Alana Fallon is a licensed social worker and the owner of Into the Woods therapy. She got into the outdoors five and a half years ago.
"When I got sober, I needed activities to kind of fill my time. And hiking was something that I really enjoyed. And so I started going out with my dog hiking more often, and I really just loved it. So as I was thinking about starting my own practice, I knew I wanted to incorporate, like hiking and walking into my practice," Fallon said.
She says being in nature is unique and offers many benefits. The first is that being outdoors can be very grounding and it activates your parasympathetic nervous system.
"It just kind of slows down your heart rate, slows down your breathing. It also boosts your mood and gives you dopamine when you're going for a walk or getting that movement. And you usually have higher levels of dopamine when you're doing that," Fallon said.
It can also boost creativity. Fallon says she’s seen an increased need for mental health support since after the pandemic as well as a bigger push to get outdoors. She’s received training in nature based interventions, internal family systems therapy, and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, which is also known as EMDR. The basis of EMDR is bilateral stimulation, which Fallon says the creator of EMDR therapy, Francine Shapiro, got the idea of from walking.
"She noticed that when she was walking, she was able to kind of process her emotions and her memories and feel really grounded and not overly activated. So walking is its own form of bilateral stimulation," Fallon said.
A big question that Fallon gets about nature therapy is, how do you keep confidentiality? Especially being outside in a public place, others can potentially hear what her patient is saying.
"What we do is we kind of come up one with a code word for if someone is passing us while we're walking. And just so that we can kind of just maybe stop talking about what we are if it's like an intense conversation while those people pass and then we can kind of go right back to it," she said.
She also says it’s important to discuss ahead of time what her patient likes to introduce her as, such as a friend or colleague, if they ever run into someone the patient knows during a session.