Spending time outside has a lot of benefits. It can improve your health, sharpen your mind, relieve stress, and make you feel happier and more resilient. It’s a great way to make friends, see amazing places and wildlife, and adds a new dimension to vacations or other travel. But spending quality time outside is easier said than done. If you’re interested in getting into nature, where do you start? In this Outdoor Tips post, we’ll cover some tips on how to get started on your personal journey enjoying and learning about your natural world. To give credit where credit is due, I’ve received this question from a number of readers recently and want to say thanks for the suggestion.
Read more: How to make the most of your time outside
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Based on my own experiences and conversations with outdoorsy friends like birdwatchers, through-hikers, mountain-bikers, and biologists, I’ve come up with TK tips for how to be more outdoorsy. Let’s get into it!
Looking for more advice? Check out other Beginner Naturalist Tips!
1. Find nature near you
The first step in having great outdoor experiences, and learning from them, is getting outside. Ultimately, that means having natural spaces that you can access and connect with the natural world. Depending on your living and transportation situation (access to a car, urban versus rural), you may have different options available to you.
Generally, its best to find spaces that you can get to within 30-45 minutes travel, and where you can spend enough time to really immerse yourself and get the benefits of time outside. Based on clinical literature, this is probably something like 20-30 minutes, but I tend to shoot for longer. My rule of thumb is spending at least two minutes in a natural area for every minute I spent getting there.
To find natural spaces near you, try using:
- Searchable navigation apps like Apple Maps, Google Maps, or Mapquest
- The websites of local government or non-profit conservation agencies
- Online mapping databases like Greenmapper that keep track of natural spaces
- Outdoor apps like eBird, iNaturalist, or AllTrails where people share info about outdoor locations
Keep in mind, that you can find some kind of nature pretty much everywhere. Even patches of moss between slabs of cement on a city sidewalk can contain a bustling array of life. Parks and gardens, even in big cities, can be portals to quality time in nature if you approach them the right way. If you have your own space, consider bringing nature to you by engaging in wildlife friendly gardening and seeing what fascinating new neighbors move in!
2. Make time for nature
It seems like everybody is busy nowadays, and that probably won’t change anytime soon. Nonetheless, as with any habit or change we want to make in our own lives, we have to devote some time to it. Becoming more outdoorsy is no different; you need to set aside time to enjoy and connect. As I mentioned above, this doesn’t have to be a lot of time. If an area is easy to access, you can spend as little as 15-20 minutes a few times a week and you’ll still be picking up benefits and learning new things.
I have two major tips for making time for nature:
- Schedule a time and stick with it. Once you get in the habit of going outside at a certain time every week, you’ll automatically plan around it. That consistency (see point number 8!) will make it infinitely easier.
- Take advantage of unexpected free time. Did a friend cancel a brunch date? Did you finish your errands 45 minutes early? Rather than suck up extra time doomscrolling on your phone or streaming a series, head out to a nearby natural area and take advantage of that time.
3. Take up an outdoor hobby
If just being outside doesn’t feel like enough, outdoor hobbies can help add direction and energy to your outdoor time. These can also be an extra motivator for making time (see above) and can help you build useful skills, learn new things, or stay in better shape. I categorize hobbies into four groups, which have different benefits and advantages:
- Athletic outdoor hobbies are those where your goal is to get a good workout. Things like trail running, climbing, bouldering, and mountain biking fall into this category. These are the best options for getting in shape but, since they emphasize completing a strenuous task, they may not make it as easy to really connect with nature.
- Immersive outdoor hobbies are centered around just getting outside and being in beautiful natural spaces. They can involve some physical activity and learning about the natural world, but these aren’t their primary focus. Activities like hiking, canoeing, and picnicking are excellent examples of immersive outdoor activities.
- Extractive outdoor hobbies involve taking things from the outdoors, or honing skills for doing so in an outdoor setting. Hobbies like hunting, fishing, foraging, and mushrooming fall into this category. Because these are less intense than more athletic hobbies and require careful attention to nature, they require a deeper connection with the natural world. They also teach skills of observation and awareness of different kinds of flora and fauna and their behaviors. One drawback of these hobbies is that, in excess, they can cause environmental harm, and they may only be permitted in certain areas.
