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鈥檛 warm, but it was soft. 鈥淚t鈥檚 gluten-free!鈥� he announced.

I鈥檇 invited Amster here because I hoped we could experience some classic, mind-blowing awe, and I wanted him to explain exactly what was going on in our brains and bodies while we did. Amster is an MD and a coauthor of the recently published book , and my challenge today was to find us some of that.

Awe isn鈥檛 something you can conjure at will, or at least I can鈥檛. Of its many recognized sources鈥攆rom works of art to religious experiences to heroic acts鈥擨 knew that nature was my surest bet.

I knew this because, yes, I like nature, but also because I鈥檇 recently strapped on VR goggles at Johns Hopkins University鈥檚 Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, where scientists tested my responses to various stimuli using what they referred to as an awe-experience scale. Moving through a virtual cathedral was surprisingly captivating. Then I was transported to a room with enticing fractal patterns on the wallpaper.

But I scored the most awe watching a dramatic sunset dipping over a lake. I鈥檓 not alone. In studies conducted around the world, nature tends to rank in the top two or three categories of awe triggers. About a quarter of the time we experience awe, it鈥檚 from being outside.

I also knew that a standard ingredient of an awe experience is that it defies expectations in some way. It rattles us out of the ordinary. After decades of living in beautiful places and reporting for magazines like this one, I鈥檝e seen my share of breaching whales, vertiginous waterfalls, northern lights, calving glaciers, and bright red salmon mustering their last stores of energy to swim up sparkling rivers and spawn. What I hadn鈥檛 seen, ever, was a full-fledged California superbloom.

The post Awe Is Good for Your Brain. Here鈥檚 How to Find It. appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

OUTSIDE: We鈥檙e 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. There was no light pollution! I stared up and fell over backward on the log, fell right on my back. I was so awed by the panoply. I don鈥檛 know what it was鈥攎ore than anything else, the mystery.

Einstein once said that the most beautiful emotion we experience is mystery.
I guess he never felt great passion.

Do you remember where you were when you saw the first moon landing?
I know exactly where I was, in a pasture on Long Island. I was getting divorced, as a result of which I had no money. Star Trek had been canceled, and I needed work. I had an old beat-up truck I was living in, doing summer theater. I was a poverty-stricken actor. I was despondent. What am I gonna do now? What am I doing?

I was in my little cot in the camper, looking through a window and seeing the full moon, with a four-inch, black-and-white television set on my chest. I stopped thinking of my own problems and realized: What an extraordinary moment in mankind鈥檚 history.

You joined the Blue Origin expedition to space. It sounds like you didn鈥檛 expect it to be quite as profound as it was. I mean, you almost turned it down.
Not only did I not think it would be profound, but I didn鈥檛 think anybody would notice. I was like: Shatner goes up in the air, so what? Nor did I have any idea what an experience it would be for my psyche.

Tell me.
I dispensed with the marvel of weightlessness. I just wanted to get to the window and see what there was. So I looked back at where we鈥檇 come from and could see the wake of the spaceship in the air, like a submarine going through the water. Then I looked ahead and I saw the blackness of space.

I鈥檓 as interested as anybody about the awe and wonder of space. But there was nothing there that was awesome or wondrous. It was black, palpable black, and I saw death. The temperature is death, instant death. Death is all around. There are enormous forces at work that will instantly kill you and our little delicate life-forms.

And then, turning back to earth, I saw that we had gone through this . And you realize it鈥檚 a tiny little rock with two miles of air. And that鈥檚 all that鈥檚 keeping us alive amid all those forces. So you see how precarious life really is and how you are clinging to this life raft. When we landed, I was weeping. And I鈥檓 like, What am I weeping about? Do we not realize how we are offending and destroying this life raft? I was in mourning. I was in grief for the earth.

It sounds like it was truly a surprise, really shocking.
Yes. I was shown. It鈥檚 one thing to talk about, yeah, the earth鈥檚 very small, it鈥檚 a pebble. It鈥檚 another to see how small it is.

Do you find awe now? I know you take care of dogs and you take care of horses. You live in a beautiful place.
I鈥檓 filled with awe. I鈥檓 filled with awe at the magic of everything. Everything is magical.

The post How William Shatner Was Transformed by the Immensity of Space appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

is the February pick for the 国产吃瓜黑料 Book Club. You can learn more about the book club here, or to discuss the book.

My biggest problem at the moment was the portable toilet. It was just too heavy. It was weighing down the bow of my canoe, which was already loaded with 80 pounds of water and a double-walled cooler filled with fairly ridiculous items like coconut milk, rib-eye steaks, and cage-free liquid whole eggs. Also, I鈥檇 brought a fetching beach parasol. But why does something you shit in in the desert have to be made of ammunition-grade 20-millimeter steel? It doesn鈥檛! I just needed some sturdy plastic bags. The ill-conceived toilet was one of many small and giant mistakes that had led me to this moment, cursing alone in the wilderness. There were the mistakes in my marriage, the cosmic mistake (to my mind) of the divorce, the wrong men I鈥檇 fallen for in the year since my separation, the friendships I鈥檇 overburdened. All of these were, yes, weighing me down. If I thought about the heavy-shit metaphors too long, my head hurt.

Most recently, there was the poor decision, made because I was possibly having a hot flash, to launch this leg of my journey a day early, at 7 P.M., in fading light, just above a small rapid, in a canoe that felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. Then again, it was August and it was 97 degrees in Green River, Utah. Even a teenage boy would be having a hot flash. Camping at the shadeless town park was an unbearable option. Running a desert river for a month in the height of summer was probably another bad decision. But here I was. An outfitter named Craig had rented me the 15-foot canoe with a broken thwart, splintering gunwales, and the tanker toilet. The boat was the color of lipstick you wear when you鈥檙e trying too hard. It did, however, match the parasol.

鈥淛ust remember,鈥� he鈥檇 said, 鈥渋f you don鈥檛 know knots, make lots!鈥� He laughed, snapped a picture of me surrounded by my gear, and drove off in his air-conditioned pickup.

To be clear, I do know how to tie knots, and I generally know what I鈥檓 doing in the wilderness. But my own canoe lay upside down in Washington, D.C., where it petulantly awaited better days and where, for much of the last year, I also petulantly lay, often right side down, after my husband decided to leave our 25-year marriage because, among other things, he said he needed to go find his soul mate. Still, nothing in my prior canoeing experience had fully prepared me for the reality that I could barely alter the trajectory of this boat once I got it into the river. Only a few small inches of freeboard lay between the water and the top of my gunwales. I stared at the approaching shoals. I glared at the toilet, glinting like a smug brigadier in the twilight.

The river split into two channels. I chose the one on the right, but the current grew fast, shallow, and bumpy. The canoe scraped over some rocks, then some more, and started to list sideways. I pushed my feet back into my river shoes and hopped out into the shin-deep water, figuring I鈥檇 have an easier time keeping the boat upright and off the rocks if I were outside it. My heart was beating fast, and I chastised myself for not tying down my gear better. The boat bumped along, upright, and I jumped back in. I knew I needed to pull over and camp, soon, before it got any darker. I grounded the boat onto the first available scruffy gravel bar. For my first night ever spent alone in the wilderness, I鈥檇 be camping within sight and earshot of the interstate.

I spent the night awake, berating myself for existing in the first place, then berating my ex, and then scheming about how to jettison the toilet, because there was no way I was hauling that thing for the next two weeks.

The post He Divorced Me on Land鈥攂ut I Left My Marriage on the River appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

It was getting dark when I hit the first riffle of my trip down Utah鈥檚 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鈥檇 been in a rush to launch, my gear wasn鈥檛 tied down very well. I had trouble reading the water in the fading light, hit some shoals, and barely came out upright. Shaking, I pulled over to camp on a scruffy pile of gravel near the highway for a night of bad sleep and excoriating self-recrimination.

It all seemed a fitting metaphor for the way I鈥檇 been hurtling through life. In the previous two years, I鈥檇 , recorded a dozen podcast episodes, zombie-marched through a 14-city book tour, gotten sick a few times, and missed more of my kids鈥� dance recitals and cross-country meets than I care to remember. Hoping for recovery and insight, I鈥檇 embarked on an ambitious vacation: a 120-mile solo paddle with a tight deadline for a resupply and another tight deadline for a water taxi to pick me up at the end. A vacation with deadlines! The insight, at least, was becoming obvious: what I really needed was to slow down.

I鈥檓 not alone in my overreach. Most of us have a hard time refusing to set goals. In this age of 5G hyperconnectivity, performative workaholism, personalized coaching, biohacking, Strava posturing, and supplement swilling, we鈥檝e internalized the imperative to optimize every aspect of our lives. We feel lost without a plan, guilty for slouching, regretful of every injury, scuttled workout, and to-do item left unticked. Even our so-called leisure activities require frantic preparations and logistical ops reminiscent of Caesar鈥檚 army.

We don鈥檛 just have fear of missing out, we have dread of slacking off. It鈥檚 telling that so many of us push to the edge of our endurance in order to feel good about ourselves. We鈥檝e equated recreational difficulty and social-media posts of summits with self-worth, and that鈥檚 a precarious and unsustainable place to be.

So how is putting our heads down and suffering in the name of glory working out for us? Not so great. Americans are, by and large, fried. Depression听and 听听are , we鈥檙e experiencing high , and we鈥檙e not engaged in as many 听as we used to be.

Anne Helen Petersen, a 38-year-old 听and long-distance runner in Missoula, Montana, remembers the days when her college pals graduated and became ski bums for a while or worked odd jobs in national parks. Now, she says, that鈥檚 rare. Younger millennials and Gen Zers, anxious over the gig economy and helicoptered by their parents, fear veering too far off script into experiences that offer unquantifiable personal gains. The result? Malaise, disaffection, disconnection.

Last year the World Health Organization 听its entry on burnout in the International Classification of Diseases, defining it as a syndrome resulting from 鈥渃hronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.鈥� It is characterized by feeling depleted, cynical, and unmotivated. Many experts also understand it as a concept of charging too hard without adequate recovery in other spheres of life, including parenting, exercise, and passion-based volunteering.

Leisure pursuits used to be about, well, leisure. Running, for example, emerged as a recreational pastime in the sixties and seventies largely as a way to bliss out, according to Princeton historian Dylan Gottlieb. By the early eighties, though, 鈥渞unning, and marathon training in particular, dovetailed with the same habits that yuppies honed in their white-collar jobs. Personal discipline, delayed gratification, obsessive time management, constant self-analysis, long-range planning: they were just as vital to race training as they were to arbitrage or corporate litigation,鈥� Gottlieb writes in .

The alpha-dog self-optimization trend has now permeated youth sports, too. Some coaches admit that they鈥檙e complicit in creating burnout. 鈥淔or many sports, there is no longer an off-season, no time off, competitions all year long, nonstop, and that鈥檚 trickled down to kids,鈥� says Ken Vick, the CEO of Velocity Sports Performance. 鈥淭he demands are ridiculous.鈥�

Millennials are helping us understand burnout in a new way, because they鈥檙e insisting鈥攊n their insistently millennial fashion鈥攖hat we recognize its impact and the urgency of learning how to back off, both in the workplace and in the rest of our lives. For many of them, years of working hard has failed to deliver听measurable gains in wages, affordable real estate, or even job security. And they are not happy about that. In 听that went viral last year on Buzzfeed News, Petersen wrote, 鈥淏urn颅out and the behaviors and weight that accompany it aren鈥檛, in fact, something we can cure by going on vacation. It鈥檚 not limited to workers in acutely high-stress environments. And it鈥檚 not a temporary affliction: It鈥檚 the millennial condition. It鈥檚 our base temperature. It鈥檚 our background music. It鈥檚 the way things are.鈥�

Of course, every recent generation is at least passingly familiar with burnout. The sometimes inspiring, sometimes soul-sucking rally toward achievement, self-颅reliance, and optimal efficiency has been dogging us since the dawn of industrialization. As early as 1807, Words颅worth , 鈥淭he world is too much with us.鈥� He preferred to leave it behind, walking some 180,000 miles in his lifetime across alp, glade, field, and fen.

The overburdening of the individual can exact a real cost on both physical and emotional health. As sports psychologist Michael Gervais bluntly puts it: 鈥淭he way the human organism responds to chronic stress is fatigue, staleness, and even death.鈥� He points to the effects of the stress hormone cortisol, a get-up-and-go neuropeptide that is adaptive in spurts but should not remain elevated all day.

When we鈥檙e pushing hard for an extended period of time, we do indeed get stuff done. We pass the test, win the race, meet our deadlines, make money for shareholders. But as scientists are now , those who are exposed to prolonged stress are more likely to develop dense arteries, cellular inflam颅mation, and 听of the telomeres, those protective casings at the end of a cell鈥檚 chromosomes.

Even if we鈥檙e incredibly fit, we can inflict collateral damage on two of our most health-promoting systems, sleep and relationships, warns Rob Kent de Grey, a social neuro颅scientist at the University of Utah. 鈥淥ne way or another, there鈥檚 a cost to overdoing it,鈥� he says. 鈥淵ou鈥檒l eventually suffer performance decrements, and you don鈥檛 always get to choose where the decrements are.鈥�

The relentless pursuit of achievement is also counterproductive to many of our values, says Christie Aschwanden, a former nordic ski racer and the author of . 鈥淗igh-achieving people almost uniformly don鈥檛 prioritize sleep,鈥� she says, 鈥渁nd they are kidding themselves, because that鈥檚 the single most important thing you need to be good at anything.鈥� Researchers at Harvard 听that adequate nighttime sleep significantly improves motor-skills learning and memory consolidation. And a 2014 review of 113 studies found that sleep deprivation likely reduces motivation and endurance, while a 听from Australia found that a lack of shut-eye increases tension and worsens mood before competition.

A 2014 report from researchers in Sweden 听that people experiencing symptoms of burnout had poorer neural connections between their brain鈥檚 amygdala鈥攐r threat center鈥攁nd the anterior cingulate cortex, which helps regulate emotions. Translation: they let stressful events get the best of them. Another 听from Sweden, published in 2015, found that chronic occupational stress accelerated aging in the medial prefrontal cortex, whose function is critical for decision-making, judgment, and self-concept.

To put it simply, we鈥檙e becoming jerks and prematurely aging ourselves. Burnout and exhaustion, Aschwanden says, prevent us from being present, tuning into the needs of our own bodies, and enjoying the people around us. Relying on technology like sleep-tracking apps may only stress us out more. 鈥淵ou鈥檒l become one of those people road-raging on the way to yoga class,鈥� she says.

The good news is that while elite coaching may have contributed to the burnout epidemic, it also points to a solution. 鈥淲e spend more time now talking about recovery,鈥� says Gervais, who has coached amateurs, Olympians, and, increasingly, burned-out executives. 鈥淭o go the distance, to do extraordinary things, nobody does it alone, and nobody does it when deeply fatigued.鈥� It鈥檚 easier to prevent burnout than to treat it, he says. But we shouldn鈥檛 be stress avoidant, because it鈥檚 stress that drives us to perform and to excel. The trick is to toggle between what Gervais calls 鈥渞unning to the edge of our capacity鈥� and recovering on a daily basis, with emphasis on the daily.

Two-time Olympic volleyball silver medalist Nicole Davis learned this the hard way. After the London Olympics, as she was training for the 2013 professional season, she says, 鈥淚 would take stress home with me and bring it to others.鈥� After a poor practice session, she was more impatient, grumpier, and quicker to anger. Ultimately, she had to acknowledge that her emotional state affected her performance back on the court.

