The deep winter months are about the worst possible conditions to fight anxiety. This applies not only to teenagers already wrestling with challenges like academic stress and peer pressure from classmates but also adults.
Being isolated at home to avoid the frigid outdoors are ingredients for many forms of anxiety. Feelings of unease, worry, fear, and apprehension are among the condition’s symptoms.
But with spring dawning (it officially began in Maryland March 20) there’s a way to at least partially confront anxiety: Get outside — even for a few minutes at a time, per the advice of Towson-based psychotherapist Heidi Schreiber-Pan.
“One of the things that we’re seeing is that anxiety is a normal reaction to an abnormal way of living. We were outside until about 200 years ago, at the start of the Industrial Revolution,” Schreiber-Pan said in an interview. “Now we’re stimulated by things indoors, different than how we naturally evolved — screens, fast simulation, etc. It’s just not the way the body and brain were designed.”
Spending time in a garden and going for a walk are two of the most accessible outdoor methods to fight anxiety.
“It’s such free, cheap medicine. You don’t even need a full hour,” said Schreiber-Pan, whose practice focuses on harnessing nature’s potential in therapeutic contexts.
“If you can do this a couple of times a day, just a five-minute outdoor break to take a few deep breaths, that’s the most helpful,” added Schreiber-Pan, who has written two books on nature and psychological wellness.
Everyone stands to benefit from time outside, but particularly younger people — teenagers, college-age students, and early adults. After all, studies have found anxiety a growing problem with this age group, a theme explored by author Jonathan Haidt in his 2024 book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.”
Haidt, a professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, argues in the book that young people today are damaged products of a massive shift in the culture of childhood. Specifically, the Gen Z generation, covering roughly those now ages 13 to 28.
In this view, Gen Z members became the first-ever cohort of tweens and teens to go through adolescence under the thrall of smartphones. The constant scrolling, and seeing peers preen online, helped make them super-anxious.
American kids and teenagers spend nearly six hours a day looking at screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative. Which means a collision of political, economic and social trends have created a generation in which huge numbers of young people struggle to cope with the present. And many of them feel even worse about the future.
Gen Z has the poorest mental health of any generation, per a recent Gallup and Walton Family Foundation report. Just 44% of Gen Z-ers surveyed said they feel prepared for the future.
Which is where the outdoor adventures come in, if young people take the initiative, said Schreiber-Pan. Parents ordering their teenagers and young adult kids outside likely isn’t going to be very effective. But getting them to find outdoor activities they enjoy can be.
Most important about these outdoor sessions is doing it with somebody else when possible.
“They’re in that stage of human development where peer relationships take precedence overall,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what your parents are saying so much as your friends liking you.”
And they need to put away the smartphones while outdoors, which is something young people are starting to do, if in fits and starts.
“Within the last year we’ve seen adolescents wanting help with addiction to their phones. We have not seen that before,” Schreiber-Pan said of her own counseling experiences and
those shared by mental health professional colleagues.
It’s advice that can last well into adulthood, when anxiety often lingers, and is sometimes worse than earlier years.
“When you look at all the mental health challenges that we’re up against, anxiety is one of the most treatable ones,” Schreiber-Pan said. “When you make lifestyle changes — a breathing technique, not drinking coffee after 12 p.m. — that when combined, with time spent outside, these can lessen the anxiety significantly.”
Adults also need to keep smartphones off when outside. Otherwise, it defeats the purpose of trying to lessen their anxieties.
“It feels like an addiction. It’s a dopamine hit,” Schreiber-Pan said. “We see adults really struggling to put it down.”
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