Forest 🌳 Bathing 🧼

Forest bathing (shinrin-yoku) is less about hiking and more about slowing down enough to notice where you are.
The basics

• Pick somewhere with trees and low foot traffic. Two hours is the classic recommendation, but 20 minutes helps.
• Leave the phone in your pocket or bag. No podcast, no music, no step count.
• Walk slowly — much slower than feels natural. Some people cover under a kilometre in an hour.
• Stop often. Sit for a while. Look up at the canopy.
• Work through the senses one at a time: what you hear, what you smell, the temperature on your skin, texture of bark or moss.
• Don’t aim for a destination. A summit turns it back into exercise.
  We’ve got some of the best places in the country within a short drive — Lynn Canyon and Mosquito Creek are the quiet ones, Capilano River Regional Park has flat cedar trails. Weekday mornings if you can manage it.
  If you’re doing this partly for the stress, it’s worth knowing this one actually has better evidence behind it than the flower remedies — studies have found measurable drops in cortisol and blood pressure after time among trees, though much of it is small Japanese research and the effect fades after a few days. Which is the argument for making it a habit rather than a one-off.