鈥淔ear and anxiety are a wet blanket for passion,鈥� she says. So she worked with Gervais to 鈥渄ecouple my identity from just being an athlete鈥� and to reexamine her core values, including her relationship with the sport. It made her realize that attitude is a big component of stress. 鈥淲e are firing on a lot of cylinders all the time,鈥� she says. 鈥淔atigue is inevitable. Burnout is not.鈥�

Both Gervais and Davis, who now coach together, believe that mindfulness meditation can play a major role in daily recuperation, along with sleep, nutrition, and hydration. A combination of these basics, they say, can apply to anyone at risk for depletion in work or sport. 鈥淢editation,鈥� Davis says, 鈥渃reates more presence and a lengthened perception of time.鈥�

Who doesn鈥檛 want a more expanded sense of time? In fact, it appears that for many of us there鈥檚 an inverse relationship between scheduled productivity and bliss. Not that we can鈥檛 be in a flow state at work or while exercising, but it happens despite the striving, not because of it. Bliss occurs when we are emotionally at ease, in the moment, and well rested.

But it wasn鈥檛 until I read , by another disaffected millennial, Jenny Odell, that I realized that perhaps the recovery experts are asking only part of the question. Rather than attending to our own optimization, what would happen if we attended to something else altogether鈥攕ay, each other? Or the natural world? Thoreau suggested as much in his 听鈥淲alking鈥�: 鈥淏ut the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise 鈥� as the Swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.鈥�

Reorienting in a meaningful way requires a fairly radical upending of capitalist norms, not to mention our relationship with social media and information itself, but Odell, a Bay Area artist and an art and art-history lecturer at Stanford University, says it鈥檚 worth it. Even simply loafing about outdoors, with no goals in mind, is 鈥渁n act of political resistance,鈥� she writes. 鈥淚鈥檓 suggesting that we fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore and disdain the body, the bodies of other beings, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit.鈥�

Odell says she does this by wandering around and looking, slowly, at birds and plants she鈥檚 learning to identify. It鈥檚 not that she isn鈥檛 busy, and she hasn鈥檛 sworn off Twitter, but she also takes three-day retreats several times a year鈥攂y herself and unplugged鈥攖o minimalist rental cabins in the mountains. 鈥淚 call them hermit trips,鈥� she says. 鈥淭he whole point is that they help me maintain a sense of interiority.鈥� The deep thinking that follows can help drive her creativity. She finds it funny that apps like AllTrails rate spots by scenery over natural history, biodiversity, and general loafability. 鈥淚 like to look for metaphors in nature, and those are not in an AllTrails review,鈥� she says. (For more on how Odell does nothing, see this story.)

After sustaining a couple of injuries from overtraining, runner Anne Helen Petersen no longer clocks her workouts or races, although she still enjoys participating in organized events. 鈥淚鈥檒l track distance, but not while I鈥檓 running,鈥� she says. Without her Garmin, she says, she鈥檚 gotten better at sensing how her body feels, and she鈥檚 stronger because of it. She takes her earbuds out and listens to the sounds of the mountains instead.

There are lessons that don鈥檛 come easily for many of us raised in late-stage industrialism. One day last spring at an artist retreat, my neighbor, Robbie Q. Telfer, asked me if I wanted to join him for a short hike near Georgia鈥檚 Chattahoochee Hills. I glanced from my computer screen to the pulsing burst of springtime outside. I considered the number of pages I had left to write and the number of days I had left to write them. I sighed and turned him down.

Telfer, whose performance poetry often centers on the natural world, came back many hours later looking very pleased with himself. On the trail, he鈥檇 stopped to study a map when a retired schoolteacher sidled up to him and asked, 鈥淲ould you like to see a pond full of baby salamanders?鈥� Uhhh, OK? The pond turned out to be full of amphibians of all kinds, and there were sci-fi carnivorous plants and two killdeer having sex. He was giddy recounting all this to me. When I asked how far he walked, Telfer looked wounded: 鈥淚 don鈥檛 consciously record my mileage. My main rules are to let the experience unfold and don鈥檛 get lost.鈥� He and the teacher have since become pen pals.

Science tells us that harnessing a spirit of play helps us bounce back from life鈥檚 stressors and put disappointments into manageable perspective.

鈥淲e take ourselves so seri颅ously,鈥� says Lynn Barnett-颅Morris, associate professor in the department of recreation, sports, and tourism at the University of Illinois. 鈥淧layful people have more resilience鈥濃�攂ecause they know how to find amusement, defuse stressors, and solve problems creatively. 鈥淲e think playfulness can be an antidote to burnout,鈥� she says. 鈥淭hings roll off you.鈥�

As Telfer, a fan of nonlinear creativity, explained it to me, 鈥淚f I see a path going off, I鈥檒l take it.鈥�

I decided I needed to go look for some nonlinearity. So a few weeks after my trip on the Green River, I asked social neuroscientist Rob Kent de Grey to join me for a relaxed hike in Utah鈥檚 Wasatch foothills. The 34-year-old postdoc knows a thing or two about the trade-offs we make, sometimes subconsciously, in the push to achieve. He spent his graduate-school years in thrall to a looming corkboard in his office, on which he tabulated the 30 research projects he was working on in various stages of completion. While collecting data, publishing, and studying for his exams, his immune system fizzed out, his relationships faltered, and the only time he could find for pleasure reading was while brushing his teeth.

For a full sensory wake-up, we decided to start our hike in Red Butte Garden and gradually make our way toward the Bonnev颅ille Shoreline Trail. A sign on the arboretum鈥檚 Floral Walk reminded us to notice microclimates by paying attention to how the trail鈥檚 sunny spots felt on our skin. In the cool fall morning, they felt great. That made me breathe more deeply. The toads and birds were riotous, including a hummingbird that darted around a red yucca. We leaned over to inhale a silver sands lavender shrub and admire blue globe thistles as tall as our armpits.

But as two people often do when they鈥檙e out for a hike, we soon forgot to smell things and landed deep in conversation. And that鈥檚 OK, Kent de Grey assured me. Social connection is perhaps the most important factor for happiness. He was geeking out explaining what he鈥檚 learned about how psychosocial factors influence health and disease. The upshot is that when we allow ourselves to wander a bit, we become better at aligning our everyday actions with who we are and who we want to be, and we boost our cellular health at the same time.

鈥淪hall we sit for a bit?鈥� I asked, feeling a desire to shore up my telomeres.

鈥淵es!鈥� he said. The bench was high off the ground, and we swung our legs like little kids. A hawk circled overhead. The scent of sage wafted from the hot slopes. I felt like I was sitting in the sweet spot of stimulation, not too much and not too little.

Kent de Grey passed me a water bottle and adjusted his Ute Proud cap.

鈥淲e鈥檙e not built for unrelenting stressors,鈥� he said. 鈥淲hat the science points to is this: the very act of doing nothing is important.鈥�

We stood up, stretched, and started out again, in a random direction. I was liking it. I could see what Wordsworth and Thoreau knew, and what millennials like Odell are rediscovering鈥攖hat cruising around at the pace of human locomotion may be the perfect riposte to modern life.

When we want to feel powerful, it鈥檚 good to remember that humans are the only striding bipedal mammals in the world.

This, right here, is our superpower.

Contributing editor Florence Williams is the author of听The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative.

The post Your 2020 Burnout Recovery Plan appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Caden Fuchs can鈥檛 tell me what he did in the sweat lodge. 鈥淚t鈥檚 secret,鈥� says the 14-year-old. 鈥淏ut,鈥� he offers, 鈥渋t鈥檚 a little bit like I went in a boy and came out a man.鈥�

A statement like that might freak some parents out, but Caden鈥檚 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 . The mysterious sweat lodge was part of a yearlong coming-of-age curriculum that also included backpacking, leadership skills, a 24-hour solo fast, and an emotional ceremony with all the parents.

Caden鈥檚 belief that something profound about him had changed was very much on target. In many ways, he was intentionally and thoughtfully leaving behind parts of his childhood. He still loves pizza and T-shirts emblazoned with skateboard logos. He has longish dark blond hair that he expertly maneuvers with a quick head flip. And yet, after the Vilda program, the eighth-grader now helps out more at home without being asked. He has taken on strenuous chores, is kinder to his younger siblings, and is more expressive about how grateful he is to his parents.

By guiding middle schoolers through coming-of-age rituals in nature, programs like Vilda are filling a critical gap. offers 鈥渟olos鈥� of up to several nights alone as part of the curriculum, and smaller outfits like the , in California, and Washington鈥檚 focus on rites of passage. , a private school in San Rafael, California, offers a Wilderness Quest program to high school juniors and seniors.

Not so long ago, American kids took a pathway to becoming grown-ups that included a series of rigorous and rewarding steps: increasingly challenging labor on farms or at home, their first fish and first hunt, permission to roam over a zone wider than the driveway. While ceremonies like bar mitzvahs and quincea帽eras鈥攁nd, to some extent, qualifying for a driver鈥檚 license鈥攕till serve to initiate children into adulthood, we鈥檝e replaced numerous other rites of passage with just one: a kid鈥檚 first smartphone.

In his 2009 book , Michael Chabon wrote,鈥淐hildhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity.鈥� But instead of having their own outdoor exploits and learning to sort out their own problems, modern kids, we all realize, are increasingly domesticated.

Adolescence has become almost pathologized. Teens are basically self-destructive half-wits, the current wisdom tells us; without a fully formed prefrontal cortex, they lack judgment and take stupid risks. Many do, of course, but a far bigger problem today is that teens are taking too few worthwhile risks and assuming too little responsibility. And because they鈥檙e not learning through exploration鈥攖he way teen brains were designed to learn鈥攖hey鈥檙e not developing the emotional skills they desperately need. Our changing culture has knocked away the scaffolding that used to provide formative and enriching adventures. So what do we do now?

, a professor of education at Antioch University, is a proponent of resurrecting meaningful nature-based rituals. Without them, he says, teens are in danger of 鈥渙verinfantilization, extended childhood, or excessive nonmodulated risk-taking.鈥�

For centuries, traditional rites of passage encompassed everything from slaying beasts to offering up one鈥檚 own flesh for mutilation. Across cultures, certain elements remained remarkably stable: a phase of separation and isolation, a period of transformation through trial and reflection, and a celebratory reintegration into the community. 鈥淭he point is to endure some hardship,鈥� says Sobel, 鈥渁nd that prepares you for adult responsibility, because being an adult is hard. It tests your mettle, it tests your capacity to persist in the face of difficulty. Young people have lost that.鈥�

To help kids regain it, some parents are creating rituals of their own. Allen Jones, a dad in western Washington, is the author of . When both his sons were in middle school, he recruited men from the community to write them letters about their values; formal discussions ensued around sex, work, and spirituality. Over the course of a year, father and son would go on outdoor excursions, culminating in a tough final climb up 12,300-foot Mount Adams. 鈥淚 grew up without much direction from my father,鈥� says Jones, who began experimenting with drugs and alcohol when he was 13. 鈥淢y goal was for my boys to not be like me.鈥�

The Lawlor family of Helena, Montana, initiated all three daughters into big-game hunting. Starting when they were five or six, they鈥檇 accompany their father, uncle, and grandfather on multi-day elk and deer hunts. Once they were old enough to get hunting licenses, at ten or twelve, the girls would hike miles with the Winchester rifles given to them at birth, lying in the snow waiting for their quarry. They鈥檇 help quarter and pack out the animal, learning to practice respect by using every edible part. Tess Lawlor, now 13, hung her first buck skull in her room amid her stuffed animals and floral quilt. The hardest part, says the soccer midfielder and diehard fan of British cooking shows, is pulling the trigger. But, she adds, 鈥淚t makes me feel more grown-up, and I feel proud about providing meat for my friends and family.鈥�

Parents need to think about how to put wildness back into childhood. One first step is to introduce periodic technology fasts (if not caloric ones). With less to keep them indoors, kids naturally look outside, where nature can become a comfortable, adventurous, and wisdom-yielding space during times of transition and growth.

Another is to bake in some significant milestones. To commemorate their son Johnny鈥檚 13th birthday last year, the Frieder-Stanzione family of Boulder, Colorado, arranged for him to climb a six-pitch route in the local Flatirons with a guide. A few months later, he competed a mountain-bike race, 24 Hours in the Enchanted Forest, finding his way alone, at night, through 13 miles of New Mexico鈥檚 Zuni Mountains. 鈥淲e鈥檙e so protective as parents,鈥� says his mom, Julie Frieder. 鈥淗ere he could be in a risky situation, and the risk is so fundamental to his maturing. This was raw risk and shivery fear. I wanted him to be in that situation.鈥�

Johnny repeated the ride this year, bringing along his favorite stuffed animal, a move that illustrates the transition he鈥檚 still in. Next year, he and three friends plan to hike California鈥檚 220-mile John Muir Trail for two weeks by themselves.

Frieder describes these rituals as a kind of inoculation. 鈥淟ife dishes out scary things,鈥� she says, 鈥渢hings you can鈥檛 plan for. If you get crushed, how are you going to experience the world, and get stronger and open yourself to possibility? I want him to know some fear and loneliness and happiness and elation.鈥�

Contributing editor 颅Florence Williams () is the 颅author of .

The post The Importance of Teaching Children Hard Lessons appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Asta spent her first night in Colorado sleeping in an outfitter鈥檚 warehouse, replaying in her head the bear growls she鈥檇 learned online. She wanted to be ready. Although she鈥檇 slept outside plenty of times, usually under a bridge, she鈥檇 never camped in the mountains, and she was, to say the least, apprehensive.

鈥淚鈥檓 a little nervous, OK?鈥� she says the next morning, practicing how to stuff her winter sleeping bag into the bottom of her loaner pack. She鈥檚 wearing leggings and a loose sweatshirt; her long hair hangs straight. 鈥淚 was homeless for four years in Atlanta, so this is a new adventure,鈥� she says. 鈥淚 was afraid of the streets and the men, but this is different. It鈥檚 the mountains I鈥檓 intimidated by. Bears, lions, mountain goats, cheetahs鈥擨 don鈥檛 know, bugs, snakes.鈥�

鈥淎re you really more afraid of bears than men?鈥� I ask.

鈥淚 know how to survive back there. This is unknown territory.鈥�

Asta鈥檚 southern accent is strong. Her body, she says, not so much. In addition to her fears about wildlife, the 34-year-old is worried about being out of shape, about not being able to carry a 40-pound pack, about holding up the group. And, oh yeah, about the cold October blast that鈥檚 expected to move in from the north, dropping nighttime temperatures into the low twenties.

For Asta and five other women who鈥檝e traveled here from Atlanta, this four-day backpacking trip in the Colorado wilderness is part reward and part recovery. (The participants鈥� names have been changed to protect their privacy.) They are nearing the end of various yearlong residential treatment programs for women who have lived in the grip of substance abuse and sex trafficking.

Today the group woke up in the Denver warehouse of , a company commissioned by the one-year-old Atlanta-based nonprofit , which connects women from various recovery centers with outfitters that can take them into nature. The women on this trip range in age from 20 to 38. They are not the image many of us have when we think of victims of sex trafficking. They are all U.S. citizens, for one thing. Four are white; two are African American. Most were born and raised in Georgia; a couple were brought there by their pimps.