- Nature-focused outdoor hobbies prioritize learning about and directly experiencing nature, or different aspects of biodiversity. This category includes hobbies like birdwatching, naturalist walks, nature-journaling, herping, and many more. Nature-focused hobbies emphasize connecting with the outdoors above all else, and often involve building skills in observing and identifying forms of wildlife.
Read more: How to keep a nature journal
All of these outdoor hobbies are great for getting yourself outside. Furthermore, there’s no need to do just one or the other, and you can practice many of them on the same outing. For example, many of my trail-running and backpacking friends are also avid naturalists, who take advantage of their long treks to see fantastic wildlife.
4. Find other people who are interested
Like anything else, you can only learn so much on your own. Connecting with other people is one of the best ways to learn outdoor skills and get more comfortable outside. Even better, natural spaces can be a great setting for making new friends, and outdoor hobbies are a fun and low-pressure way to get to know people. In my experience as a naturalist, nothing has ever been as useful as spending time outside with more knowledgeable people. There’s always someone who knows something that you don’t, and quality time outside and informal conversations can go a long way in getting you the “download” on the outdoors.
5. Read nature-themed books
Even if you’ve got some great companions for time in nature, there are plenty of ways to build outdoor skills and knowledge on your own. Books are among the best and most poorly appreciated resources for doing that. Whether you’re visiting your local library or shopping nature books online, there is a huge and still-growing body of reading out there with advice on all aspects of being outdoorsy.
Don’t know where to start? Contact Gulo in Nature with questions and we can help you get going. You can also check out book reviews for some of our favorite reads.
6. Try an outdoor app
Although they don’t have nearly the richness of nature-related books, a growing number of outdoor apps are available for on-the-fly support when you’re out and about. These apps can help with things like:
- Identifying plants, animals, fungi, and other critters through photographs
- Recognizing and learning bird songs
- Finding good hiking trails
- Tracking your time and distance
- Identifying stars and constellations in the night sky
Read more: 5 Essential Outdoor Apps for Beginning Nature-lovers
7. Buy some field guides
A key part out being outdoorsy is knowing what you’re seeing and why. Having a familiarity with the nature of your surroundings is crucial, both for safety and enjoyment of the natural world. Being able to answer questions like “What kind of tree is that?” and “Why does that rock have such a funny shape?” is not only a fulfilling part of connecting with the outdoors, but its a great way to impress your friends. Aside from learning from mentors and friends (see tip #4!), field guides are an essential way to pick up on that knowledge.
Field guides come in lots of different formats, from ones focused on a particular type of wildlife (mushrooms or beetles, for example) to ones that cover a particular geographic region like the Caribbean, or other which explain types of environments, like forests or wetlands.
Unless you really enjoy somewhat repetitive content, you should not try to read field guides cover-to-cover. Instead, keep them somewhere handy and pick them up whenever you have a spare moment. Like practicing an instrument, a little bit of extra time here and there can make a big difference in learning about the outdoors. I like to use field guides as coffee table books and read a few pages when I have extra time.
Importantly, the introductory chapters of field guides tend to have really great, broad information to help you get oriented in your knowledge and pick up relevant skills. Always be sure to check out the introductory contents first, which typically read like a normal book.
Check out Gulo in Nature’s top field guides
Read more: The 5 Best Field Guides for the Birds of North America
8. Be consistent
Like any other habit or skill, becoming more outdoorsy required consistency. Even if you don’t have time to put in hours every week, sparing what little time you have and keeping with it is most important. Planning goes a long way toward being consistent, as well as not overdoing it. Many of the previous tips can help you be more consistent, like connecting with other enthusiasts, taking up a hobby that gets you outside, or finding accessible places to be in nature. Typically, any new practice that you can keep up for a month or more has a higher chance of “sticking”, so try to keep up your nature habit for at least a month or two for starters.
Thanks for reading!
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