Reconnecting With The Great Outdoors - Five Benefits Of Camping

Whether you’re tired of the pace of city life, need an adventure or wish to connect with yourself on a more spiritual level, the great outdoors can provide for you. Camping is one of the most common ways for people to reconnect with the great outdoors, stripping away unnecessary burdens and encouraging people to focus on what really matters to them for survival. Aside from being a fun activity for children and adults of all ages, camping is also connected with many health benefits including lowering stress, improving mood, and encouraging mindfulness. Here are just five of the benefits that you can experience when camping,

Improved relationships with friends and family

Although camping alone can be a rewarding experience, most people choose to socialize during their camping trip by camping with their close friends or family. Whether you have a 5 person tent to share or are sleeping solo in a circle around the fire, there’s something very intimate about camping and sleeping so close to your friends and loved ones, and many people report that their relationships are strengthened by the experience.

A chance to re-focus on what really matters

In the modern age, it’s all too easy to get caught up in the marketing and advertisements that are trying to sell us things that we don’t really need. Clothing, makeup, fancy food, luxury furnishings, trinkets, and accessories may all bring us pleasure but aren’t essential for our survival and it’s important to realize what a privilege it is for us to have access to these things. A camping trip is a great chance to take a step back and to reassess what you really need in your life. A primitive shelter, basic food, simple warmth and the company of friends or family can be a humbling experience and one which can connect us closer to God.

An opportunity to be challenged

Camping isn’t always an easy ride, the weather can quickly change, your equipment may falter and you may have to navigate through difficult terrain, but all of these experiences are designed to challenge you and will ultimately benefit you in the long run. The University of Texas and the University of Michigan have both shown that experiencing new challenges helps to keep the brain healthy, not to mention it also enables us to learn skills that can then be applied in other situations. If you can keep your head cool when the heavens open and you are forced to seek shelter in a small tent, you can find the calm you need to navigate through other stressful situations at work or at home.

A chance to disconnect

Digital technologies such as mobile phones, laptops, and game consoles have revolutionized society, but we all know that spending too much time on these devices is not good for our mental health. Camping is a chance to disconnect from the digital world, to leave emails, social media, and the internet behind and to practice mindfulness by simply living in the present moment. Although most mobile phones will now get signal in even the most remote camping locations, it’s worth turning your device off, encouraging your children to get off their screens, stowing them away someplace safe for emergencies, and allowing yourself some downtime away from backlit screens. Unplugging from technology has been proven to help people sleep, to improve their concentration, and to benefit both their physical and mental health.

An opportunity to increase your self-confidence

Last but by no means least, camping can also help people of all ages to experience success and to grow their self-confidence. Camping is a non-competitive activity, whether you’re putting up your tent, cooking a meal, starting a fire, or following a trail, there are many non-academic successes to be had while camping that can boost your self-confidence and make you feel as though you have achieved something. Children, in particular, can really benefit from these kinds of non-academic and non-competitive activities and can take the confidence and skills that they have learned back into the classroom.

So there you have it – just five of the many benefits of reconnecting with the great outdoors by going camping. Whether you take a tent to your local campsite, find a remote spot in the countryside or even just erect a shelter in your garden, camping is the perfect way to reconnect with the great outdoors and to find a sense of inner strength. Have you ever been camping? How did you find the experience? Let us know how you got on and what you learned in the comments.