To listen to the women鈥檚 tales, which they shared last night over plain burgers and plastic cups of water, is to hear a litany of broken promises and broken hearts鈥攑imps who refused to bail them out of jail, husbands or boyfriends killed or imprisoned. They have all been neglected or abused by their parents, and in some cases watched as their own children were taken away by the state.

Between the forecast and the predators, this expedition is looking like yet another ordeal. Today the group will try rock climbing for the first time. Then we鈥檒l hike into the , which borders the southern end of , to spend three nights in the backcountry. The women will be tested by the fickle weather of the Rockies in autumn鈥攁nd so will the philosophy of wilderness therapy itself. How much can you recover from psychological scars if you鈥檙e still profoundly traumatized? What if you鈥檙e way more easily freaked out than most people who shoulder a pack? And what if you don鈥檛 want to triumph over nature and the elements so much as get a decent night鈥檚 sleep, experience some calm, and maybe learn to love yourself again?

Fears can be outsize when you鈥檝e spent much of your life afraid.

From the beginning, Asta鈥檚 life wasn鈥檛 so auspicious. Her mother was mentally ill, she says, and her father was a sexual predator. She was adopted by her grandparents as a young girl. The rest of her childhood was pretty typical: suburbs, school, church. She had a daughter when she was 20 and a son five years later, but his father ended up getting deported to Mexico. She became addicted to crack and alcohol, and, she says, 鈥済ot the wrong attention from a man.鈥� He pimped her out through online classified ads for dating and escort services.

Atlanta is an epicenter for sex trafficking, generally defined as a transaction that involves force, fraud, or coercion. According to an report, the city鈥檚 underground sex economy totaled $290 million in 2007, the most recent year for which figures are available. Many of those offered up on escort sites are minors. Local advocate Mary Frances Bowley, founder of the residential program Wellspring Living, calculated in 2007 that the city鈥檚 monthly population of underage trafficked girls hovered around 395. Many, she said, were expected to see eight to ten clients per night.

鈥淵our ad is put up,鈥� Asta explains. 鈥淎nd men can call and request you, and then they come to your hotel room and you have in-calls and out-calls.鈥� For her, she says, using drugs meant that decision-making wasn鈥檛 really an option. 鈥淢y choices were made for me, but I allowed that door to open and then I couldn鈥檛 close it.鈥� She lost custody of her two children鈥攈er daughter to live with the girl鈥檚 father and her son to adoption. After four years, she fled to a different set of pimps and became a street prostitute.

Eventually, Asta was rescued by a worker from a Christian ministry, who scooped her into an outreach van from under a bridge. She endured two weeks of near coma-颅inducing detox before entering a residential addiction program. Three other women on this trip are from the same center, and two are from another Atlanta facility. Both places are affiliated with Christian evangelical groups.

This lends the trip a prayerful tone. Last night, Tamara, 31, talked about losing custody of her six-year-old son, who now lives with her grandparents. She started crying quietly.

鈥淐an I pray for you?鈥� asked a woman named Kris. Tamara nodded. Kris offered her hand.

鈥淟ord, please help heal every crevice of her broken heart. Help renew her mind during her absence from her son. Meet her where she is at, whether it鈥檚 in a warehouse or on a mountaintop. I know, God, you have a purpose for her life.鈥� Tamara sobbed harder, then Kris started to cry, and pretty soon the whole group, including the guides, were sniffling amid piles of sleeping bags and Nature Valley granola bars.

Asta climbing into that rescue van, Kris riding out withdrawal: that was bravery. These women don鈥檛 need to scale a mountain in a blizzard to gain a sense of achievement. But coming to Colorado required an unusual leap of faith.

鈥淚 don鈥檛 welcome or receive. I push away,鈥� said Asta. 鈥淚鈥檓 a runner.鈥� She didn鈥檛 mean the sport.

As we听pack up for the trip, game faces are back in place. The women pull on hiking boots, colorful knit hats, and fleece jackets, all of it donated, over their street clothes. 鈥淕irl, you look good in yellow,鈥� says one.

Next come the backpacks, hoisted into place amid much groaning. We pile ourselves and our packs into a roomy white van parked out back. 鈥淭he van is new and needs a name!鈥� says our guide, Chelsea Van Essen. 鈥淲hat shall we call it?鈥�

鈥淏etty White!鈥� yells Tamara.

鈥淵es!鈥� replies Chelsea.

Although Chelsea, a chipper, curly-haired 26-year-old, has worked with sexually abused women before, this is only her second trip as a leader for Expedition Backcountry 国产吃瓜黑料s, and it鈥檚 the first time the outfitter has worked with trafficked women.

Before loading up the van, Chelsea and fellow guide Hope Swearingen, a 23-year-old part-time mental-health coach, sit the ladies down in a circle for a briefing.

鈥淥ne thing we want to focus on as a theme of the trip is safety. Every day we will let you know what鈥檚 coming,鈥� says Chelsea, who has a social-work graduate degree focused on trauma from the University of Denver. 鈥淚f I feel like I don鈥檛 know what鈥檚 going on, I don鈥檛 feel safe, right? I am going to ask you before I put my hand on your shoulder, and if you say no, that鈥檚 awesome! We鈥檙e going to respect that. We recognize that if you don鈥檛 feel safe, then nothing else is going to happen, this power of healing in nature. None of that can happen if our brains are not fully safe.鈥�

This fierce defense of emotional safety may seem completely sensible, but it鈥檚 a radical departure from the way many adventure programs are run. Chelsea, along with other, primarily female outdoor educators, are drawing from a small but deep vein in feminist social science suggesting that the standard story line of 鈥済row through toughness, conquer the peaks and find yourself鈥� just doesn鈥檛 work for populations who have suffered long-term psychological trauma.

鈥淚t has to be understood from the get-go that this is not going to look like a quote-unquote normal trip,鈥� Chelsea tells me. In some ways, it is less than normal: fewer miles, fewer vertical feet, fewer vistas. But before long, it will turn into more of a field test than anyone expected.

One thing the women are quite used to is group therapy. After months in rehab, they are so good at it that the trip leaders don鈥檛 颅always feel the need to step in. 鈥淚鈥檝e learned to let the women do most of the talking,鈥� says She Is Able founder Elise Knicely.

In one year of operation, Elise鈥攍argely on her own鈥攈as commissioned 14 excursions in several states, taking some 100 women on day trips and overnights. Last year, with a budget of just $80,000, she drew heavily on volunteers and partnerships with safe houses. At 27, she has proved successful raising funds, bringing in sponsors, and recruiting a well-connected board. As someone with no training in trauma care, though, Elise says it鈥檚 easy for her to become invested鈥攑erhaps excessively so鈥攊n the women鈥檚 lives. 鈥淚鈥檓 a very empathetic person,鈥� she says. 鈥淪ometimes I return from these trips emotionally hungover, truly, for weeks.鈥�

At first glance, Elise seems the polar opposite of her charges: tall and wispy, regally poised, an Alpha Chi Omega with crisp outdoor gear and a confident stride.

鈥淚 like your cap,鈥� Kris says to her later. 鈥淲hat does that mean, Patagonia?鈥�

鈥淥h,鈥� says Elise, smiling. 鈥淚t鈥檚 an outdoor brand. I used to work in one of their stores.鈥� She played a lot of sports growing up outside Atlanta and worked as a camp counselor during college at the University of Georgia. At 23, during a solo trip around the world, she landed in India, where she shadowed an organization fighting sex slavery in the slums of Mumbai. There she met young women forced to live in caged rooms. 鈥淭hose encounters changed my life,鈥� Elise told me.

She went back to Atlanta and accepted a job doing corporate consulting. On weekends she took women from a sex-trafficking safe house hiking, then canoeing. The response was overwhelming.

鈥淥h crap, that got real fast,鈥� she recalls of the decision to quit her corporate job. 鈥淏ut how the heck do I begin to turn this into something bigger and more constructive?鈥�

Why did Elise think that a few hours or days in the woods could help course-correct a near lifetime of abuse, addiction, poverty, and exploitation? At first it was just intuition layered with sorority-girl optimism. She鈥檚 like Legally Blonde鈥�s Elle Woods combined with 奥颈濒诲鈥�s Cheryl Strayed. Then she started reading research showing that time in nature can help such women develop the tool kit they need to heal: self-regard, peace from the hypervigilance associated with trauma, and better, more connected relationships with friends and family.

Her doubts receded. She decided to found She Is Able in January 2017, offering three levels of outdoor adventure鈥攆rom half-day trips to multi-day overnights, depending on how long the women had been in recovery.

鈥淎 voice inside said, 鈥楨, this is what you鈥檙e made to do.鈥欌�夆��

Betty White's first stop on our way to the trailhead is Clear Creek Canyon, which saws up into the Front Range from Golden. The morning is cold, and when we arrive the women huddle behind the van to pull on more layers and lace up their climbing shoes. At a crag called East Colfax, named after a boulevard in Denver that passes through an area known for street drugs and prostitution, we meet up with our climbing guide, Aleya Littleton. Diminutive, energetic, and infinitely patient, 32-year-old Aleya is an adventure therapist who specializes in sexual trauma. She has already fixed ropes on three short routes, and she helps the women into their harnesses.

鈥淚鈥檓 just going to watch,鈥� says Kris, gazing up at the rock.

鈥淢e too,鈥� says Asta.

鈥淚t鈥檚 your choice,鈥� says Aleya. But she has soon made participating irresistible. 鈥淟isten to your body,鈥� she says. 鈥淵ou鈥檙e going from a horizontal world to a vertical one, so use your muscles in a way you don鈥檛 usually use them. Settle down into your legs, shift your weight. If I breathe and find my center, I can zoom out, open my focus. If I鈥檓 anxious, that focus closes down.鈥�

With Littleton belaying her, Tamara practically jumps onto the wall, giddy with the task, a natural.

鈥淵ou are crazy!鈥� calls out Rochelle, 32. But then she too starts to climb on the next route, slowly but steadily.

A third woman, Kim, the youngest of the group at 20 and a recovering alcoholic, grins and starts up the last route. After a bit she looks down and calls out, 鈥淚鈥檓 rock climbing, y鈥檃ll!鈥� She looks out over the rocky canyon, where the nearby creek rushes past ruddy willows and yellow aspens.

An hour later everyone has climbed, some twice, to much hugging and high-fiving.

The guide gathers the women into a semicircle. The sun has entered the canyon, and a breeze blows upstream. The women are blinking happily in the light, like they can鈥檛 quite believe they鈥檙e here.

鈥淲hat was that like for you?鈥� asks Aleya.

Rochelle speaks first. 鈥淚 noticed that once I started trusting, it got a lot better,鈥� she says. 鈥淲hat are the odds I鈥檓 going to fall down the side of a mountain? Pretty low. When you said, 鈥楾ake little steps,鈥� that really ministered to me. Baby steps. That is a truth bomb. Baby steps.鈥�

Asta is nodding. 鈥淚鈥檓 the only one who tells me that I can鈥檛 do something. I tell myself that too much.鈥�

鈥淵eah,鈥� says Kim. 鈥淚 can help other people, but I鈥檓 so bad at helping myself.鈥�

鈥淚 was reminded that I鈥檓 going to be OK,鈥� says Kris. Then she starts to cry.

Climbing as metaphor may seem obvious. You have to trust the person holding your rope. You have to find your breath. You move one step at a time while also looking ahead. You pull yourself up and cheer each other on. But the banalities of these points don鈥檛 make them less profound, and the benefits鈥攆rom both the mental and physical effort鈥攔each unexpected places.

As Aleya explains it, healing trauma is complicated. That鈥檚 because the brain wants to hold on to memories of danger. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e separate from linear, logical thought processes,鈥� she says, 鈥渟o your nervous system acts like it鈥檚 happening now or is about to.鈥� Simply talking about traumatic memories doesn鈥檛 fully work, because it engages only those neural pathways associated with logic and speech. Healing involves both separating fearful emotions from bad memories and bringing the nervous system back to the safer, quieter present. 鈥淭rauma healing happens not only through talking, but also through integrative nonverbal therapies,鈥� Aleya says, referring to both movement and mindful颅-ness. These happen easily in adventure sports, as long as they feel relatively safe.

Still in their harnesses, the women have taken more risks than they expected. But trust is an unfamiliar feeling. They don鈥檛 trust others, and they don鈥檛 trust themselves. Before she enrolled in her current program, Asta had already experienced relapse once, returning to the streets and the bottle after a few weeks in a safe house. 鈥淚t鈥檚 always a step away,鈥� she says.

Kris has never gone this long鈥攁 year鈥攚ithout a drink or methamphetamine since her life started unraveling 12 years ago. She turned to meth as a way to keep her weight down after her third son was born, and she got sucked into prostitution to pay for the drugs. Sexually abused from the age of 11, she never felt that her body was worth protecting. 颅Ultimately, she started dealing. She went to prison twice. The last time, her mom agreed to bail her out if she entered long-term rehab. That was just over a year ago.

At one point, Kris asks the guides, 鈥淲hy are you doing this to help people like us?鈥�

鈥淲e鈥檝e screwed every person over, burned every bridge,鈥� adds a woman named Joy.

Hope, passing out the last of the granola bars, responds, 鈥淚 know the power the wilderness has. I can鈥檛 keep this to myself.鈥�

It's afternoon听by the time we arrive at the Monarch Lake trailhead鈥攐ur gateway to Indian Peaks鈥攁nd it鈥檚 clear that these will be low-mileage days. The first challenge is obvious: the sky is dumping graupel. This, Chelsea explains to the wide-eyed Georgians, is a combination of snow and sleet.

鈥淲ell, this is not what I was expecting,鈥� says Kris. 鈥淚t鈥檚 90 degrees in Atlanta.鈥�

We munch some apples, layer on raingear, and drape our packs with Smurf-blue covers that look like giant shower caps. The trail is narrow and smooth, a yellow brick road of fallen aspen leaves. Over the next few hours, we walk and stop and walk again. There are clothing adjustments, snacks, blister repairs. Asta and Rochelle need to rest at the top of gentle rises. We are near 8,500 feet. 鈥淥h Lord, this pack is heavy!鈥� groans Rochelle.

The fact that she is even feeling her body is progress, according to researchers like Julie Anne Laser-Maira, a trafficking expert and associate professor at the University of Denver. 鈥淭hey鈥檝e been through so much brutality,鈥� she says. To survive those experiences, women often dissociate from their bodies.

Rochelle knows this well. 鈥淚 came to a place where I had to be OK with being raped,鈥� she tells me. 鈥淚 had to be OK with it because it happened every single day for a really, really long time.鈥� Rochelle says she was basically held captive as a sex slave for a year in Boston, then became a street prostitute and meth addict. She tells me this with bright eyes that, she says, were vacant not long ago.

Today she is scanning a marshy area off the trail that looks a little moosey to me. A few minutes later, sure enough, we see a mother and an adolescent moose about 100 feet away. The women fall into a huddle of exclamations and whispers.

鈥淭his is my first time ever seeing a moose in person!鈥� says Tamara.

鈥淪ame!鈥� says Kim.

No one pulls out a cell phone, because they are not allowed to have them in rehab鈥攐ne of many restrictions they agree to as part of their treatment. Life back there reverberates into the mountain in other ways. That first night, Kris wouldn鈥檛 zip up her sleeping bag because she didn鈥檛 want to feel trapped by it. The women go off to pee or collect water or firewood only in pairs, partly because they don鈥檛 like being alone out here and partly because it isn鈥檛 permitted in their treatment centers.

