Florence Williams
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PEN-winning author, Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey (2022), The Nature Fix, and Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History (LA Times Book Prize)
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Articles by Florence Williams
Here's Why You Love Music Festivals, According to Science
New perk: Easily find new routes and hidden gems, upcoming running events, and more near you. Your weekly Local Running Newsletter has everything you need to lace up! Subscribe today. Conjure for a moment the feeling of a perfect summer day. The trees are fully leafed out. The western sky is filled with changing light. Your friends and neighbors are gathering on the great green lawn of your town park, where communal tables await.
How the Outdoors Shapes Our Relationships
Reeling from her husband’s request to divorce after 25 years of marriage and two kids, Florence Williams was experiencing debilitating grief. An accomplished reporter, she decided to explore the science of heartache to see if she could find a cure. In this excerpt from her new book, ‘Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey,’ she heads out for a 120-mile solo paddle on Utah’s Green River, with a too heavy portable toilet and a shattered heart.
The Outside Guide to Simplified Living
These days, screen-addicted Americans are more stressed out and distracted than ever. And there’s no app for that. But there is a radically simple remedy: get outside. Florence Williams travels to the deep woods of Japan, where researchers are backing up the theory that nature can lower your blood pressure, fight off depression—and even prevent cancer.
Awe Is Good for Your Brain. Here’s How to Find It.
Reflecting on my passage through the galaxy of wildflowers, it’s hard to tell whether the sensation I was feeling was on par with sadness or amusement, or something more like an altered state. Recent neuroscience suggests it might be both. A heightened awe experience stimulates the vagus nerve, which calms us, and releases a pleasant rush of dopamine and oxytocin, increasing a sense of connection. It also dramatically shifts which brain networks are firing up.
Awe Is Good for Your Brain. Here’s How to Find It.
This article originally appeared on Outside Michael Amster arrived at the Flying J truck stop in Lebec, California, carrying a loaf of homemade pumpkin bread. His orange puffer vibrated in the wind as he climbed into the Toyota Tacoma that would ferry us up into the foothills of the Tehachapi Mountains of the Central Valley. We buckled up. A wintry mix of rain and snow lashed the windshield. The bread wasn't warm, but it was soft. "It's gluten-free!" he announced.
How William Shatner Was Transformed by the Immensity of Space
Oops! Something went wrong. Please try again later. In this article: Oops! Something went wrong. Please try again later. William Shatner Canadian actor This article originally appeared on Outside OUTSIDE: We're thrilled to speak with you about one of our favorite shared subjects: awe. Let’s start with outer space. When did your fascination with it begin? At a summer camp outside Montreal. I was a city boy, and I was sitting on a log. It was night, and I was looking up into the stars.
How a Broken Heart Can Literally Break Other Parts of Your Body
Before I became heartbroken, I tended to dismiss portrayals of broken hearts in popular culture or literature or even by my friends — as overwrought. But one of the first stages of heartbreak, I soon learned, is feeling stunned, even if you shouldn’t have been. I’d been used to feeling in control. But heartbreak overtakes you. When my husband decided to live on his own after three decades of togetherness, the clichés of heartbreak felt not like melodrama at all.
The Science of Heartbreak
Death and disease increase after divorce. Journalist Florence Williams, mourning the end of her own marriage, investigates why. Source link
On “Broken-Heart Syndrome” and the Possibility of Resilience
The heart can break in a lot of ways. It took a while for the cracks to form in mine toward the last hard years of my 25-year-marriage. But sometimes loss happens all at once, so suddenly that the heart literally stops working. Interested in the links between one’s emotional state and one’s physical health in the wake of my divorce, I read up on a condition called Takotsubo cardiomyopathy.
The Personality Type That's Best At Rebounding After Setbacks & Heartbreak
Divorce is known to sit near the very top of stressful-life-event lists. Some of the damage to our short-term physical health is easily apparent: People going through the end of a long, intimate relationship (especially the ones who might have wanted it to keep going) are likely to lose sleep for months, as well as losing copious amounts of weight. They may turn to unhealthy lifestyle habits, and they can get sick.
