What to do
Integrating some ancestral practices into your daily life is called rewilding, and it can be done by anyone, anywhere. It involves recovering skills and benefits that modern industrialisation has taken away and can improve your quality of life, health metrics and personal satisfaction. At the deepest level, it is about becoming humans in direct relationship with nature once again, restoring our heritage as wild people who do not exploit each other or Earth’s resources.
Spend more time outside
In industrialised nations, more than 90 per cent of our time is spent inside buildings and vehicles, many of them constructed with synthetic products. This statistic has entirely flipped during 300,000 years of Homo sapiens’ history – we once spent at least 90 per cent of our time outside. The modern indoor lifestyle has adverse effects on our physiology, mood, circadian rhythms, and even our microbiome, because industrial building materials do not provide exposure to the bacteria we co-evolved with. (A healthy, diverse microbiome is important for maintaining a healthy immune system and metabolism.)
It is easy to address this problem because any routine activity can be deliberately moved outside. Choose to sit on the café patio while getting coffee with a friend. Take phone calls while on a neighbourhood walk. If you work with a laptop, you can bring it anywhere. I’ve been known to work from a low-hanging tree branch! A park bench or picnic table near a local pond can be an attractive place to get your daily dose of vitamin D, fresh air, microbes and bird song, and will give you a live landscape to train your eyes on during breaks (this helps prevent myopia or worsening myopia).
Integrate more movement into your day
Wild foragers engage in low- to moderate-level activity that is integrated into daily tasks. There is no separation between work, exercise, socialisation and recreation – it’s all just daily life. In contrast, the average college-educated employee spends most of their time sitting; the movement necessary for providing their basic needs has been outsourced to other labourers who farm, harvest, manufacture, transport, deliver and stock the goods they order from phones.
Modern humans have invested so much creativity and inventiveness in trying to reduce movement – from the coffee machine that begins the day to the remote control that concludes our nights – that we are deprived of opportunities to leave the couch, bed, car or desk. Exercise becomes an optional activity that one in four people just don’t do enough.
To address this, deliberately add more movement into daily life by choosing to do some of the work of modern machines throughout your day. Unplug the food processor and mix up pancakes by hand. Put the Roomba away and sweep the floor with a broom. Always take the stairs, and park your car far away from your destination so that you have to walk a little bit for every journey. Leave the gym and take your exercising outside. Of course, you can also use your leisure time to get outside: go for a hike, explore a natural area, or learn orienteering.
Spend extended time in wild settings
On a similar note, it is restorative to spend extended time in places that don’t feature human architecture, media and technology. These don’t have to be vast swaths of wilderness – even an undeveloped section of a riverbank, or a small patch of green can provide relief from stress in an environment of sunlight, fresh air, diverse microbes, aromatic compounds, and calming sights and sounds. Participants in a study who spent four days in the wilderness without access to technology demonstrated improved cognitive skills and creativity. Numerous other studies have demonstrated that time in natural settings improves mood, cortisol levels, blood pressure, pulse, immune response and overall happiness. So, spend free time regularly in the most wild natural settings you can find, especially if you live in an urban area, which tends to increase overall stress levels in residents. Research suggests significant benefits can arise from spending just two hours per week in wild settings. I’m fortunate to live in the woods but, when I visit urban areas, I always make a point to go walking in nearby parks, or make stops at open spaces when travelling by car.
Positively stress your body with some discomfort
When you venture outside, it’s important to leave the bubble of comfort and convenience you are accustomed to in indoor environments and activities. Modern humans must accept that nature immersion will make them uncomfortable at some point. Maybe you’ll sit or climb on a rocky surface, deal with bug bites, prickly plants, the seasonal hazards of scorching sun, mud and rain, snow or ice, and exist in a general state of grime and sweat (which, incidentally, actually restores beneficial bacteria to your skin). Many of us have grown accustomed to eliminating all these outdoor discomforts with heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems, cushioned floors and furniture, insect repellent, daily showers, sunglasses, thick down coats, and even heated blankets.
By exposing yourself to nature’s discomforts, you strengthen your physiological systems, increase your resilience to persist through difficulty, and will feel more gratitude for the moments when you do experience comfort. Similarly, when you skip a meal, or exercise at high intensity, you provide a positive level of stress that allows your body to eliminate wastes and maintain fitness levels more efficiently. These discomforts and short-lived stresses are similar to what hunter-gatherers experience, and are what shaped our species during our long evolutionary period.
If you are in good health, to reap the benefits of positive stress, also known as hormesis, you can try fasting intermittently, taking 15-18 hours between dinner and lunch the next day. Deliberately pushing your exertion for 20- to 30-second intervals several times during exercise trains your mitochondria – the powerhouses of your cells – to deal with stress efficiently, increase energy production, and reduce cellular ageing.
Other forms of hormesis include increased heat and cold exposure practices such as cold showers, saunas, steam baths, swimming in natural water, and walking outside without a coat in freezing temperatures. Don’t overwhelm your body (certain cardiovascular and other illnesses preclude the safe practice of these activities – check with your physician if you are unsure), but try if you can to embrace the feeling of extreme temperature variation, not as something to be avoided, but as a natural force that strengthens and invigorates you for short periods of time.