It takes us over two hours to hike the three miles to camp, following Buchanan Creek and crossing into the Indian Peaks Wilderness. White patches of snow glow like spotlights on the forest floor. The temperature keeps dropping, and it鈥檚 getting dark. We set up tents, and eventually dinner is ready: thin bean soup. I figure this is the first course, but it鈥檚 the whole deal. Chelsea and Hope look apologetic and whip up some Nutella on tortilla wedges for dessert. We heat water to fill bottles that we slip inside our sleeping bags, then wrap our bodies around the hot plastic and try to sleep.

According to the usual outdoor-therapy script, we鈥檇 all wake up feeling a little vulnerable, then gradually assume a mantle of fist-pumping, we-made-it-through-the-night badassery. The idea that pushing our limits builds character is as old as the hills. John Muir embraced it. So did Teddy Roosevelt. The tough-it-out-to-toughen-up plotline is so familiar, we all assume it鈥檚 true. Many wilderness-therapy courses鈥攁long with Outward Bound, the National Outdoor Leadership School, the Eagle Scouts鈥攃onform to the narrative, a male-centric, quasi-militaristic hero story that says that what doesn鈥檛 kill you, yada yada.

But for trauma therapists like Chelsea and academics like Denise Mitten, who chairs the master鈥檚 program in adventure education at Arizona鈥檚 Prescott College, it鈥檚 time to rethink the old tropes. They want less Daniel Defoe, more Katniss Everdeen. Not content to be the lone victor, you鈥檒l recall, Katniss chose to hold Peeta鈥檚 hand, and together they freed the slaves of Panem. Well, OK, I guess that鈥檚 kind of militaristic. But you get the idea.

In the U.S., there is a legacy of woods-for-hoods programs and spartan canyon-country marchathons for troubled teens and young adults. Some of these are more compassion based than others, but most share a central theme of overcoming challenges. According to Mitten, recovery may happen in those programs despite the hardships, not because of them. 鈥淧eople always talk about risk taking and challenge, but I don鈥檛 think those are the agents for change,鈥� she says. 鈥淭here鈥檚 still a patriarchal creep in a lot of these groups of getting out of your comfort zone, but in general they鈥檙e geared toward people who are already comfortable. What about people who aren鈥檛 comfortable?鈥�

Mitten knows of just a handful of progressive groups specializing in wilderness expe颅riences for women听with trauma. They include Idaho-based , which runs trips for women veterans, and the Colorado-based , which runs LGBTQ and other programs. Aleya, our climbing guide on this trip, is planning to open an adventure-therapy center that will include courses for women suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

鈥淣ature should put you in a comfort zone,鈥� adds Mitten. 鈥淧eople with PTSD, they don鈥檛 even have a comfort zone.鈥�

This morning听along Buchanan Creek, ease and repose are not exactly on offer. Water bottles left outside our sleeping bags have frozen. The forecast is calling for snow tomorrow. Then there鈥檚 the matter of last night鈥檚 Dickensian rations. Kris, in her unzipped bag, nearly froze. Joy confided in me that she was terrified of the dark. (鈥淚t was pitch-black, and the trees started screeching. And I felt like somebody was coming.鈥�)

鈥淭his just kind of sucks,鈥� admits Elise at the morning fire. 鈥淭his trip for y鈥檃ll is about healing, and if that鈥檚 not what鈥檚 being accomplished, then we as leaders need to reassess and make decisions, and we can鈥檛 do that unless we鈥檙e hearing from everyone.鈥�

鈥淎ll right,鈥� Asta volunteers, 鈥淚鈥檓 a little overwhelmed. Sleeping on the streets is way different. I thought maybe I had a little bit of an understanding, but it鈥檚 definitely different. This is real camping.鈥�

鈥淚 mean, this is joyous to be out here,鈥� adds Kris. 鈥淭he scenery is amazing. But last night was pretty miserable. I鈥檓 like, What have I gotten myself into?鈥�

So while Hope brews oatmeal, Chelsea jogs back to the trailhead to find some cell reception and see about amending the plan. Meanwhile, the women do yoga in down jackets, raid the peanut butter to bulk up their oatmeal, stoke the fire, and watch the pine needles sizzle. When Chelsea returns two hours later, she gathers up the group.

鈥淥K, new plan!鈥� she says. Instead of continuing along to a second campsite, we鈥檒l use this one as our base camp and go on a day hike. Tomorrow morning, before the worst of the storm hits, we鈥檒l hike the three miles back out and head for a cushy retreat center for our last night. And we鈥檒l buy more food. The women express relief and delight. No packs today! A waiting bed!

Later, Chelsea tells me why she felt the urgent need to pull the plug on a third, colder night out. It comes down to neurobiology. Everyone has a window of tolerance, she explains, in which they feel emotionally stable and can stretch and grow. 鈥淭his is where you can stay connected to your frontal lobe, which is where social connections can happen, and abstract thought, creativity, self-concept, and meaning making.鈥� People who鈥檝e experienced trauma can go into a state of hyperarousal, becoming anxious and on edge. Or they may experience hypo-arousal, which can look like listlessness and depression. Either way, emotions hijack the controls. 鈥淭heir windows shrink quite a bit,鈥� Chelsea says. 鈥淭heir windows are really small.鈥�

By midday, though, we all seem to have entered some sort of bliss bubble. The clouds have cleared, the temperature has warmed to the fifties, and the positive benefits of nature arrive on cue. We smell the vanilla bark of a ponderosa, walk across a log bridge over a fast-flowing creek, and picnic in bright sun.

Over bagels and canned salmon, I sit with Rochelle, who has an easy laugh that belies her life before treatment. I ask her how she feels today. She smiles and groans.

鈥淚 am feeling a little bit exhausted,鈥� she says. 鈥淏ut I am honestly doing a lot of self-reflection.鈥� One thing she鈥檚 noticing is more physical sensation, not all of it pleasant. It鈥檚 a good reminder that she didn鈥檛 always take care of her body, and now she wants to. 鈥淚t鈥檚 like a loving type of awareness, you know?鈥�

This is one of the main reasons that being active and outside鈥攊n a full-sensory environment鈥攃an be so powerful. Although there鈥檚 not much research on how long these benefits last, healing from trauma is a long, slow process, says University of Denver鈥檚 Laser-Maira. On a trip like this, mind and body finally start to come together again. The hope is that survivors use that base to keep themselves safer and healthier moving forward.

Although She Is Able doesn鈥檛 formally follow up with participants, the idea is that they鈥檒l remain in touch and continue to support each other. For example, Elise and many of the other women will soon be attending Tamara鈥檚 graduation from her treatment program, though that鈥檚 still hard to picture from their chilly streamside perch.

When we arrive back at the trailhead the next day, snow is falling. We board Betty White and head to 110-acre Toth Ranch, a Christian retreat center nestled into the rangy slopes of Hot Sulphur Springs. The main house is warm, with picture windows, deep plush sofas, and a hot tub. Kris looks around and starts crying, and Chelsea has to tell her it鈥檚 OK, she is worthy of this place.

The afternoon is spent reveling in hot water, walking to a pond, and cooking up Thai noodles and Nutella cookies. Satiated and toasty, hair freshly washed, the women settle in for the evening debrief.

True to form, it isn鈥檛 long before the tears and the prayers kick in. As the moon rises and the wind blows against the barren poplars, Elise talks about the many times she felt burned-out this year, desperately seeking funds, facing enormous self-doubt. She has agonized over whether to remain as executive director or move to the board level. (In several months, she will indeed hire a new director with experience treating victims of trauma.)

鈥淚t鈥檚 been really hard,鈥� she says, sniffling, 鈥渂ut watching you guys, the genuine conversation and the realness that鈥檚 happened here, you can鈥檛 beat it. And so you guys have made me want to keep going. This is why I鈥檓 here. And how cool, you know?鈥�

All the women tell Elise to keep going.

鈥淚 know there鈥檚 six of us who have walked down a dark, dark path,鈥� says Kris, who only 18 months ago crashed a vehicle into a gas station while being chased by a U.S. marshal. 鈥淣one of us thought that we鈥檇 be sitting here today. If you had asked us a couple years ago, the answer would鈥檝e been no. I mean, this is something that I will never forget.鈥�

鈥淚 got a lot out of this,鈥� starts Rochelle, 鈥渆ven the very uncomfortable parts of not being able to breathe and my back hurting or my muscles aching or not getting sleep or whatever, like the uncomfortable stuff.鈥� She takes a deep breath. 鈥淚t just sent messages to me like, Wow, my body is actually a responsibility.鈥� Heads are nodding, slowly.

鈥淚 didn鈥檛 know that I needed any healing physically, or that there was deep, deep, deep wounding there.鈥� Now she is crying, but she keeps going. 鈥淎nd I had never grieved the loss that it had caused me. And I realized that my body has never鈥攜ou know, like, I never really claimed it as mine.鈥�

国产吃瓜黑料 the big windows, the snow keeps falling on the mountains we just left, where, it seems, the women also deposited a few shards of themselves, bits that needed to be abandoned. Rochelle looks out over the range. 鈥淚 took back my body. I realized it could be mine.鈥澨�

Contributing editor Florence Williams () is the author of . She wrote about Girl Scouts in May 2017. Mikaela Hamilton is an 国产吃瓜黑料 contributing photographer.

The post The 国产吃瓜黑料 Therapy Cure for Survivors appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Spider arrived at the breakfast table with glitter on her cheek. Six wide-eyed middle school girls were 颅devouring ham sammies while she described her midnight abduction. 鈥淭his dude came to the window and gave me a bead. And then I got the power of Narnia and an orange compass.鈥� She reached out for a tater tot. 鈥淚 felt like I was there for a week! He crowned me queen of the stars and the moon above. It was the best dream ever.鈥�

The XX Factor Issue

Our special issue highlights the athletes, activists, and icons who have shaped the outside world.

Read all the stories

A 12-year-old redhead named Nicole nodded. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 why she has glitter and white paint on her face! From the journey!鈥� Nicole, who was eating Count Chocula, looked happier than she had the evening before, when she was a little hysterical because she couldn鈥檛 find her sleeping bag. 鈥淚t was in my duffel the whole time!鈥� she groaned. 鈥淚t was so embarrassing! I had to sit on the floor and cry a little.鈥�

These were the dauntless Cadettes of . Sixty teens were spending a cold December weekend at the camp in the Kenosha Mountains near Bailey, Colorado. After breakfast they would run through four skill stations, including field archery, route finding, wilderness food prep, and winter survival. The latter would involve very popular practice sessions of slithering into a sleeping bag (with hiking boots on! squeee!) and then having your friends fold you up in a tarp like origami to keep the arctic blasts out. It worked so well that no one wanted to emerge except for the promise of Twizzlers. Last night the girls hiked in nine-degree darkness and felt the power of the universe. They saw shooting stars, some of them for the first time. They learned that we are all one, but thanks to a groovy Carhartt-clad 颅leader who goes by the name Obi Joe (), they also learned that they are special.听

鈥淲hen you鈥檙e sad, remember this,鈥� she said, her dark braids flapping in the stiff wind. 鈥淥f all the billions of stars out there, this is the only one we know of with life. And you got to be here.鈥�

This weekend is part of a yearlong pilot program for Colorado scouts called , designed to test the concept of delivering high-order, full-on, risk-taking fun. You know, like the Boy Scouts. One weekend a month, girls from across the state meet with trained staffers to rock-climb, snowshoe, mountain-bike, raft, and learn other wilderness skills. There were 120 spots. A good deal at $195 for the year, it sold out immediately.听

鈥淚t鈥檚 popular because it鈥檚 a great program,鈥� said Kristin Hamm, who works in marketing for the Girl Scouts of Colorado council and whose sixth-grade daughter, Alice, was running around looking for snacks. 鈥淭he goals here are getting adventurous and also 颅keeping girls at this age interested.鈥� Hamm is also a troop leader and knows how hard it is to compete with soccer, skiing, music lessons, and the umpteen other activities of the average Colorado suburban middle-schooler. This is the age when girls鈥攚ho may have been diehard 鈥淥n my honor鈥︹�� reciters as Daisies and Brownies鈥攕tart to peel off. , to 1.8 million girls, largely due to competition from other activities, including ones that take place indoors on screens.听

In response, the Girl Scouts now offers ten new outdoor badges, including five for adventure. Girls in Virginia are working toward their by hiking, caving, and camping, while . Troops are getting the message that tweens are ready to wiggle out of their sashes and embark on some real exploration.听

Aspen Rundell, a fourth-generation Girl Scout from Peyton, Colorado, certainly seemed more interested in making hardtack and ponderosa-needle tea than in straightening her hair. At Tomahawk Ranch, she had hat head, big time, but she didn鈥檛 mind. 鈥淚鈥檓 joyful today, and I bring joy,鈥� she said during circle time, the orientation before dinner, which is not something you hear from a lot of eighth-graders. Her mother, being third-generation and all, was also here, tidying up the dehydrated apples. 鈥淔or us, being outdoors is about sisterhood and social interaction,鈥� said Rose Rundell. 鈥淎spen doesn鈥檛 know any of these girls, yet she has to get along and make friends, and she has. It takes them out of their shells.鈥�

This weekend the girls will see their small triumphs and failures refracted through the mountain light. Nicole will learn that it鈥檚 OK to lose track of her sleeping bag, even if she cries a little, and Mackenzie will feel comfortable crooning some homemade lyrics. They鈥檒l all discover that it鈥檚 possible to hike when it鈥檚 seriously freezing out and that听they can take care of themselves if they get lost. They will cheer on a girl they don鈥檛 know who flings arrows like a vengeful goddess.听

Hold up. If you thought that the Girl Scouts was mostly about selling cookies, you鈥檙e right鈥攊t still is. Nicole told me she moves a couple thousand boxes each year: 鈥淎t least 100 hours in cookie season, every day after school and every weekend. If I sell 1,000, I get a discount to summer camp!鈥� With their badges and smiles, these little sharks gross their troops around the country close to , money that stays in the local councils.听

But scouting is still by far the biggest on-ramp to the outdoors for American girls. According to the group鈥檚 own data, more than 70 percent of scouts surveyed said that they first tried an outdoor activity while in a troop or at camp. That鈥檚 a lot of girls. With 59 million alumnae, the Girl Scouts sweeps in nearly one in two American women at some point in their lives, including me. Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Condoleeza Rice, Sally Ride, Taylor Swift, Venus Williams, 鈥攁ll Girl Scouts.听

Founded in 1912, the organization has a national office in New York City, with a $93 million budget of its own, and 112 independently听run councils. At just $15 per year in dues (plus more for troop activities), the Girl Scouts is accessible to everyone. And thanks to online and school-based outreach and recruiting, .听

But scouting鈥攁nd its historic, gender-defying reach into the 颅outdoors鈥攆aces challenges worth noting if you care about the future of girls and the future of adventure. In the U.S., participation in outdoor activities among girls ages听6 to 12 dropped about 15 percent between 2006 and 2014. It was 7 percent lower among girls 13 to 17, according to听the , the non颅profit research arm of the . As little kids, boys are 4 per颅cent more likely to do things like cycling, running, fishing, camping, and hiking. With teens, the gender gap widens to 12 points. And while , they receive plenty of mixed messages when it comes to physical pursuits.