What Happens in Your Brain When You Get Dumped
We all know that when love is good, it’s really good. Research shows that romantic attachments, when they’re healthy and supportive, can be immensely beneficial for our health. Married people tend to live longer than single people and seem to fare better when seriously sick. But as poets and pop singers have long told us, when love goes awry, it hurts like nothing else. After my marriage ended—not by my choice—I found some comfort in art, but what I really wanted was science.
He Divorced Me on Land-but I Left My Marriage on the River
Get full access to Outside Learn, our online education hub featuring in-depth fitness, nutrition, and adventure courses and more than 2,000 instructional videos when you sign up for Outside+. Heartbreak is the February pick for the Outside Book Club. You can learn more about the book club here, or join us on Facebook to discuss the book. My biggest problem at the moment was the portable toilet. It was just too heavy.
He Divorced Me on Land-but I Left My Marriage on the River
Outside's long reads email newsletter features our strongest writing, most ambitious reporting, and award-winning storytelling about the outdoors. Sign up today. Heartbreak is the February pick for the Outside Book Club. You can learn more about the book club here, or join us on Facebook to discuss the book. My biggest problem at the moment was the portable toilet. It was just too heavy.
How (Almost) Risking My Life Healed My Heartbreak
A few months after my husband moved out of our house in the spring of 2017, I found myself clipped into a metal cable that ran 1,000 vertical feet to the top of a cliff. My teenage children, a few friends, and I were setting out to climb an Italian via ferrata (literally, an iron path). That cable was our safety system, but we would be pulling our own bodies hand over foot into the clear Dolomite sky. The climb took hours.
The Healing Power of Nature: How wilderness adventure therapy helped an Army veteran calm his PTSD
When Stacy Bare returned home after fighting in Baghdad, he wasn’t sure who he was anymore. His girlfriend hadn’t waited for him, his hometown friends couldn’t relate to him, and he felt disillusioned with the U.S. military he had once so admired. He’d experienced a mild traumatic brain injury when his Humvee got hit by a roadside bomb.
Nature Can Save Us All
To boost her patients’ physical and mental health, Dr. Suzanne Bartlett Hackenmiller has been prescribing time in nature for the past four years. Now, she says, it’s more important than ever.
Benefits of Nature: How Nature Helps Your Brain
When you go to the desert with David Strayer, don’t be surprised if he sticks electrodes to your head. A cognitive psychologist at the University of Utah who studies the mind’s ability to think clearly, Strayer understands the relentless distractions that pummel our modern brains. But as an avid backpacker, he thinks he knows the antidote.
Why Are We So Burned Out? (And What Do We Do Now?)
It was getting dark when I hit the first riffle of my trip down Utah’s Green River in a canoe. My plan was to set out while it was cool and log some mileage before nightfall, but dusk came on quicker than I thought. Because I’d been in a rush to launch, my gear wasn’t tied down very well. I had trouble reading the water in the fading light, hit some shoals, and barely came out upright.
Why Are We So Burned Out? (And What Do We Do Now?)
It was getting dark when I hit the first riffle of my trip down Utah’s Green River in a canoe. My plan was to set out while it was cool and log some mileage before nightfall, but dusk came on quicker than I thought. Because I’d been in a rush to launch, my gear wasn’t tied down very well. I had trouble reading the water in the fading light, hit some shoals, and barely came out upright.
We're Calling Time Out
The Big Chill Florence Williams Jan 1, 2020 Why Are We So Burned Out? (And What Do We Do Now?) Work hard, play hard—that's how many of us live today. But it turns out that our supercharged lives aren’t so great for us, and fitness experts and doctors are now emphasizing restorative practices and rest to improve performance and overall health.
