If you tell a friend that instead of snacking on junk food at work you’ve been eating two hard-boiled eggs each day for the past month and have lost five pounds as a result, that friend will surely congratulate you. But if that friend is also a perfectionist, you’ll get more than congratulations.

You’ll get asked, “How are you boiling the eggs?”

Go for a laugh, say, “In water,” and the best you can expect is a distracted smile. For a perfectionist is already focused upon what to say to prove there is an ideal way to do so.

But if you’re more of a realist than an idealist, you won’t be interested in hearing the proof.

It’s research from the University of Naples Federico II in Italy and published in the February 2025 issue of Communications Engineering that determined to get both the whites and the yolks perfect, you need to move an egg from a pan in which the water temperature is 212 degrees Fahrenheit to one that’s 86 degrees Fahrenheit every two minutes 15 times. And, from a realist’s point of view, spending 32 minutes to get six eggs hard-boiled (six, that is, if you’re an egg juggler extraordinaire) is hardly ideal.

In fact, it’s impractical and just as illogical as thinking impractical measures will improve or maintain your health and fitness for the long-term.

Now I do consider, in a pen pal sort of way, that we are friends, and I am aware that many of mine feel I’m both an idealist and a perfectionist. So I can only hope you hear me out as I explain a rather practical way to improve your mental health.

Get outdoors and be aware.

Doing so has been shown to help your mental health in a number of different studies in a number of different ways. One example of this was published in the September 1991 issue of the Journal of Environmental Psychology and used 120 subjects, a stressful movie, and three videotapes each of urban and natural settings.

After having the subjects view the stressful movie, they were shown one of the six videotapes. In between the two viewings and afterwards, the researchers checked the subjects’ level of stress using a number of physiological measures, such as heart rate, muscle tension, and a “non-invasive measure that correlates with systolic blood pressure, and the subjects themselves rated if and to what degree they were feeling stress.”

In essence, the study corroborates what’s called the psycho-evolutionary theory for it found “if individuals are stressed, an encounter with most unthreatening natural environments will have a stress reducing or restorative influence, whereas many urban environments will hamper recuperation.”

Published in the August 2016 issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology, another study employed more subjects and a slightly different approach to find that encounters with nature do more than mitigate stress.

In it, 395 undergraduates at Concordia University of Edmonton were randomly assigned to one of three groups. One group served as the control group and was told to do nothing out of the ordinary during the next two weeks. The second was told to pay particular attention to the nature they encountered in their daily surroundings and to take photographs of the “objects/scenes that evoked emotion in them” and to write about those emotions.

The third was to told to do the same as the second, but to focus on man-made objects instead of nature.

When the writings were assessed, the researchers found the second groups’ to have “significantly higher levels of net-positive effects, elevating experiences, a general sense of connectedness (to other people, to nature, and to life as a whole) and prosocial orientation” as compared to the third’s.

Those are just two of the many studies worthy of mention, and so is what Dr. Holli-Anne Passmore, Associate Professor, Department Chair, Department of Psychology at Concordia University of Edmonton explains in an Sarah Amandolare article for Web MD, “Feeling the Winter Blues? Notice Nature for a Well-Being Boost.” That you need not be looking at something grandiose like the Grand Canyon for mental benefits to occur. That they can happen from simply noticing a bird in a tree or the moon at night.

Or, as it’s quite often the case for me, the winding creek aside the steep road I’m climbing on a bike — and finding rather taxing. It’s strange indeed: my legs can be screaming, my lungs can be heaving, but if I look at the water and listen to the rush it makes, I feel a sense of peace and greater purpose.

How can this be? The belief is that any experiences in nature activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the network of neurons and nerves that helps your body relax.

It’s why I’ve said to other cyclists more than once that a bad ride becomes good ride as soon as it passes a water source.