What was true a century ago is still true today: . (Even back then, experts worried that girls spent too much time inside, overly influenced by fashion and media.) We know and to . than any other group. Even for girls who are healthy and well-颅adjusted, there鈥檚 something about the combination of estrogen and modern life that acts like a hybrid washing machine and pressure cooker. As Mary Pipher famously pointed out in her 1994 classic, , American girls are vivacious and opti颅mistic when they enter puberty, but many emerge a few years later as meeker, quieter, less confident, and less curious versions of themselves. It鈥檚 enough to make you want to grab your Thin Mints and run for the hills with every girl you know.

鈥淚 think we鈥檙e overprotecting girls while encouraging boys to take risks, be tough, and learn sound decision-making,鈥� said , a former firefighter and whitewater competitor, and the author of . 鈥淲e are failing to prepare girls for life.鈥澨�

Behind the outdoor-sports discrepancy lurks a worrisome chasm: the bravery gap. A 2014 survey of more than 1,000 girls by the Oakland, California, nonprofit showed that half identified as brave, compared with 63 percent of boys. 鈥淎 boy is pushed to do things, but when a girl says she鈥檚 scared, an adult will often intervene,鈥� Paul said. 鈥淏oys are taught to per颅severe, and girls are told that fear will protect them. .鈥澨�

But here's the good news: a solid decade of research has 颅revealed that outdoor adventure programs for girls promote friendship, perseverance, self-confidence, leadership, and general bad颅assery linked to happiness and success. A 2016 study by social psychologist Viren Swami at Anglia Ruskin University, published in the British journal Body Image, . Being active and outside, he said, makes us focus on .

Middle school, researchers have confirmed, is a critical window not only for connecting kids to 颅nature but for changing their brains in ways that will make them more resilient and more confident throughout their lives. If you can get girls interested in outdoor activities now, they鈥檙e more likely to stick with them.听

Not surprisingly, Girl Scouts USA is a big fan of the nature-psych research and has even hired its own Ph.D.鈥檚 to study the effects. In a r, and, not incidentally, more likely to recommend the Girl Scouts to their friends.听

That last part is key. Sixty-three percent of teenagers of both sexes cite being with friends and family as the biggest motivators to getting outdoors. And听research has shown that .听

These elements were deliberately baked into Girl Scouting from the very beginning. Founder Juliette Gordon Low, an American divorc茅e (well, technically he died while she was divorcing him), wanted girls to learn to be strong and self-sufficient. Women still didn鈥檛 have the vote颅, she thought, but they could damn well make a campfire. She 颅befriended Boy Scouts founder Robert Baden-Powell in England and decided that if boys could get tough and healthy by route finding and sleeping under the stars, so could girls. Plenty of parents in fast-颅urbanizing America agreed. In fact, scouting for both genders helped drive the remarkable .听

Early on, Low envisioned an 颅orga颅nization that was inclusive, democratic, and welcoming (unlike, it may be said, the and ). 鈥淏ut what was really interesting,鈥� said Susan Miller, a historian of childhood at Rutgers University and the author of , 鈥渋s that the Girl Scouts never saw the outdoors as being incompatible with being a girl. They were always adamant that the outdoors was really their birthright, although maybe it鈥檚 true that daily life didn鈥檛 always match the aspirations.鈥�

In the century since its founding, the organization鈥檚 emphasis on the outdoors has waxed and waned like alpine moonlight. Girl Scouting fully embraced home economics in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies, when TV鈥檚 Marcia Brady famously ditched her troop to go camping with the boys. (Ironing badge, anyone?) The scouts are both a reflection of girl culture and an influence on it.

鈥淲e鈥檙e always evolving,鈥� said Girl Scouts USA chief marketing and communications officer Lynn Godfrey. After some soul-searching, the organization decided to embrace the 颅acronym G.I.R.L.: 鈥淲e want girls who are go-颅getters, innovators, risk takers, and leaders,鈥� she said. To help develop those traits: new programs in adventure sports and robotics. It鈥檚 a deliberate swerve away from your grandmother鈥檚 fusty troop. These days, summer scout-camp themes echo听 and . 鈥淧arents may not realize that what we offer is exactly what they are looking for,鈥� said Godfrey. 鈥淎nd the outdoors is the essence of who we are.鈥�

Girl paradise, right? Don鈥檛 pull out your homemade cork-and-needle compass just yet. Given the well-studied benefits of unleashing girls in nature, the Girl Scouts still put up pretty deplorable statistics when it comes to actually getting girls outside.听

In my neighborhood in Washington, D.C., the local Boy Scout troop goes camping once a month and the Girl Scouts go three times a year. Chalk one up for the boys. Only 40 percent of Girl Scouts, in fact, do any kind of outdoor activity on a monthly basis. Although half of all Girl Scouts rate 颅camping as a favorite activity, only 3 percent go out and pitch a tent 颅every month. Four percent go hiking monthly, and 19 percent go walking, an activity that sets a 颅pretty low bar. Those figures plummet even further for scouts of color.

Because I wanted to see some adventure newbies, not just the already-slaloming girls of Colorado鈥檚 Camp Tomahawk, I sought out an urban troop in D.C.

Forty girls strong, Troop 3812 is run by the formidable Nina Hughes, who presents as part Michelle Obama, part Miss Jean Brodie. I joined a group of her Seniors, ages 14 to 16, at an Ikea in College Park, Maryland, for some extreme interior decorating. All e.听

鈥淭oday we鈥檙e studying feng shui,鈥� explained Ziyah Holman, a poised ninth-grader who was leading the afternoon鈥檚 activity for the . Standing under an ad for Swedish meatballs and consulting her packet, she explained that the girls needed to find inspirational examples of something orange (鈥渇or prosperity鈥�), something 鈥済lued,鈥� and something with texture.听

The giant box store off the Beltway may not seem an auspicious setting for an inquiry into the outdoors, but even here they couldn鈥檛 stop talking about their last adventure. Except to talk about scented candles. They鈥檇 recently gone hiking at a winter weekend retreat, where they went 鈥渓odge camping,鈥� and they were excited about summer camp.听

鈥淚 didn鈥檛 really like hiking at first,鈥� said Ziyah, who lives in Hyattsville, Maryland, a suburb of D.C. where the closest neighborhood park is, as she put it, 鈥渄amaged.鈥� 鈥淏ut I really started to enjoy it, seeing the views.鈥澨�

鈥淕irl Scouts makes it more fun because there are people you can joke along with,鈥� added Elisabeth, a ninth-grader. Tyler, who had an impressive set of corkscrew curls and Converse low-tops 颅decorated with lemons, added that she loves kayaking, which she tried at a scouting camp.听

鈥淭hese girls have an opportunity to stand up and say there鈥檚 not many people that look like me that do what I do, and that鈥檚 OK and I鈥檓 proud of it,鈥� said Hughes, who is also Tyler鈥檚 mom and has been leading the troop for ten demanding years. Although she was no expert, the organization offered training, and she went for it because Tyler insisted. 鈥淚f it wasn鈥檛 for Girl Scouts, we wouldn鈥檛 be camping,鈥� she said. 鈥淚 had no interest in it. Now we go three or four times a year. I knew this would give her opportunities she wouldn鈥檛 normally get: canoeing, sailing, caving, skiing, archery. Things we never did when I was growing up.鈥�

All the girls鈥� moms were also hanging out at Ikea, both because they had to schlep them there from various points in Prince George鈥檚 County and because they often volunteer on the outings. 鈥淚鈥檝e loved every minute of it,鈥� said Cheryl Betts, Elisabeth鈥檚 mom. She鈥檇 watched her daughter鈥檚 natural leadership abilities blossom as she went from a shy fourth-grade Junior to student-council representative at her high school. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 because of the Girl Scouts!鈥� she said.听

Most of the girls in Troop 3812 come from middle-class families, but the D.C. area鈥檚 5,000-plus troops include many girls from less privileged communities. Girl Scout research shows that its those girls who benefit most from the organization鈥檚 outdoor agenda, even though they participate less. But the Nation鈥檚 Capital council听hopes to boost rates. Last year it provided $160,800 in tuition assistance for day and sleepaway camps, and more than 10,000 of the 60,000 D.C.-area Girl Scouts attended them.听

The Ikea girls and their moms were so awesome, I almost signed up to become a leader right there in housewares. My own daughter, 13, was a scout for several years, but it didn鈥檛 hold her. 鈥淚鈥檓 too busy,鈥� she finally declared as she packed up her dance bag for another day of activity inside.听

I lasted a bit longer than my daughter as a scout. Back in my heyday in the seventies and early eighties, the outdoors was having a moment, even in New听York City where I grew up. We did some unconventional things, like venture into Central Park at night, camp on Fire 颅Island, learn 颅assault preven颅tion, and even smoke a joint with our renegade leader, who shall remain nameless. Could this really have happened? I reached out to my old troop pal Kati 颅Kovacs, now a law professor.听

鈥淵up, that happened,鈥� she said. She reminded me that we were even allowed to bring boys on camping trips, and she told me a story about a sailing excursion I鈥檇 missed, when the troop got marooned in a squall on Oyster Bay. They took shelter on the property of a Roosevelt heiress and were sent merrily back to the city in chauffeured limos. No badge for that, unfortunately. 鈥淪he was a great role model,鈥� Kati said wistfully of our leader.听

Back then troop leaders, like everyone, had more license to be wacky, irresponsible, and occasionally illegal. These days troop life is pretty staid. It involves a lot of leader-颅training webinars, consent forms, and worksheets. When Girl Scouts alumna Kita Murdock decided to become a co-leader of her daughter鈥檚 Brownie troop in Boulder, Colorado, in 2009, she was put off by what she called 鈥渁ll the box checking鈥� to earn badges. This being Boulder, the troop鈥檚 families decided that they didn鈥檛 want anything to do with peddling sugar or supporting palm-oil production by flogging corporate cookies, and they didn鈥檛 need the money it generated.

鈥淲e were rogue Girl Scouts,鈥� she said. 鈥淲e liked the focus on leadership but came to it with our own ideas of what to get out of it.鈥澨�

Other parents and educators have gone further rogue, creating alternative organizations.听

When Lyn Mikel Brown鈥檚 daughter was an eight-year-old Brownie in 2000 and tired of crafting, they decided to ditch the group and start their own. 颅, based in Waterville, Maine, is one of many local and 颅national groups working to get more girls outside more 颅often. Some include adventure components and some don鈥檛. Most are small-scale and pricey, but that鈥檚 also changing. In addition to 颅classes in welding and 颅media 颅literacy, Hardy Girls offers its 颅popular听backpacking and horseback-颅riding units to much larger organizations, including the Girl Scouts.

Brown, a professor of education at Maine鈥檚 Colby College and author of , attributes the rise in girl-adventure programs to new heroines in dystopian fiction and to parents who are concerned about technology eating their children. 鈥淚 think girls are really much more brave, assertive, and focused on what they want for themselves,鈥� she said. 鈥淚鈥檝e seen the shift in just the past five to ten years. But I don鈥檛 think they have the same access to adventure as boys, and some of the programs that claim to be adventure based are really more protective of them.鈥�

That鈥檚 something groups like , a Vermont mountain-颅biking program, and , in San Francisco, are working to change. GirlVentures takes girls ages 11 to 18 on multi-day kayaking, backpacking, and rock-climbing expeditions. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 offer camps per se,鈥� said former executive director Taara Hoffman. 鈥淥ur territory is nature. We want girls out of their comfort zones. Learning that you can live off the land without material things is very empowering.鈥� Serving 120 girls a year, GirlVentures provides full or partial scholarships to two-thirds of them. offers group expeditions to teenage girls, many of them also on scholarship. And teaches fitness and life skills to 200,000 third-to-eighth-graders nationwide.听

These are important trends, and Nadine Budbill, an educator who founded Dirt Divas, is proud to be part of them. But for reasons of scale and the potential to get vast numbers of girls outdoors, she鈥檚 still a big fan of the Girl Scouts. 颅鈥淓specially now that they鈥檙e not so old-school,鈥� she said.听

If we accept the evidence that taking physical risks is related to psychological health, emotional resilience, and the self-confidence that girls need to navigate a complicated and sometimes unfriendly world, then it matters that we close the bravery gap, for all girls. As put it, 鈥淕irls need to see the world as something they have control over. It starts at a young age with exploration. We want them to have a sense of agency.鈥�

Simone Marean, executive director of Girls Leadership, agrees. Not every risk leads to success, whether on a ski slope, in school, or in a relationship. 鈥淚f we can build bravery skills, then they鈥檒l have the internal capacity to recover from failure and go back out there and try again,鈥� Marean says. Pain and rejection will happen; being in nature can help girls find solace, strength, and inspiration.听

Under the open, twilit sky, the world becomes a bigger place. It becomes their place.听

I like picturing the girls of America, legions of them, storming the archery fields, tipping over their canoes, and getting their minds blown watching the slow rotation of the Milky Way. Briefly, they鈥檒l turn away from Snapchat, their obnoxious brothers, their too-small yards. For a few weeks or a few days, they鈥檒l have the space and the power to start figuring out who they are and who they want to be.听

Back at Tomahawk Ranch, I was walking in the forest with a girl named Meghan from Westminster. 鈥淢y parents don鈥檛 like the outdoors as much as I do,鈥� she told me. Our footsteps crunched atop an inch of snow. It was a cold, clear, perfect Colorado morning. 鈥淚 love being outdoors! But I also like the comforts of indoors. I have two guinea pigs, Teddy and Puddles.鈥�

OK, so maybe she was a little homesick. Sustained introspection isn鈥檛 big at this age. Out here it didn鈥檛 have to be.听

鈥淚鈥檒l give extra M&M鈥檚 to anyone who finds missing arrows!鈥� yelled a field instructor. 鈥淭he trail is our safety zone. Do not get shot at!鈥�

鈥淩ange is hot!鈥� belted out a 12-year-old named Taya. She tossed her pink fleece over a ponderosa branch, adjusted her quiver, and 颅lifted her bow. She held the power pose for a moment, her long blond hair billowing behind her. Releasing her fingers, she fired off a searingly fast missile. It landed square in the trunk of a tree.听

鈥淵es!鈥� she pumped her fist. 鈥淚 feel like Katniss!鈥�

Taya lifted the bow again and vanquished another obstacle.

Contributing editor Florence Williams is the author of . She also hosts a series of women-focused episodes on our podcast. Follow her .

The post The Girl Scouts Is Raising Our Next Generation of Rippers appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

By second grade, it was clear that while Zack Smith could sit in a chair, he had no intention of staying in it. He was disruptive in class, spoke in a loud voice, and had a hard time taking turns with others. His parents fed him a 颅series of medications for attention-deficit hyper颅activity disorder, or ADHD, many of which didn鈥檛 work. Zack, who attended school in West Hartford, Connecticut, was placed in special classrooms where he showed a 颅propensity for lashing out. Twice suspended, he was miserable. He didn鈥檛 seem to care about anything at school. When his parents realized that his path would likely lead to worse trouble, they pulled the ripcord on eighth grade.

Where Zack eventually landed is clinging spread-eagle to an east-facing slab of quartzite in the West Virginia panhandle. His chin-length, strawberry blond hair curls out beneath a Minion-yellow helmet. A harness cinches his T-shirt鈥攖he sleeves of which have been ripped off鈥攐bscuring the Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare lettering.

鈥淚 have a wedgie!鈥� he bellows out from 20 feet up.