Both heat and cold exposure can improve your cardiovascular fitness and metabolism and there can be mood benefits as well. Build your tolerance by gradually increasing the time you spend in intense outdoor conditions, including exposure to sun (taking sensible precautions to avoid skin damage as needed in your part of the world), humidity, rain and snow. One way to introduce an easy hormetic practice is to end your showers with 15-30 seconds of cold water before turning off the tap.
Go barefoot
All human cultures before modernisation walked barefoot or with minimal footwear, and they sat and reclined directly on the ground or on natural materials. Now, we rarely experience direct contact between the earth and our skin. We wear cushioned, structured shoes that deprive us of the sensations of walking and running, weaken our feet, and compress our toes. Always clothed, we deprive our bodies of healthy exposure to the elements, and we’ve dulled the capacity of our largest sensory organ – the skin.
Of course, we need some covering for protection and warmth, but addressing such extreme disconnection from the natural environment will bring benefits. To start, going barefoot on bare ground for a few minutes every day will strengthen the musculature in your legs, feet and toes while reviving some of the sensory capacity of the soles of your feet. Choosing minimal footwear, with ample space for your toes, and without added cushioning or heel height, will also provide similar benefits.
Aim for autonomy in small social groups
Rewilding isn’t just about what you do outside or in nature. It also pertains to how you think and interact in the social world. Remember that our ancient human ancestors interacted in-person in small, egalitarian groups of familiar faces every day, rarely coming across strangers, as do contemporary hunter-gatherers. Resources are not hoarded, and no one holds power over another – any hierarchy beyond the natural process of seniority did not arise until the advent of agriculture around 10,000 years ago. Over millions of years of evolution as a social species, these bonded clans were key to human survival. A significant body of research reveals that strong social networks are vital to wellbeing, and we still prefer our original hunter-gatherer group sizes of around 150 people or fewer. People whose daily interactions are filled with fewer meaningful relationships, and who observe strict social hierarchies, are generally unhappier.
As the psychologist Mark Seely wrote in a blog post in 2019:
We once lived in close contact with people who directly supported our physical existence and provided the raw material out of which we constructed life’s meanings. We now live in giant tribes of two-dimensional beings, engaged in a shared superficial monologue, searching for constant distraction, desperately trying to convince ourselves – through sheer quantity of experience – that our isolated consumption-driven lives are meaningful.
When you maintain friendships with a large group of loose contacts, your interactions are less satisfying because you cannot share the wide range of human emotions with so many. With fewer people, you can develop stronger emotional ties, which leads to greater feelings of support and emotional resilience. Culling my outings with friends to the people I truly trust and respect helped me shape my social life towards a more ‘tribal’ organisation of five to seven very close contacts. This strategy works even for online interactions. When I reduced my number of Facebook friends to around 100, this social network suddenly became a much more intimate venue where I felt that I could truly express myself and fully engage with others.
If you have the freedom to do so, then adjusting your working life to be in line with our ancestral heritage could also improve your mental health. Aim for self-employment or jobs that offer a high degree of autonomy that will allow you to tap into your innate desire to direct your activities and make independent decisions, rather than submitting to the will of a boss.
Eat wild foods, learn to forage them yourself
An ancestral human diet is highly variable, because humans are omnivorous and can live in almost every ecosystem. At the same time, all ancestral foods are wild, non-toxic, unprocessed, high in fibre, high in nutrients, high in protein, high in healthy fats and low in sugar. Learning to source some wild foods from your local environment is a fun and beneficial way to spend time in nature. Many of our common ‘weeds’ are in fact highly nutritious, and can be flavourful additions to soups and salads. For instance, the ubiquitous dandelion plant is a good source of iron, calcium, B vitamins, potassium, magnesium and zinc. The young leaves are the best to eat, and they can be an excellent substitute for arugula (rocket) leaves in salads and on pizza.
Most areas have local foraging guides available that you can study, and many urban places have foraging classes where you can learn from experts (here are a few pointers to get you started: Forage London and San Francisco; foraging in New York; or find fruit tree locations worldwide).
If you aren’t able to forage locally, you can still approximate a wild diet by choosing minimally modified plant foods at the market. These are species that have not been significantly altered from their wild progenitors and still contain many beneficial phytonutrients (chemicals found in plants that are beneficial for human health). Foods that are industrially produced and genetically modified, by contrast, have arguably been stripped of a lot of their original nutrition. However, when you eat vegetables such as beets, parsnip, purple carrots, ginger, garlic and turmeric, and enjoy fleshy fruits such as avocado, blackberry, currants, mulberries and prickly pear, you are taking in nutrient-dense flavour. Nuts and seeds that are minimally processed include amaranth, chia, hazelnut, pecan, quinoa, wild rice, hemp and Brazil nuts. Organic leafy greens such as chicory, spinach and watercress are pretty much exactly how you’d find them in the wild.
Many ancestral human diets would contain plants with bitter flavours. Yet outside of coffee, today most of us mostly avoid bitters, to the detriment of our metabolism. Bitter flavours come from an array of phytochemicals that stimulate the production of gastric enzymes and fluids that facilitate digestion and help us absorb the vitamins in the food we eat. For these benefits, eat more cruciferous vegetables, dark chocolate, dandelion greens and/or grapefruit when you can.
