later psychiatric disorder, even after accounting for wealth, city living, and family history. None of these studies is perfect: the survey can’t prove which way the arrow points, the experiment was small and brief, the Danish data tracked green near your house rather than time you actually spent in it. But the imperfections sit in different places, and the results still line up.

So let’s say you throw caution to the wind, and go outside to feel the breeze and smell the trees. If you’re going to go outside buoyed by these results, it’s important to really be outside, not just walking somewhere in woods but still stuck in your head. Yes, there’s a difference between being in nature and being in nature while doomscrolling under a nice tree. The study measured contact with the natural world, but I’d add, from my own corner of the research, that how we pay attention probably matters as much as where we are.

You can stand in a grove of trees or a meadow and miss all of it because you’re three notifications deep or halfway through a podcast. The simplest antidote isn’t effort or willpower. Instead, it’s curiosity. Notice the actual texture of the bark. Listen to the birdsong and wonder what bird that is, without needing to look it up. Let yourself get a little interested in what’s in front of you instead of what’s on your screen. If you notice that you’re walking but stuck in your head worrying, you can simply get curious and notice, “I’m inside my head right now,” which can be a reminder bell that wakes you up and brings you back into your surroundings. Curiosity is one of the few states that reliably pulls us out of our heads and into the present moment. And the present moment is, conveniently, the only place the trees are. (Whether curiosity is part of or adds to why nature works the way this study suggests is a question I’d love to test, not one this study answered.)

None of this means the trees will fix you. Deep-rooted struggles with body image don’t dissolve because we took a walk. But the picture from fifty thousand people across fifty-eight countries is hopeful, and it points somewhere unfashionable. In a culture that keeps insisting the path to liking our body runs through changing it, here is a very large body of evidence suggesting that one of the better things we can do is step away from the mirrors entirely. To spend time somewhere that was never grading us to begin with, and to notice, with a little curiosity, that we were never required to play that game in the first place.

The mountain doesn’t care how we look. Go find out what that feels like.

Judson Brewer MD PhD is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist and professor at Brown University. He is the author of Unwinding Anxiety (NYTimes bestseller), The Craving Mind, The Hunger Habit and The Unwinding Anxiety Workbook. He co-founded MindshiftRecovery.org which provides free support for people with any type of addiction.

If you are struggling with anxiety, Dr. Brewer’s Going Beyond Anxiety program brings together his research and clinical experience to help people build effective skills to reduce anxiety and cultivate calm (www.goingbeyondanxiety.com).

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Copyright © 2025, Judson Brewer, MD, PhD. All rights reserved.

REFERENCES

Swami, V., Voracek, M., Stieger, S., Tran, U. S., & the BINS Consortium. (2026). Positive body image is a pathway between nature contact and life satisfaction across 58 nations. *Environment International*, 110277. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2026.110277

Bratman, G. N., Hamilton, J. P., Hahn, K. S., Daily, G. C., & Gross, J. J. (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112*(28), 8567–8572. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1510459112

Engemann, K., Pedersen, C. B., Arge, L., Tsirogiannis, C., Mortensen, P. B., & Svenning, J.-C. (2019). Residential green space in childhood is associated with lower risk of psychiatric disorders from adolescence into adulthood. *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116*(11), 5188–5193. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1807504116

White, M. P., Alcock, I., Grellier, J., Wheeler, B. W., Hartig, T., Warber, S. L., Bone, A., Depledge, M. H., & Fleming, L. E. (2019). Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing. *Scientific Reports, 9*(1), 7730. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-44097-3