Belaying him is another 14-year-old鈥攑ale, earnest Daniel. Earlier in the day, Daniel asked, 鈥淒o I have to belay? I鈥檓 only 95 pounds.鈥� Both kids still look a little apprehensive, but there鈥檚 no question that they are paying full attention to the wall of rock and to the rope that unites them. Yesterday beneath a picnic awning in a campground near Seneca Rocks, they and 12 other scrappy teens from the learned how to tie figure-eights and Prusiks, the knots that would safeguard their lives, under the tutelage of trip leader Joseph Geier, the academy鈥檚 director, and seven other energetic field instructors mostly in their twenties. The students鈥� ages span five years, but in the spectrum of puberty, the younger kids look like they could be the square roots of the biggest ones. Zack occupies an awkward middle ground, lanky and knock-kneed, with a surprisingly deep voice and a crooked smile.

He gradually moves his right foot to a new nub and pulls himself higher. He scrabbles upward, finally victoriously slapping a carabiner on the top rope before rappelling down. 鈥淥h man, my arms hurt,鈥� he says at the bottom, his pale cheeks flushed from sun and exertion. Daniel accidentally steps on the climbing rope and, per the rules, has to kiss it. This happens so often that no one remarks on it. For a moment both boys cheer on Tim, a small boy from the D.C. area with bright eyes behind eyeglasses so thick they look like safety gear. The aspirational name tape on the back of his helmet reads T Bone Sizzler. A group chant begins: 鈥淕o, Tim, go鈥攐h, go Tim!鈥�

Before enrolling in this adventure-based boarding school for grades seven through twelve, Zack, like a lot of these students, had already spent some summers at SOAR鈥檚 Balsam, North Carolina, camp or its programs in California, Florida, and Wyoming for kids of both sexes with ADHD, dyslexia, and other learning disabilities. SOAR鈥檚 founding principle鈥攔adical several decades ago and still surprisingly underappreciated鈥攚as that kids with attention deficits thrive in the outdoors. Since then ADHD diagnoses have exploded鈥�11 percent of American kids are now said to have it鈥攚hile recess, PE, and access to nature have shriveled miserably.

Zack鈥檚 first SOAR summer involved a three-week stint of horse-packing in the Wind River Range. Before the trip, he says, he would have preferred to stay home and play video games. 鈥淚 hated nature,鈥� as he puts it. But something clicked under the wide Wyoming skies. He found he was able to focus on tasks; he was making friends and feeling less terrible about himself. Zack turned his restlessness into a craving for adventure鈥攚hich is perhaps what it was meant to be all along.

It鈥檚 one thing to let kids unplug and run loose in the woods in summer, but shifting the whole academic year outside鈥擲OAR students alternate two weeks on the forested campus in North Carolina and two weeks in the field鈥攔eflects either parental desperation, intrepid educational insight, or a combination of the two. Zack鈥檚 backstory is a common one, especially among boys, who are diagnosed at more than twice the rate of girls. History is full of examples of restless youths who went on to become celebrated iconoclasts, like wilderness advocate John Muir, who spent his early childhood sneaking out at night, dangling from the windowsill by his fingertips, and scaling treacherous seaside cliffs in Dunbar, Scotland. Frederick Law Olmsted, who would later change the torso of Manhattan and influence scores of other cities with his park designs, hated school. His tolerant headmaster would let him roam the countryside instead. Ansel Adams鈥檚 parents plucked their fidgety boy out of class, gave him a Brownie box camera, and took him on a grand tour of Yosemite. It was unschooling, California style.

Olmsted, looking back on his life, identified the problem as the stifling classroom, not troublesome boys. 鈥淎 boy,鈥� he wrote, 鈥渨ho would not in any weather & under all ordinary circumstances, rather take a walk of ten to twelve miles some time in the course of every day than stay quietly about a house all day, must be suffering from disease or a defective education.鈥�

The Academy at SOAR鈥攚hich became accredited three years ago鈥攊s determined to find a better way. The school has just 32 students, 26 of them boys, divided into four mixed-age houses. Each kid has an individualized curriculum, and the student-teacher ratio is five to one. Tuition is a steep $49,500 per year, on par with other boarding schools, although you won鈥檛 find a Hogwartsian dining hall or stacks of leather-bound books. The school still covers the required academics, as well as basic life skills like cooking, but finds that the kids pay more attention to a history lesson while standing in the middle of a battlefield or a geology lecture while camping on a monocline.

鈥淲e started from scratch,鈥� says SOAR鈥檚 executive director John Willson, who began working there as a camp counselor in 1991. 鈥淲e鈥檙e not reinventing the wheel鈥攚e threw out the wheel.鈥� The school鈥檚 founders didn鈥檛 have any particular allegiance to adventure sports; they just found that climbing, backpacking, and canoeing were a magic fit for these kids, at these ages, when their neurons are exploding in a million directions. 鈥淲hen you鈥檙e on a rock ledge,鈥� Willson says, 鈥渢here鈥檚 a sweet spot of arousal and stress that opens you up for adaptive learning. You find new ways of solving problems.鈥�

Some of the teens who arrive at SOAR are still putting their clothes on backward, not uncommon among kids with ADHD. They forget to eat or they can鈥檛 stop. They lash out in anger, and they鈥檙e easily frustrated. Symptoms tend to express themselves differently in boys and girls. The classic symptoms in boys, which are better understood, are hyperactivity, impulsivity, and distractibility; girls tend to show less of the hyperactivity, which makes the condition harder to spot. We all fall somewhere on the continuum of these traits, but people with more-extreme symptoms appear to have different chemistry in the parts of their brains that govern reward, movement, and attention. They may have trouble listening or sitting still, and they get distracted by external stimuli. They can be hyper-focused, but they also get bored easily, so they tend to be risk takers, looking for charged activities that help flood their brains with feel-good neurotransmitters like dopamine and norepinephrine, which otherwise get gummed up in the ADHD brain. Kids with the condition are more likely to suffer head injuries, accidentally ingest poisons, and take street drugs.

With all these liabilities, you might think such heritable traits would diminish in humans over time; that鈥檚 the way Darwin awards work. The fact that they remain so common, though, means that these same characteristics must have once conferred tremendous advantages on individuals and ultimately on the human race.听

It鈥檚 worth taking a look into the brains of kids like Zack, because not only do kids with ADHD need exploration, but exploration needs them. Zack and his tethered band of misfits might look like merry miscreants, but they hold clues to the adventure impulses lurking in all of us, impulses that are increasingly at risk in a world moving indoors鈥攐nto screens and away from nature. Attentional mutants everywhere have saved the human species, and they may yet spare us the death of adventure.

The human brain evolved outside, in a world filled with interesting things, but not an overwhelming number of interesting things. Everything in a child鈥檚 world was nameable: foods, creatures, the stars. We were supposed to notice passing distractions; if we didn鈥檛, we could get eaten. But we also needed a certain amount of stick-to-itiveness so that we could build tools, stalk game, raise babies, and plan big. Evolution favored early humans who could both stay on task and switch tasks when needed, and our prefrontal cortex evolved to let us master the ability. In fact, how nimbly we allocate our attention may be one of humanity鈥檚 greatest and most distinctive skills, argues neuroscientist Daniel Levitin of McGill University.

Most humans had brains that craved novelty and wanted to explore鈥攖o a degree. This worked out for us. As Levitin writes in , our species expanded into more habitats than any creature the earth had ever seen, to the point where humans plus our livestock and pets now account for 98 percent of the planet鈥檚 terrestrial vertebrates. But evolution also favored variability, and some of us pushed exploration more than others.

Wondering if we have a specific adventure gene, researchers have looked at the DNA of humans in the farthest reaches of the globe鈥攖he descendants of people who kept moving until there was no place else to go. One mutation kept popping up: a variant called 7R on the DRD4 gene that helps regulate how signals from dopamine are processed. People with 7R are more likely to take financial risks and to travel and try new things, probably as a way to juice up their stingy dopamine delivery. Long story short, this gene mutation, which affects roughly 20 percent of today鈥檚 global population, does indeed cluster in places like Siberia, Tierra del Fuego, and Australia, where humans had migrated over the longest routes.听

It turns out that the gene also clusters in people who have ADHD. It would be too easy to say that any one gene or set of genes explains the human capacity to explore or explains ADHD, since both are determined by numerous genetic and environmental factors. And not all kids with ADHD like risk taking. But to Dale Archer, a Lake Charles, Louisiana, psychiatrist and author of , the link makes sense. Once upon a time, the dominant traits of ADHD were highly adaptive. They were鈥攁nd still can be鈥攇ifts that enable rapid interpretation of sensory data, thinking on your feet, curiosity, and creative restlessness. 鈥淭he thing with the ADHDer is that we get bored easily but we do great in a crisis, we can function really well,鈥� says Archer, a surf kayaker, solo sailor, and cyclist who shares the diagnosis with his adult son. According to him and others in the learning-differences community, Napoleon probably had ADHD (along with some other issues) and so did Captain James Cook, Ernest Shackleton, Thomas Edison, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

If you take a typical ADHD kid, layer on some experience and maturity, tamp down the impulsive bits, and add some goal aspirations and a keen ability to plan and dream, you end up with a high-adrenaline achiever like alpinist Conrad Anker or adventurer Sir Richard Branson, both of whom believe they have the condition. They are comfortable in extreme environments, enlivened by risk, able to thrive on the unknown. When Branson dropped out of school at age 16 to start his first company, he says, 鈥淭he headmaster told me that I would either end up in prison or become a millionaire.鈥� Since then he has scored two first-ever transoceanic ballooning records, received eight helicopter rescues, and founded the Virgin Group.

鈥淚 am hyper situationally aware,鈥� says Anker. 鈥淚t was a trainwreck in second grade鈥攅very input received my attention. When I鈥檓 alpine climbing, that keeps me alive.鈥� Anker can nimbly process snow conditions, incoming weather, and rope integrity to make quick decisions. His brain likes intense environments, he says, but too much pointless stimulation, like on a busy city street, drives him bananas. Precision wingsuit flier Jeb Corliss was diagnosed with ADHD when he was ten. 鈥淢y sisters are normal people. I鈥檓 hyper, yeah, big deal,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 believe that a lot of people are like that, and they use it to their advantage.鈥� Corliss says flying through the air is when he feels calm and peaceful.

As a laconic, impulsive, and depressed teen in northeast Ohio, Matt Rutherford landed in juvenile detention five times for petty crimes and in rehab twice. Some 15 years later, he became the first sailor to circumnavigate the Americas alone. During his 308 days at sea, his secondhand 27-foot boat started falling apart under him. It caught on fire, he lost his water supply, his fuel bladder sprang a leak, and, just past French Guiana, he nearly smacked into a freighter. 鈥淭he more challenging it is,鈥� he says, 鈥渢he happier I am. The more rocks, the more ice, the better.鈥�

In fact, ADHD traits are so common among modern-day alpinists, rock climbers, BASE jumpers, snowboarders, and other extreme athletes that the observation raises several important questions: If adventure sports are such a great fit for people with ADHD, why aren鈥檛 more doctors, schools, and families boosting participation? And, as kids are asked to sit still for longer periods of time indoors and given more medications to help them do it, what is the fate of the next generation of adventurers? Does the mass medicalization of ADHD mean the human species has reached peak exploration?

If you鈥檙e the sort of person who eats chaos for breakfast, sitting in school all day may well suck out your soul. But with the rise of industrialism, educators thought all kids should be in standardized classrooms. 鈥淎DHD got its start 150 years ago when compulsory education got started,鈥� says Stephen Hinshaw, a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley. 鈥淚n that sense, you could say it鈥檚 partially a social construct. If you look at the symptoms of ADHD, maybe they鈥檙e not really symptoms anymore if you get in the right profession or the right ecological niche. We鈥檝e learned some of this by looking at extreme athletes, who have found that niche.鈥�

But school often isn鈥檛 it. To oversimplify, it鈥檚 like taking kids who are genetically meant to be hunters and gatherers and making them tend crops instead. Not only will they feel bored and inadequate, but the constrained setting will actually make their symptoms worse. For kids like Zack, school feels stifling and rule bound. They act up. They may get moved into even more restrictive environments, sometimes with chain-link fences, guards, and neurotropic meds that go beyond ADHD to deal with the ensuing anxiety, depression, and aggression. Sometimes they end up in trouble or, as Zack feared might happen to him, get 鈥済ooned鈥� in the middle of the night by burly strangers intent on packing him off to a residential therapeutic program that looks like Outward Bound in the brochure but ends up feeling like a gulag.

Interestingly, researchers have observed similar patterns in lab rats鈥攚ho, let鈥檚 face it, suffer the ultimate cosmic gooning. When Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Washington State University, restricted the play of young rats, their frontal lobes (which control executive function) failed to grow normally. 鈥淲e had the insight that if animals don鈥檛 play, if there are not sufficient spaces for them to engage, they develop play hunger,鈥� says Panksepp. 鈥淭hey have impulse-control problems and eventually problems with social interactions.鈥�

Panksepp points out that while common stimulant medications for ADHD like Ritalin and Adderall may improve attention skills and academic performance in many kids, they do so at the cost of reducing the playfulness urge鈥攁t least temporarily. 鈥淲e know these are anti-play drugs in animals,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hat is clear and unambiguous.鈥� The bigger question is whether the drugs鈥攁nd all the enforced sedentary behavior鈥攕queeze the adventure impulse out of kids in the longer term. Psychologists tend to disagree on this point, but the truth is, no one really knows. It鈥檚 not a boutique question. Of the 6.4 million diagnosed kids in America, about half are taking prescription stimulants, an increase of 28 percent since 2007.

For athletes like Corliss and swimmer Michael Phelps, who has also been diagnosed with ADHD, the sport itself becomes their medication, filling their brains with endorphins and endocannabinoids. But for every hour that a drug is supplying a kid鈥檚 fix, that鈥檚 an hour a potential explorer is not looking longingly out the window plotting escape. Of course, some kids, Hinshaw points out, need medication even to make big plans, not to mention learn algebra. Other families, he notes, are seeing the value in medication holidays, allowing kids to come off their drugs on weekends and during summers.

At SOAR, many students arrive on meds, and many stay on them. At all times, the instructors have locked and sealed messenger bags full of pharmaceuticals strapped to their torsos like baby marsupials. Though Willson emphasizes that SOAR is not a way to get kids off ADHD meds, some do find that they can taper off. Zack鈥檚 parents said they鈥檙e planning to toss his during his holiday break, and they expect to lower the dose of his stimulant as well. 鈥淭he changes in him have been nothing short of miraculous,鈥� says his mother, Marlene De Pecol. 鈥淣ow he鈥檚 just happy.鈥�

Taking meds didn鈥檛 seem to alter the daring trajectory of solo sailor Rutherford. He took multiple pills for six years until he was 16, when, like Zack, he managed to find a place more compatible with his brain鈥檚 wiring鈥攖he Eagle Rock School in Estes Park, Colorado, an adventure-based boarding school funded by the American Honda Education Corporation. Anker, meanwhile, says it鈥檚 possible he wouldn鈥檛 be making first ascents today if he鈥檇 taken Ritalin through his teenage years. His parents encouraged him to go outside instead. Climbing developed his technical mastery while helping him sit still when he needed to. It also likely helped his prefrontal cortex mature.

The senior Ankers were ahead of the curve, or perhaps about 10,000 years behind the curve, depending on how you look at it.

