Summary: Forest therapy sessions can be done either with a guide or alone. There might not be a local guide near you or the guided sessions are expensive. In any case, doing solo forest sessions offer lots of great benefits: experiencing awe, reducing cortisol and our response to stress and a greater opportunity for introspection.

“Why do I need a forest therapy guide?” This is an uncommon question. And it’s fair. After all, unless you’re paying to visit a forest or paying for parking or transportation, it’s a free activity.

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While there are many benefits to joining a reputable forest therapy facilitator on guided sessions (and we will discuss this more in an upcoming post), there are great reasons for doing forest therapy sessions on your own, which we will cover in today’s post.

Experiencing awe through nature: Dacher Keltner is professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and the director of the Greater Good Science Center. He has done a great deal of research on the topic of awe, which he summarised in the must read book Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder. His research shows that the second more frequent sense of awe comes from nature (the first comes from “moral beauty”, such as examples of kindness, courage, everyday acts of generosity). By awe, Keltner means “the feeling we get in the presence of something vast that challenges our understanding of the world”, so in nature, this could mean being amazed by a BBC nature documentary, marvelling at a spider web, or looking up at the stars. 

The benefits of awe in nature are numerous: calming our response to stress and lowering cortisol, making you less focused on yourself and more interested in other people and more open minded, thinking more rigorously and evaluating data more objectively, being more environmentally conscious, making us more generous and giving, and helping us getting better quality sleep.

Being outside in nature on a solo forest therapy session helps you experience the benefits of awe.

A more immersive experience and greater opportunity for introspection: Solo sessions also mean that you’re able to go through nature on your own in your own time and space. You’re not required to move to the pace of a group or participate in activities that might not appeal to you. When you are walking through a natural space on your own, you are of course with yourself and with your own thoughts. This can be uncomfortable, particularly in our modern life, when we are frequently in the company of our phones and have access to constant distractions. 

But if you can leave the phone behind or on silent so that you are not distracted, and you allow yourself to just be in the forest, you will find that eventually your senses start becoming more attuned to the world around you. You become immersed in the world around you and activate your default mode network (DMN), which is a connected group of regions of the brain that become active when we are at rest and not engaged in tasks that are mentally demanding or those that require us to focus deeply. Activating the DMN allows us to be more introspective, think more about our purpose, where we get meaning, how we interact with the world around us.

Lack of availability and the expense of guided sessions: More practically, and unfortunately, there are many barriers to many people being able to tap into the benefits of forest therapy. Whilst the United Nations declared in 2022 that everyone has the right to clean, healthy and sustainable environment, Natural England has estimated that more than one in three people here in England, do not live within a 15-minute walk to a green space or a body of water. 

For those of us who do have access to the natural world, we might not live near someone who offers facilitated forest therapy sessions or we might not be able to afford these sessions. Cost and availability of forest therapy sessions should not be barriers, so for that reason, solo sessions are a great way for everyone to experience the benefits of forest therapy. 

Although I love guiding participants on sessions, I also think it’s absolutely critical for everyone to find a way to get outside, even if on their own, to recharge, experience awe, and get out of our own heads.

Note: In a study of 37 undergraduate students by Chungbuk National University in South Korea, participants were randomly assigned to two groups: 19 in the self-guided forest therapy group and 18 in the guided forest therapy program group. Each group participated in eight sessions. The guided forest therapy sessions were one hour and a half per week for eight weeks and a trained forest therapist delivered each session. For the self guided sessions, participants were asked to spend an hour walking a marked route in the university campus forest, and to visit specific locations where explained panels on forest activities were installed. The study concluded that self-guided forest therapy provides an opportunity for self-reflection to focus on and to think about one’s inner self. On the other hand, guided forest therapy programs have been shown to be effective in providing participants with positive emotional changes and promoting social bonds through interaction with others. Whilst the sample size here is small, it gives some good indications of how self-guided and guided forest therapy sessions might differ in the benefits.