How Animals May Cause the Next Big One
How Animals May Cause the Next Big One Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen Norton, 587 pp., $28.95 Anat Givon/AP ImagesPeople wearing surgical masks to protect themselves from the SARS virus, Hong Kong, April 2003 For better or worse, Homo sapiens has become the most abundant large mammal ever to roam the planet. We have spread into nearly every conceivable terrestrial habitat. We have increased our fertility and decreased our mortality.
This Is Your Brain on Adventure
It’s one thing, a beautiful thing, to watch a falcon swoop off a 2,500-foot cliff. But to watch a man run to the edge and hurl his earthbound body into the void is to feel ill. Primates just aren’t supposed to do this. Don’t try telling that to Ted Davenport, though. When the 28-year-old Aspenite started BASE-jumping a few years ago, he found his destiny. “I always wanted to fly. I love anything involving big air,” says Davenport, who’s also a champion extreme skier.
Book review of The Invisible Killer: The Rising Global Threat of Air Pollution-and How We Can Fight Back by Gary Fuller
May 17 Florence Williams is the author of “The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative.” Spring is a deceptive season. It tricks you into thinking you’ve emerged from the dull gloom of winter into a bright festival of light, green, health and freshness.
The 3-Day Effect
Love the Planet If you take one of these listens outdoors with you, learning all about our fascinating world is a walk in the park.
Why You Should Inspire Your Child to Take Risks
Caden Fuchs can’t tell me what he did in the sweat lodge. “It’s secret,” says the 14-year-old. “But,” he offers, “it’s a little bit like I went in a boy and came out a man.” A statement like that might freak some parents out, but Caden’s folks rolled with it. They knew he was out there with a tight group of friends and a few trusted adults in a Northern California outdoor program called Vilda.
Rewilding the American Child
How to restore kids' freedom, fire up their imaginations, and let them loose to play Teach Jacob Baynham Sep 1, 2018 When (and How) to Introduce Your Kid to Your Favorite Sports Children are much more likely to enjoy outdoor activities—and stick with them—if they start out at the right moment in their physical and cognitive development. Ben Hewitt Aug 12, 2014 Why You Should Take Your Kids Out of School At least not of the traditional, compulsory, watch-the-clock-until-the-bell-rings kind.
The Little Red Hen
A Little Red Hen lived in a barnyard. She spent almost all of her time walking about the barnyard in her picketty-pecketty fashion, scratching everywhere for worms. She dearly loved fat, delicious worms and felt they were absolutely necessary to the health of her children. As often as she found a worm she would call "Chuck-chuck-chuck!" to her chickies. When they were gathered about her, she would distribute choice morsels of her tid-bit.
I Went To A 'Divorce Spa' To Try To Relax My Way Out Of A Breakup. Here's What Happened
As I prepared for my traditional Asian hand massage on Koh Samui, an island off the coast of Thailand, a young man dressed in orange scrubs asked me how I liked the pressure: light, medium, or strong. "Strong?" I offered. He raised an eyebrow, as if to say, do you know what you're in for? I nodded. I was here to go for it. My two-decade marriage had just collapsed a few months earlier, and I needed maximum healing.
The Adventure Therapy Cure for Sex-Trafficking Survivors
Asta spent her first night in Colorado sleeping in an outfitter’s warehouse, replaying in her head the bear growls she’d learned online. She wanted to be ready. Although she’d slept outside plenty of times, usually under a bridge, she’d never camped in the mountains, and she was, to say the least, apprehensive. “I’m a little nervous, OK?” she says the next morning, practicing how to stuff her winter sleeping bag into the bottom of her loaner pack.
On Living Without Money
Ben Hewitt made his name writing paeans to rural food systems and the iconoclasts who create them. Now, in Saved: How I Quit Worrying About Money and Became the Richest Guy in the World ($25), Hewitt covers his efforts to step away from the American financial machine, with the help of a 28-year-old wilderness-skills tutor named Erik Gillard, who survives on a four-digit income, lives in a handmade shack, and wears “McEnroe-era tennis shoes,” Hewitt writes.