The fact is, all human children learn by exploration, and we are tying their shoelaces together鈥攏ot just with medication, but through over-structured, over-managed classrooms and sports teams, less freedom to roam, and ever more dazzling indoor seductions. Modern life has made all of us distractible and overwhelmed. As McGill鈥檚 Levitin explains, the average American owns and must keep track of thousands of times more possessions than the average hunter-gatherer. Each of us, one 2013 study projected, consumes 74 gigabytes daily. Teens now interact with screens more than six and a half hours per day, and that鈥檚 not including time at school, according to Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that helps parents make smart technology choices. 鈥淭he digital age is profoundly narrowing our horizons and our creativity, not to mention our bodies and physiological capabilities,鈥� says environmental photographer James Balog, even as his hard-won chronicles of a changing planet are delivered to millions digitally. Yet Balog, who says he has mild ADHD, can hardly get his eighth-grade daughter off her phone. 鈥淭hese are hours not being spent outside,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t kills me.鈥�

The news isn鈥檛 all bad. While per capita visits to natural areas are down, participation by young people in a number of adventure sports like snowboarding and rock climbing is up. Solid research continues to make the case that kids benefit from time outside and regular exercise, and some schools are getting the message by instituting early-morning programs. More psychiatrists are also prescribing exercise for kids with ADHD. But the National Institute of Mental Health makes no mention of physical activity as a treatment option on its extensive website.

The radio silence on exercise is surprising, because studies consistently show that aerobic activity targets the same attentional networks that ADHD medication does. While fitness improves learning in both kids and adults, it鈥檚 adolescents like Zack鈥攚hose prefrontal cortex is in the very midst of laying down a lifetime of hardware鈥攚ho seem to benefit the most. John Green, a biobehavioral psychologist at the University of Vermont, and graduate student Meghan Eddy exercised some adult and juvenile rats and then tasked them with learning how to find food in a maze. The young rats who exercised bested the non-exercisers and did as well as rats on Ritalin. It seemed the playful and exploratory adolescent years exist to boost learning in mammals, just as SOAR鈥檚 Willson intuited. Or, as Green more formally puts it, 鈥淭he adolescent prefrontal cortex is ready to be molded by environmental experience.鈥�

So there you have it: the time is now. There鈥檚 a limited window to best launch these kids and, perhaps in so doing, safeguard a future of innovative exploration by the very young people who are wired to do it better than anybody else.

The ADHD population is an advance guard. If they can recognize how to better adapt their environments for their brains, there鈥檚 hope for the rest of us.

After many years languishing in the Formica-filled classrooms of West Hartford, Zack Smith is ready. He and his pals gather around the fire pit back at camp, bellies full of hamburgers and pickles. It鈥檚 very dark out. Tomorrow all 14 boys will make the four pitches up the South Peak at Seneca Rocks. A couple of days after that, they鈥檒l backpack across the Dolly Sods Wilderness Area, and then they鈥檒l visit Stonewall Jackson鈥檚 grave and read poetry written by the general鈥檚 sister-in-law. For now, they鈥檙e tired if not exactly mellow.

Zack鈥檚 job for the day is Captain Planet, meaning he鈥檚 the mighty taker-out of trash. Another kid named Max is Scribe. At 16, Max is an expeller of colossal farts, and proud of it. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 do anything halfway in the outdoors,鈥� he says. He shared with me on the trail that he is also an expert squirrel hunter, climber, and river runner. When he is done with school, he intends to find a job guiding. Now, beturbaned in a purple bandana, he opens the group journal and prepares to record notes on the day鈥檚 events under the narrow red beam of a headlamp.

Zack is lying on his back and looking up at the stars. He is impressed. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 have these at home,鈥� he says.

Contributing editor Florence Williams is the author of .

The post ADHD Is Fuel for 国产吃瓜黑料 appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Many things scare me: the huge rock at the bottom of Boulder Garden on Colorado鈥檚 Gunnison River that has flipped my kayak numerous times; the chutes off the stormy top of the Big Sky tram; sullen men with clubs who lurk in Kenya鈥檚 Ngong Hills (I met them a while back).

Can a scientist in an eggplant-colored blazer wielding cartoons of spiders instill fear in me?

Yes, he can.

Kevin LaBar is part evil genius, part Wizard of Oz. He creates sinister worlds that make your heart race, palms sweat, stomach clench鈥攁nd then he cures you.

He is, you might say, Dr. Fear.

LaBar is a professor at Duke University鈥檚 , where he and others conduct twisted experiments using a nine-foot-square Rubik鈥檚 Cube of an alternate universe. Known as the DIVE (for ), it is one of only a handful of similar rooms deployed in academic institutions worldwide. Designed to be used with six stereoscopic projectors and real-time head and hand tracking, this is where archeologists explore 3-D representations of Roman ruins and molecular biologists manipulate double helixes and histones. It鈥檚 not zero gravity, but it almost feels like it could be.

The DIVE is also where a colleague of LaBar鈥檚 has created something they call the Kitchen from Hell, designed to measure stress tolerance by subjecting its victims鈥攗sually unsuspecting psych majors鈥攖o an onslaught of minor miseries, from a teakettle that won鈥檛 turn off to honking cars, barking dogs, a loud ticking clock, and a 鈥渇ailure task鈥�: find your lost keys as soon as possible. Only (heh heh) there are no keys.

LaBar has been inflicting everything from predators to math tests on volunteers for several years as a way to understand fear鈥攈ow we acquire it, how we recover from it, and whether there鈥檚 any way to speed up the process of conquering it so that we can go back to enjoying our one precious picnic of a life. I wanted to better understand fear in the context of outdoor sports and adventure, because it is both a lock and a key. Fear can prevent us from doing the things we love and from loving the things we do, but it can also, if we鈥檙e lucky, help us access peak emotional experiences. As scientists are confirming, adventure seeking isn鈥檛 just about skill, planning, and the right group of buddies. It鈥檚 also about a Milk Dud鈥搒ize piece of our brains鈥攖he amygdala鈥攁nd how to get a grip on it.

Because of my interest in earthly terrors, LaBar plans to attack me with snakes and spiders. The glitch, however, is that I鈥檓 not generally very frightened of snakes and spiders, especially fake ones, and neither are a lot of LaBar鈥檚 volunteers. (Genuine phobias of any sort occur in only about 8 percent of people.) So, to make the animations more fearsome, LaBar has added voltage to the mix: now the little monsters appear with real bite, in the form of a shock delivered to my left wrist. Before I enter the DIVE, Matt Fecteau, the lab manager and resident techie, attaches probes to my arm. Wires connect me to a white box with dials and meters.

鈥淒o you feel it now? How about now?鈥�

Matt cranks up the dial. It鈥檚 been a while since they used this instrument of torture in a study, and it was usually operated by a postdoc who has since moved to Sweden. I can鈥檛 help but picture Westley inside the medieval life-sucking machine in the movie The Princess Bride. It鈥檚 supposed to be uncomfortable but not searing. I feel an unpleasant zing. We take it up to just over 40 volts (for perspective, good electric lawn mowers are 40 volts), delivered with a constant amperage. 鈥淭he amperage is the thing,鈥� says Fecteau, fiddling. 鈥淵ou don鈥檛 want to get too high or it鈥檚 deadly.鈥�

There鈥檚 more fiddling and Fecteau is moving some wires around when I feel a big zing鈥攓uite a big zing鈥攁nd I yelp a bit. Everyone looks at me. 鈥淭hat must have been electrical interference,鈥� someone says. Then it happens again. More yelping. This is the pain zone. 鈥淲e better move the machine away from the computer wires.鈥�

If I was feeling calm and confident about spiderland, now I鈥檓 not. When Fecteau hooks me up to palm sensors that monitor my skin conductance鈥攁 fancy term for sweating鈥擨鈥檓 already halfway up the stress graph. I am, as LaBar puts it, nicely pre-stressed. The DIVE is eerily quiet. The booth works like a 3-D movie: the action is projected onto the walls, and you wear glasses to get the full effect. I strap on a techno tiara that resembles scuba goggles but with built-in gyroscope, magnetic compass, and gravity sensor to track my head in space. I am seated like Miss Muffet, waiting for the show to begin.

The ground starts moving, and I鈥檓 floating through a forest as if on a hoverboard. Above me are sky and tree canopy. If I move my head, my new world moves with me. The technology is pretty amazing. Sometimes the animation slows. A spider the size of a coffee mug skitters across the top of a boulder or climbs a log next to my leg. It has unnaturally long, jagged legs and moves to the unnerving sound of ticking. Each time, it vanishes after a few seconds. Sometimes a coiled snake the size of a Frisbee appears and opens its jaws to bite me. It鈥檚 brown and plump and appears to a soundtrack of rattles. That鈥檚 when a small jolt hits my wrist; it鈥檚 barely noticeable, but I keep expecting it to be worse. I feel the uneasy buildup of anticipation. I鈥檓 wondering if I can just return to the Kitchen from Hell. This goes on for about seven or eight minutes, then the shocks stop while the images continue. The pain doesn鈥檛 return, and soon it鈥檚 over.

There鈥檚 some debate about whether we are born with primal fears of snakes or we learn them. Research last year by primatologist Lynne Isbell at the University of California at Davis found that Japanese macaque monkeys are born with specific nerve cells in the brain that respond to snakes. This suggests that at one time serpents were dangerous enough to our ancestors to drive heritable changes in brain physiology. Certainly, our brains are hardwired for fear. The old adage that horses and dogs can smell it is not only true but may apply to humans, too; research subjects who smell the sweat of scared people enter a hyperalert state themselves.

Some psychologists argue that fear is our oldest emotion, existing in the earliest forms of life on earth and predating the drive to reproduce. It鈥檚 even possible that fear is the basis of the full spectrum of human emotions, as we evolved ways to calm ourselves from our well-honed anxieties. The main reason we remember anything, scientists posit, is that we must remember fear. Emotional events, but especially fearful ones, release calcium in the brain, which in turn encodes information. Thanks to fear, we have Proust.

Fear protects us鈥攊t kept our ancestors vigilant and helped them detect and avoid physical threats. But fear can also hijack us, keeping us from performing at our peak. The so-called fight, flight, or freeze response was useful in the Pleistocene but is less so today, when our fears involve things like surfing Maverick鈥檚 for fun or giving public speeches. Now we deal with stress and anxiety more than outright predator terrors, but physiologically speaking stress resembles fear, with the same rise in sweat and blood pressure and release of combat-ready hormones. Our brains treat all fears鈥攆rom cheese phobias (yes, people have those) to standing at the top of an icy ski chute鈥攖he same way on a crude continuum. Technically, the term anxiety refers to an expectation of harm, while fear is what happens in the moment.

In the deepest clutches of fear (Gorgonzola!), our primitive brain stem overrides our problem-solving neocortex, and we become stupid. Our fine motor skills deteriorate, and our field of vision narrows. Sports psychologists know that fear can choke us, distract us, and impair our judgment. If you鈥檝e ever tried to talk someone (or yourself) down from a cliff, or experienced sewing-machine leg on a narrow ledge, or moved in slow motion from a hazard when you should have been on fast-forward, you know that fear doesn鈥檛 always save your ass. Sometimes it dishes it up on a platter.

Fear serves two main purposes: it鈥檚 supposed to jack you up with enough adrenaline to fight a threat, and to etch the experience into your brain so you know to avoid that threat in the future. Sometimes it flubs the first task, but it does the second one particularly well. Extreme fear can haunt us for decades. About 70 to 80 percent of us will experience it at least once in our lifetime鈥攁s a result of a serious accident or crime, watching someone die a terrible death, or a roadside bomb or natural disaster鈥攁nd more if we pursue high-risk work or play. About 8 percent will develop post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, essentially a very bad fear hangover.

It鈥檚 estimated that about 17 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered post-traumatic stress. And there鈥檚 some evidence that seasoned mountain climbers and other elite adventurers are less likely to develop it. (They still do, however; check out the latest edition of mountaineer Joe Simpson鈥檚 classic , in which he catalogs his lasting panic attacks and weeping fits.) Some people鈥檚 brains are genetically, preternaturally stress resilient, and these are often the types drawn to adventure sports. Conrad Anker has witnessed avalanches, carried friends鈥� lifeless bodies, and suffered extreme physical deprivation. Yet the mountains continue to call him. 鈥淚 do go back for more,鈥� says Anker, 51. 鈥淚鈥檓 less afraid than I used to be. Chalk it up to experience and the way that I鈥檓 wired. I鈥檓 not normal.鈥�

Brains like Anker鈥檚 appear to process fear in a less intense way, and they recover from it quickly. But for many others, PTSD can cause debilitating long-term mood swings, twitchy nerves, nightmares, flashbacks, aggression, depression, substance abuse, and suicide.

鈥淲e need to understand how memory works in healthy brains to understand how it might be altered in these disorders,鈥� LaBar explains. 鈥淲e鈥檙e trying to come up with better training regimens that help people reach their goals and transfer those goals across many environments.鈥�

Even healthy brains show a wide range of fear responses. Women tend to suffer more from anxiety and may be more likely to develop PTSD, but scientists aren鈥檛 sure why; it could also be that men are conditioned to hide it. Most people, unlike Anker, appear to grow more fearful of certain activities as they age. Both men and women produce less courage-boosting testosterone as they get older and their skills and reflexes decline. Regardless, fear is not a fixed response, says LaBar. We can learn to get a grip.

Back in the laboratory, I step out of the holo-deck of vipers and view my skin-conductance graph. It looks like Nevada: basins and ranges. 鈥淵ou鈥檙e a good subject. You scare well,鈥� says LaBar, who grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and prefers the gym to the outdoors, which could help explain his fondness for technology as a window into the soul. 鈥淵ou showed response to both spiders and snakes, but you showed a bigger response to the snake when it was paired with the shock.鈥� LaBar points to a steep rise in the graph. 鈥淭he shocks started here, and it really spiked higher. The double bumps go away when the shocks went away. Classic.鈥�

LaBar assures me that by showing me snakes with no shocks toward the end of the 3-D session, my brain learned to dismiss the threat. This recovery is called fear extinction or exposure therapy. It鈥檚 the basis for the most effective methods for treating fear disorders like phobias: show the phobic friendly snakes until they feel comfortable, even ready to hold them. The idea is that you essentially create new, better memories that outcompete the frightful ones. What鈥檚 so great about virtual reality, says LaBar, is that you can show any kind of fear trigger in any context. Snakes in the woods. Snakes in the office. Snakes in bed. (Wait, that was Freud.) LaBar鈥檚 studies show that extinction therapy is more effective when carried out in these diverse settings.

The keep-on-doing-it-safely strategy can also work outside the shrink鈥檚 office. It鈥檚 how most of us learn to push ourselves in risky sports, a little bit at a time, gradually gaining skills and confidence. Taken to an extreme, you get Jeb Corliss, the videogenic BASE jumper whose recent stunts include flying 123 miles per hour in a wingsuit between two canyon walls spaced just 25 feet apart. Unexpectedly, Corliss claims he used to be a fraidycat.

鈥淚鈥檝e spent my whole life confronting fear,鈥� says Corliss, who鈥檚 38. 鈥淚鈥檝e been obsessed with it since childhood. When things terrified me, I was compelled to confront them. I was afraid of snakes, so I started catching snakes鈥攆irst garter snakes, then bigger snakes, then finally rattlesnakes. Then I became obsessed with sharks, so I started diving. I didn鈥檛 want these fears to have power and control over me.

