AL FRESCO

A new year be­gins and brings with it, we can only hope, the be­gin­ning of the end of the hor­ren­dous pan­demic that has been - quite lit­er­ally - plagu­ing us for al­most two years. We are all aware of the suf­fer­ing caused by coro­n­avirus and in many cases we have ex­pe­ri­enced that suf­fer­ing first hand. An­other thing we are all aware of is that the pan­demic is chang­ing us as peo­ple and as a so­ci­ety. In this issue of the mag­a­zine (see pages 14 to 23), for ex­am­ple, we look at how spend­ing more time at home than nor­mal is af­fect­ing our men­tal health, in­creas­ing our de­pen­dence on elec­tronic de­vices and ag­gra­vat­ing anx­i­ety dis­or­ders like ago­ra­pho­bia.

How­ever, as well as prob­lems, crises bring with them op­por­tu­ni­ties. If the coro­n­avirus pan­demic has forced us in­side and ex­posed us as a so­ci­ety to such neg­a­tive con­se­quences as a lack of so­cial in­ter­ac­tion or greater al­co­hol and drug con­sump­tion, for ex­am­ple, might we also hope that it has made us ap­pre­ci­ate some of life’s sim­ple plea­sures, such as spend­ing more time out­side?

I live in a rural area that has an ex­ten­sive net­work of tracks and paths that exist for agri­cul­tural pur­poses but at­tract lots of walk­ers and cy­clists. When the lock­down was an­nounced at the start of the pan­demic, the num­bers using the local paths ex­ploded, as peo­ple re­sponded to being con­fined by en­joy­ing one of the few ac­tiv­i­ties al­lowed. Those num­bers have gone down since then, but I get the feel­ing that there are still more peo­ple using the local tracks than at any time I can re­mem­ber in the pre­vi­ous 15 years.

And that can only be a good thing, and for lots of rea­sons.

As the ex­perts con­sulted in the se­ries of ar­ti­cles men­tioned above all say, the best treat­ment for peo­ple that suf­fer from anx­i­ety about leav­ing the house is to do just that, to go out and to ex­pose them­selves to the thing they fear.

But the ad­van­tages of being out­side go much fur­ther.

For ex­am­ple, stud­ies show that spend­ing time out­side can help us sleep bet­ter, as the more time we spend out­doors, the more in tune we be­come with na­ture’s light-and-dark cycle, while an ex­cess of ar­ti­fi­cial light in­ter­feres with our cir­ca­dian rhythms.

Then there is the issue of vi­t­a­min D. Sun­light is one of the best sources of this es­sen­tial nu­tri­ent, and vi­t­a­min D de­fi­ciency has been shown to in­crease the risk of Covid-19 in­fec­tion, along with other dis­eases. And while we’re on the sub­ject, nu­mer­ous stud­ies show that the chances of catch­ing Covid are mas­sively re­duced when we are out­doors. That’s be­cause fresh air dis­perses and di­lutes the virus and helps evap­o­rate the liq­uid droplets that carry it. An added bonus is that the ul­tra­vi­o­let light from the sun kills viruses that are out in the open.

Fi­nally, Covid or no Covid, ex­er­cis­ing out­doors brings ben­e­fits that you just don’t get in­side. Phys­i­cal ac­tiv­ity out­side low­ers a per­son’s blood pres­sure and heart rate, stud­ies have found, which makes out­door ex­er­cise feel less stren­u­ous than the same or sim­i­lar ex­er­cise in­doors and there­fore boost­ing per­for­mance, which means you get more for your ef­fort.