The Nature Fix
From forest paths in Korea to islands in Finland to eucalyptus groves in California, Florence Williams investigates the science at the confluence of environment, mood, health and creativity. Delving into new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our lives shift indoors, these ideas—and the answers they yield—are more urgent than ever.
Feel Good Fractals: From Ocean Waves to Jackson Pollock’s Art
When Richard Taylor was 10 years old in the early 1970s in England, he chanced upon a catalogue of Jackson Pollock paintings. He was mesmerised, or perhaps a better word is Pollockised. Franz Mesmer, the crackpot 18th-century physician, posited the existence of animal magnetism between inanimate and animate objects. Pollock’s abstractions also seemed to elicit a certain mental state in the viewer.
Binge 'Breasts Unbound' Now
My award-winning Audible Original series, Breasts Unbound, takes listeners on a revealing journey into everyone’s favorite organ. Over eight episodes, I travel from Houston to Hollywood to the boob-shaped hills of Northern England to share the big and small story of breasts – why we have them, how we view them, and why they sometimes do weird things. I need your help spreading the word that Breasts Unbound is now available on Apple Podcasts.
GMO Facts You Need to Know - Are GMOs Safe?
You scan food packages for fiber and whole grains, avoid added sugar, and wouldn't even think about buying something with trans fats. Just when you thought you had a handle on how to eat healthy, there's another worry to sort out: genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Some opponents would have you believe these ingredients, which are largely banned in Europe, are the dietary scourge of the decade. But how concerned should you really be?
Author says it’s time for a ‘Nature Fix’ for a longer, happier life
“Actually they are not,” said the journalist on a recent trip to Salt Lake City to speak to the Utah Nature Conservancy Board. “Both are environmental health books. The first was about how the environment is hurting our health. The second was about how the environment can help the Earth.” Williams said that while there are moments of mirth and light because of the topic of writing about breasts, the book had a serious message.
The Nature Fix: Free Your Mind and Go Outdoors
I recently gave an author talk in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, about the mental health benefits of walking in nature. I shared some of the latest research about how time outdoors helps boost our moods and reduces symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety. At the end of the talk, a woman raised her hand and said, “I go for walks, but I just can’t seem to stop thinking about my to-do list and all the things I have to deal with when the walk is over.
How to Reclaim Peace and Quiet in a Noisy World
This morning, as I often do, I walked with my dog by the Potomac River along a pretty stretch managed by the National Park Service. Both of us watched a pair of nesting mallards, and I spotted a couple of hawks circling overhead. A great blue heron flew by, all gangly and prehistoric. It could have and should have been a blissful moment of repose from D.C.’s urban frenzy.
Can trees heal people?
Stocksy The establishment of dozens of “healing forests” is part of South Korea’s surprising prescription to improve its citizens’ health and wellbeing. Journalist Florence Williams takes a walk in the woods to learn more about this intriguing approach to public health. Park Hyun-Soo didn’t look like a man on chemotherapy. Forty-one and with a full head of black hair, he can hike the socks off anyone, but he prefers to take his time.
Veterans seek respite, and solace, on the River of No Return | News | Missoula Independent
The first American veteran on Idaho's main stem of the Salmon River was Capt. William Clark. He and Meriwether Lewis had split up to search for a route to the Pacific, but this one was not panning out. The rapids were too rough for the expedition's 1,000-pound dugout canoes, and the canyons proved too steep to portage around the whitewater.
Mouthful of Shame: The Scandalous State of U.S. Dental Care
In January 2007, a 12-year-old boy named Deamonte Driver developed a toothache. Six weeks and two emergency surgeries later, he was dead. Bacteria from the abscessed molar had spread to his brain. It was a medieval death, but not as uncommon as you might expect in 21st-century America, where 100 million citizens — nearly a third of all Americans — have little or no access to dental care.
The Girl Scouts Is Raising Our Next Generation of Rippers
For more than a century, the Girl Scouts has been the most well-trod path for junior explorers to get into adventure. But what comes after the Thin Mints and craft badges is a troop for sisterhood, winter camping, and some serious archery. Spider arrived at the breakfast table with glitter on her cheek. Six wide-eyed middle school girls were devouring ham sammies while she described her midnight abduction. “This dude came to the window and gave me a bead.
