Our lives seem to get more stressful by the day. This stress builds up to unbearable amounts sometimes. Continuously, people turn to therapists to cope with these amounting responsibilities. This isn’t the route I have taken to deal with anxiety. Like a sensible human, when I got one day off of work, I went on a 15-mile hike. Although this hike is longer than what most people do, it serves the same function. Hikes give you the time to be disconnected from the busy world and process your thoughts. It is where you can breathe fresh air that isn’t tainted by your worries. If you hike with a friend, you can talk things out. Simply put, it gives you time to think. For me, hiking is therapeutic. When I hike, I have the best “me time." I get so caught up in my thought process that the miles go by quickly and all I have to do is remind myself to look at the ground and not trip.
The most recent hike I went on was with one of my best friends, who I hike with frequently. She is my friend who I talk with anything and everything about. Although we have drastically different personalities, we usually come to the same conclusion about things. Even if we don’t agree, I can always count on her to give her honest opinion. As someone who always likes to have a second opinion on things, I love running things by her. It’s hard when we both have full-time jobs and go to different schools and have our own busy lives, to talk everything through like we used to. I work hard to make time for my friends but it always ends up getting cut short by responsibilities. When our days off coincided, we decided to drive an hour out of the city to go on a hike. We had both done the first part of the hike to a popular waterfall, but the neither of us had done the entirety of it. On the hike, there were a plethora of waterfalls, rocks, creeks and other natural phenomena.
Although we picked the hike for the views it touted, the real takeaway from hiking, for me at least, is the peace that it brings. Inevitably, at the beginning, we were excited and energetic and talking nonstop. We were catching up and telling each other everything we had wanted to say. As the hike went on and we got tired, the talking got sparser. We didn’t run out of things to talk about; we were just choosing what we had to say and what we wanted to keep in our own heads. One second we would be talking 10 million words per minute, and the next it would be dead silent with only the sound of the creek to be heard. This serene setting gave me the time and place to think through things thoroughly that have been adding up in my daily life. I had been too stressed to think about them before. Each step I took, I remained calm and surrounded by beauty.
Whether you hike frequently or not, I highly recommend that you do it so can get outside, be active and relieve your stress. Hiking may not be actual therapy, but it can feel similar.
