Touch grass, touch a horse’s nose, touch a rock
This is a very interesting post from Ranchlands Wellness which you may, or should, connect with. The phrase “touch grass” has been around for the better part of a decade as internet slang for telling someone that they’d lost the plot, spending too many hours arguing with strangers online, and not enough time outside. This year, The Atlantic turned that idea into a podcast, taking the advice seriously instead of treating it as a joke, asking what it actually takes to rebuild an attention span in a culture built to fracture it.
The realization that we may need to be concerned about our phones and how they’re affecting our brains isn’t new (see: Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism (2019) or Jenny Odell’s How to do Nothing (also 2019)). But with the increasing pervasiveness of generative AI, which is creating more of what we now read, see, and even talk to, the topic feels even more urgent and relevant.
This society-wide conversation is going to continue, as we debate the role that we want evolving technologies to play in our lives. What Ranchlands has to add to that conversation is old, working knowledge: that time outside, in the natural world, around animals, and away from a screen, does something good for people.
There’s research catching up to this now. A recent study found that two weeks without mobile internet access improved people’s sustained attention by an amount equivalent to reversing about ten years of age-related cognitive decline. Their mental health gains were larger than what’s typically seen with antidepressants.
A related pattern shows up in sleep research. Studies on campers show that with a few days of nothing but natural light, a body’s internal clock resets by more than an hour, which can lead to higher quality rest. As writer Chloe Frost-Smith put it in a recent article for Vogue, “These environments also remove many of the modern disruptors that delay sleep: no signal, no late-night scrolling, and no ambient glow from devices, removing the habitual delays that push sleep later into the night.”
There’s something specific that happens when spending time with horses too. Horses can read our emotions and have been shown to sync heart rhythms with the people near them. Multiple studies on time with horses report people feeling calmer and more grounded afterward.
All of this amounts to a heightened quality of attention that also explains, we think, why so many people who spend time here end up inspired to journal or paint or photograph or just think more clearly. The attention that lets you see a landscape is the same attention that sparks ideas of creating something new. It’s part of why we started an artist residency through our nonprofit, The Collective.
None of this experience at the Paintrock was engineered to meet wellness goals. It’s just the kind of lifestyle that stems from decades of ranching traditions that we’ve always valued and sought to incorporate into our modern lives. If that’s the kind of experience you’re missing, we’d love to have you join us for a stay.
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“Without artificial light, the body responds to darkness as it’s meant to, triggering melatonin release earlier; without enclosed, recycled air, breathing becomes deeper and less disrupted; without the constant stimuli of modern life, the nervous system settles.”