Benefits of Nature: How Nature Helps Your Brain | Reader's Digest
Christoffer relanderWhen you go to the desert with David Strayer, don’t be surprised if he sticks electrodes to your head. A cognitive psychologist at the University of Utah who studies the mind’s ability to think clearly, Strayer understands the relentless distractions that pummel our modern brains. But as an avid backpacker, he thinks he knows the antidote.
Feel Good Fractals: From Ocean Waves to Jackson Pollock’s Art
When Richard Taylor was 10 years old in the early 1970s in England, he chanced upon a catalogue of Jackson Pollock paintings. He was mesmerised, or perhaps a better word is Pollockised. Franz Mesmer, the crackpot 18th-century physician, posited the existence of animal magnetism between inanimate and animate objects. Pollock’s abstractions also seemed to elicit a certain mental state in the viewer.
8 Amazing Ways Nature Can Heal You
Consider this: One in four U.S. women has a medical prescription to treat depression or anxiety. College campuses are reporting a spike in students needing psychiatric counseling. And between 1994 and 2008, the rate of antidepressant use in the U.S. jumped nearly 400 percent. Many of us juggle jobs and families and information overload, often lacking the social support to keep all of our plates spinning.
How Just 15 Minutes of Nature Can Make You Happier
William Wordsworth climbed Mt. Snowdon in North Wales when he was 21. Undertaken mostly at night, it was an epic and spectacular slog. The young poet saw a flash of light revealing vast mists; he heard a “roar of waters, torrents, streams.” Arduous hiking was the X-Games of the late 18th century, a chance for young bucks to challenge their bodies and souls. Modern Americans have inherited Romantic notions of nature. We too seek out the sublimity of ocean views and majestic peaks.
River of healing
The first American veteran on Idaho’s main stem of the Salmon River was Capt. William Clark. He and Meriwether Lewis had split up to search for a route to the Pacific, but this one was not panning out. The rapids were too rough for the expedition’s 1,000-pound dugout canoes, and the canyons proved too steep to portage around the whitewater.
To Fight the Winter Blues, Try a Dose of Nature
Wintertime is rough on those whom the 19th-century hiker-philosopher John Muir called “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people.” But we have an obvious cure for our doldrums: go outside. Though we are months away from the flowers and leafy foliage of spring, a dose of nature can still calm the mind and solidify human bonds. The real question is why we don’t partake more often of this easy balm.
What Jackson Pollock's paintings (and nature) can tell us about the art of being happy
When Richard Taylor was 10 years old, in the early 1970s in England, he chanced upon a catalogue of Jackson Pollock paintings. He was mesmerised, or perhaps a better word is Pollockised. Franz Mesmer, the crackpot 18th-century physician, posited the existence of animal magnetism between inanimate and animate objects. Pollock’s abstractions also seemed to elicit a certain mental state in the viewer.
Feel-good fractals: from ocean waves to Jackson Pollock’s art – Florence Williams | Aeon Ideas
When Richard Taylor was 10 years old in the early 1970s in England, he chanced upon a catalogue of Jackson Pollock paintings. He was mesmerised, or perhaps a better word is Pollockised. Franz Mesmer, the crackpot 18th-century physician, posited the existence of animal magnetism between inanimate and animate objects. Pollock’s abstractions also seemed to elicit a certain mental state in the viewer.
Star Wars Actress Carrie Fisher Dies After Heart Attack
Actress Carrie Fisher has died after suffering a massive heart attack last Friday. She was 60 years old. Fisher, who was known for her role as Princess Leia in the Star Wars franchise, starred in several films and TV shows and wrote books about her struggle with substance abuse, including the best seller, Postcards from the Edge. She went into cardiac arrest when she was flying from London, where she was promoting her new memoir, The Princess Diarist, to Los Angeles. She died in the hospital today.
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