Healing Space | World Health Day 2022: How planetary health affects your mental health

The areas now open to us, that we can be certain of, even notionally, are shrinking, along with landmass. Uncertainties like these constrict not just our our sense of what is possible but also impact the structural integrity of our concept of the world. The world now seems a more hostile place. Not just because of war or pandemic or economic slowdown, but because the land itself seems capable of turning on us.

When what we can take for granted refuses to co-operate with us, we are left with a sense of betrayal alongside the shock and tangible disruptions. A landslide in your hometown makes you feel far more vulnerable and wounded, personally aggrieved by the land, precisely because it is personal. Crop that won’t grow due to a failed or shifting monsoon is more than an agricultural loss, it is the loss of the connection of trust and interdependence between the land and the owner.

What happens to the planet is personal because the ground is not supposed to literally shift from beneath our feet. It is the one thing we expect to remain constant and friendly. A hostile planet forces displacement, disruption to routine agricultural activity, shifting seasons, creates food shortages and gluts. It also taxes the already inadequate public health and public transportation infrastructure by impacting migration, opportunity, reliability of long-term planning.

Decisions as small as whether you can live in a ground floor flat in a major city because it keeps your ageing parent more mobile are no longer a matter of preference. Planetary health is actually a wider term for micro-cosmic adjustments you have to make on a daily basis to your way of life. Constant news of disaster beaming in on a daily basis impairs your capacity to cope or feel optimistic about the world you live in. It reduces your willing social cohesion and participation.

Cityscapes altered by concrete reduce the efficacy of urban planning. Parks, wildlife, open spaces, pollution-free air, access to fresh and flowing natural resources like woodlands and springs, rivers, take us towards an organic way of living. While your father could stroll down to the river and take a dip in it with his friends, play cricket on its banks, and spend an afternoon reading under a tree, these are now activities that only the very wealthy can afford as some part of a luxury back-to-basics package. These are not just nostalgia experiences, but ways for people to reconnect with each other, the land and the environment.

Being in an artificially-simulated environment constantly creates a disconnect with our own feelings and sensations. Artificial light does nothing to prevent vitamin D deficiencies, artificially-cooled rooms affect our bodies’ abilities to adjust to environmental temperature and spur the consumption of more and more energy. Artificial sound, even the constant low hum of the fan, keeps us primally at a mild state of alert all the time. We are never organically in a state of rest. This is why when you head into a natural environment, like the mountains or sea, or are outdoors in any form, you immediately relax.

Rising sea levels, sliding land, disappearing woods and wildlife all impact our ability to be our best selves. The planet is our mental health.

How to sync your health with the planet’s

1. Switch off energy-powered utilities when possible. Notice the silence.

2. Access greenery, the sea, mountains, rivers, often.

3. Befriend sunlight.

4. Drink a lot of water, sweat, allow your body to adjust to room temperature.

5. Reduce consumption of planetary resources. You’re taking from yourself.