Then, in South Africa in 2012, Corliss jumped off a ledge, misread a target, and slammed into a granite wall at 120 mph. He broke his left fibula and both ankles, ripped his ACL, cut open his body, and went into kidney failure. After a few days in the hospital, a psychologist came to see him about PTSD. 鈥淪he was like, 鈥榃ow, you鈥檙e doing fine. This has not affected you in the slightest,鈥欌�夆�� Corliss says. A few months and skin grafts later, he was back in the suit.

OK, Corliss is a bit of an outlier.

Most of us have bigger struggles after a bad accident. Unfortunately, exposure methods don鈥檛 always work, especially for violent or complex fears. The brain is a three-pound organ of survival. It doesn鈥檛 necessarily want you to feel comfortable doing dangerous things. It wants you to go home and bake baklava. 鈥淓ven with regular extinction therapy, you can get the return of fear,鈥� says Marie Monfils, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin. This is because the original trauma memory is still rooted in your hippocampus, ready to bark at your amygdala alongside the new memories of better times on the battlefield or in the tube.

This has been the experience for big-wave champion Greg Long, who almost died while surfing a three-story wave off Southern California鈥檚 Cortes Bank in 2012. Long was battered by the break and forced down under three massive waves until he lost consciousness near the surface. A jet skier finally pulled him out. Returning to sea wasn鈥檛 easy. 鈥淚 went back out less than a month later,鈥� says Long, 31. 鈥淚t was the most terrifying thing I鈥檝e ever done. There was instant fear and panic, the thought that I don鈥檛 want to be here. It鈥檚 still hard. Overcoming those fears is about getting beyond emotions and respecting the process. Sometimes those emotions are there, sometimes not. I like to think it鈥檚 easier the more I do it, but I鈥檓 going to carry them with me forever.鈥�

As Long is finding out, the anticipation of a threat can be as bad as the threat itself. As he and LaBar describe it, memory is glued to emotion in things we鈥檙e supposed to remember. That鈥檚 why fear memories make our palms sweat. So the main idea in any number of fear-mastery techniques is to peel away the memory from the emotion. To get all Zen about it, it鈥檚 not the dragon that scares us, it鈥檚 our response to the dragon. The trick, then, is to tame ourselves.

Our dragons first travel to the brain through a sensory pathway, such as the optic thalamus, LaBar explains. Within 100 milliseconds, before our conscious brain even knows it, the threat signal rushes to the amygdala, the small but powerful emotional core. It鈥檚 the amygdala that pulls the alarm on our autonomic nervous system for a surging heartbeat, the result of which is rapid breathing, buckling bowels, that cold sensation as your blood leaves your surface layers to travel to muscle, and so on. By now the information has traveled back up to our neocortex via neurotransmitters like cortisol, adrenaline, and dopamine.

If the amygdala is our inner hysterical hausfrau, the highly evolved neocortex is our let鈥檚-be-reasonable-here negotiator. Between them something of a power struggle ensues. In some people, the amygdala tends to stay in charge, while in others, quick, strategic decision making takes over. Part of this tendency is inherited, but it鈥檚 also subject to manipulation through training, willpower, and a nice dose of Xanax or propranolol, a beta-blocker that prevents adrenaline from binding to cell receptors. Propranolol is also known as the stage-fright drug; an opera singer once thoughtfully smuggled me a dose before my first book talk. By lowering your heart rate, it literally makes you calm, cool, and collected. Regrettably, it does not turn you into Winston Churchill.

In a perfect world, we would all react optimally to fear, use it to assess risk, calculate our best options, and return rapidly to baseline. When ski guide Allen O鈥橞annon, coauthor of the classic , stepped onto a patch of rotten snow while ice climbing in the Wind River Range in 1995, he found himself falling 300 feet. Time slowed. An image came to his mind from a conversation he鈥檇 had with another ice climber who鈥檇 survived a fall. He鈥檇 told O鈥橞annon that he鈥檇 rolled into a ball to keep his crampons and ice ax from catching on the slope and creating a worse impact zone. O鈥橞annon pulled in his arms and legs until his rope finally arrested him. Now 50 and a risk manager for Denver-based , he tells clients, mostly scientists, about the power of preparation.

In a crisis, O鈥橞annon explains, some people panic and some stay cool. The vast majority, though, fall into what he calls 鈥渢he bewildered state,鈥� in which they pretty much do nothing to take charge of their situation. 鈥淚 push training in as many simulations as you can,鈥� he says. 鈥淎t what distance will you pull your bear spray? How will you react when you fall into a river? The idea is to know what failure feels like. If you can鈥檛 train, visualize. Then your response becomes automatic.鈥�

When Greg Long was unable to breathe under the waves, he stayed calm and slowly climbed his leash line to the surface. He鈥檇 trained for years to hold his breath past the comfort zone; he knew what it felt like. 鈥淭here was no panic, no questioning, just, This is what I鈥檓 going to do if I鈥檓 going to survive,鈥� he says. 鈥淭here were no negative thoughts or wasted energy. I was totally focused. Until we let go of our fears, we don鈥檛 begin to reach our potential capabilities.鈥�

Sometimes fear can help provide the focus we need. People who are comfortable on its jagged edge know how to use it to their advantage. 鈥淔ear is energy,鈥� says Jaimal Yogis, a surfer and author of last year鈥檚 science-steeped memoir . Fear, he says, is mediated by arousal systems similar to those for sex and exercise. That鈥檚 why it feels good to experience it in the context of a horror movie or a Class III rapid. When our nervous systems are aroused but not in full alarm, we are paying attention. Our senses are primed. Our working memory increases. We feel alive. The flip side of fear is flow, that delicious state in which time drops away and you are fully engaged and present.

Sian Beilock, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, has studied what happens to volunteers taking timed math tests. Most people experience math anxiety. Their cortisol levels rise, and their misery and self-doubt actually inhibit their working memory, causing them to perform worse than they would otherwise. But an interesting thing happens to people who are confident in their math skills: the cortisol actually makes them better. They become more focused.

Does this mean we鈥檙e doomed if we fear math or that steep tree run that makes our knees shake? No, says Beilick. Because we can learn to tune out the negative thought stream鈥攑aralysis by analysis鈥攖hat drains precious cognitive juice. This overthinking is the classic choke pathway known all too well by professional athletes. 鈥淵ou鈥檙e not born a choker,鈥� she says.

In other words, you can go from being someone who is hamstrung by fear to someone who is impelled by it. But it takes some work, says Beilock. 鈥淧eople can train themselves out. You can sing a song, distract yourself in the moment. Think about the outcome you want rather than your knees. Have a one-word mantra.鈥�

Canadian slopestyle skier says that if she can get a grip, anyone can. 鈥淚 am a high-anxiety person, one of the most nervous athletes,鈥� says the 26-year-old X Games gold medalist. 鈥淚 tend to overthink things. Going into these events, I generally feel like the world is on the line.鈥� After Turski ripped her third ACL on a switch 720 just six months before the Sochi Olympics, she knew the recovery would be as much mental as physical. Because of her anxieties, she鈥檇 already started working with Los Angeles sports psychologist , who helped Felix Baumgartner overcome his panic attacks before dropping like a rock from space in 2012, free-falling 24 miles and breaking the sound barrier.

The crux of their work has been mindfulness training. 鈥淚 meditate every day,鈥� says Turski. 鈥淎s soon as your mind wanders, that鈥檚 when you introduce fear. It鈥檚 as simple as tuning back into the now. I haven鈥檛 perfected this, but it has 100 percent changed my life.鈥�

The work was central to her comeback. It helped her take her eighth gold in worldwide X Games, but it couldn鈥檛 keep her from catching a bad cold and falling鈥攖wice鈥攊n Sochi. She placed 19th. 鈥淭hat experience shook me more than anything had ever shaken me,鈥� Turski says. 鈥淚t was a reality check. Things don鈥檛 always go your way. So I got back on the meditation track. Life isn鈥檛 so bad. You have to emerge into the light. Here I learned that I could survive something.鈥�

Few seem to have mastered fear so completely as Alex Honnold and Dean Potter, both of whom do unimaginably terrifying things hundreds of feet off the ground without a safety net.

鈥淚 wouldn鈥檛 say I don鈥檛 get afraid,鈥� says Honnold, 29, who is known for his free-solo ascents of big walls. 鈥淚t鈥檚 just that I鈥檓 more rational about it. If you鈥檙e fully in control of the variables, you shouldn鈥檛 have anything to be afraid of. Walking on a handrail or beam, if you know you can do it, it shouldn鈥檛 really matter how big the drop is.鈥� But that attitude has taken time to cultivate. 鈥淚 think mastery of fear is a skill,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t may be partly that I鈥檓 more skilled at soloing. I鈥檓 less nervous about a lot of things now. In general I鈥檓 more relaxed.鈥�

Dean Potter鈥檚 mother was a yoga teacher. That awareness of stillness came in handy in 2012, when the 42-year-old wingsuit jumper highlined a mile-high, 130-foot span across China鈥檚 Enshi Grand Canyon with zero protection. 鈥淚鈥檓 not so good at sitting on the floor and meditating,鈥� says Potter. 鈥淚 use those skills way better when I鈥檓 moving. Any time I鈥檓 having difficulty, I focus on the breath, on relaxed breathing. If I have a combination of calm and fear, I access mental states way beyond normal consciousness. That鈥檚 why I choose to do scary things.鈥�

Whatever Honnold and Potter have, the military would like to bottle it, and so would a lot of coaches. Although Marines might prefer a pill to the lotus position, the data on meditation鈥檚 ability to calm the nervous system is impressive, says Martin Paulus, director of the Tulsa, Oklahoma, . Marine training already includes four-count 鈥渃ombat breathing鈥� during stress. The , along with the Office of Naval Research, recently conducted a study in which infantry Marines learned other tricks for hacking their fear systems, including 鈥渘onjudgmentally paying attention鈥� to passing thoughts and feelings. In brain scans, Marines who received the eight-week training showed less activation in the anterior cingulate, a midbrain region that processes emotions, and in the insula, which trafficks in physical sensations. Paulus, who was on the team for the study, says that these regions work to dampen the amygdala so the more rational cortex can step in.

This study and others also show that mindfulness can help people recover from fear by making their brains more resilient. After the course, called Mindfulness-Based Mind Fitness Training, these brain regions in the Marines seemed to gain efficiency, and they more closely resembled those of Navy SEALs and elite athletes. When researchers deliberately stressed Marines by restricting their breathing and showing them pictures of angry faces, the meditators returned more quickly to lower heart rates, and their brains released less neuropeptide Y, a transmitter associated with stress.

The military is also experimenting with virtual reality at Buckley Air Force Base, outside Denver, to prep its troops for deployment. The idea is to expose National Guard members to the experience of seeing and handling human remains, and of witnessing violence and death, while teaching them techniques to deal with the stress. These include mindfulness, but also reframing the events in less fearful ways.

Sometimes just talking or writing about fear reduces its power, says Matt Lieberman, a social neuroscientist at UCLA. His lab looked at volunteers who were desperately afraid of spiders and had them go through exposure therapy (with real arthropods this time). Researchers told half the group to speak about how terrified they were. Lieberman calls this process labeling. Unexpectedly, these were the most successful patients, the ones 鈥渨ho could eventually put their hand in the cage and rub spiders with Q-tips,鈥� says Lieberman. 鈥淲e think labeling turns on the system that regulates brain learning in a long-term way that doesn鈥檛 have to activate the amygdala,鈥� he says. In other words, articulating their fears out loud activated a different part of the brain, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, that detours the fear from the brain stem. These subjects were better able to keep their wits about them, literally, since wits exist far outside the amygdala.

LaBar and others are also trying to help the cortex override the amygdala, which has implications for the treatment of PTSD. Recall that during exposure therapy, two memories are competing for dominance: the trauma memory and the safety memory. If you can literally reach out and poke neurons in certain parts of the cortex鈥攆or example, the ventral medial zone, associated with emotional regulation鈥攖hen you can help the safety memory win the wrestling match. Based on rat studies, one way to do this is with deep-brain electrodes or transcranial magnetic stimulation, already used occasionally to treat severe depression.

This is a lot of work to suppress a bad memory, but someday soon scientists envision shortcuts, through the help of drugs, technology, specially timed therapy, or a combination of approaches. Because wouldn鈥檛 it be better to just wipe out that bad memory鈥攐r replace it altogether?

The idea that we can master our fears is alluring. It鈥檚 one of Hollywood鈥檚 favorite plot devices, and it represents the ultimate Cartesian transcendence of reason over biology. But as scientists are increasingly learning, the mind, and not just the brain, is biological. Memories themselves are patched into neurons by calcium and proteins, and the whole process is mediated by a neurotransmitter called glutamate. The memories exist in specific places in our hippocampus, like books in a library, from which they can be retrieved. Scientists had assumed that those static memories would be there forever, even if dementia meant that we couldn鈥檛 always access them.

But recent research suggests that each time you check out those memories, they have the potential to be updated or changed. According to the University of Texas鈥檚 Monfils, the act of retrieval seems to engage new proteins and chemical reactions, to the point that the memory itself becomes briefly destabilized. She studies this effect in rats that, like I was, were fear-conditioned to a cue (in their case, a tone instead of a spider) with an electroshock. If you expose the rats to a harmless tone up to six hours after they were last scared, the memory loses its attachment to fear. Wait longer than six hours and it solidifies into concrete. Monfils believes that if you time standard exposure therapy to this window of rewriting, you can 鈥渞econsolidate鈥� the memory in a helpful way.

鈥淲e can update the memory and prevent the return of fear,鈥� she says. This holds promise for humans with PTSD, as do drug interventions using beta-blockers during memory reconsolidation. But these are early days. 鈥淚t would be irresponsible to suggest that these are real techniques. It鈥檚 definitely science fiction right now,鈥� says Elizabeth Phelps, a neuroscience professor at New York University, who has collaborated with Monfils.

It鈥檚 hard not to think about this without imagining yourself on the set of Total Recall or The Bourne Identity, because the implications are profound and definitely a little creepy. Without your original memories, are you still you? Are we willing to sacrifice a little selfhood at the altar of better performance or national security? After all, we鈥檇 be much better killing machines if we didn鈥檛 remember we killed.

Personally, I鈥檓 not ready for the loss of fear. I like the sweet spot of fear and courage. That鈥檚 where mountains get scaled and rivers descended and the heroes still come home. Most of all, it鈥檚 where the greatest acts of creativity occur鈥攁nd, with them, stories about fear and courage. In the act of telling and the act of listening, we celebrate the melding of our old and new brains, which is, after all, where we become human.

Contributing editor Florence Williams is the author of Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History.

The post The Science of Conquering Your Greatest Fears appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

There have been plenty of books documenting the myriad ways that climate change will take us all down. In (Penguin, $28), Seattle journalist and frequent 国产吃瓜黑料 contributor McKenzie Funk takes a contrarian approach, reporting on the people鈥攁nd, in the case of Greenland and Canada, countries鈥攖hat are poised to profit handsomely from the coming chaos. Funk tracks down Arctic oil strategists, Israeli snowmakers, arable-land grabbers, and those cunning enough to privatize public services, from water delivery to firefighting. So is it pragmatism, opportunism, or pure steely greed?

Author McKenzie Funk

(Penguin, )