“End the brain rot. End the doomscrolling. End the screen addiction. Touch grass.”
These simple messages come from a brand new app called “Touch Grass”. The app blocks distracting apps on users’ phones until they take a photo of themselves going outside and literally touching grass. The app is designed to help users overcome phone addiction and encourage them to spend more time outdoors.
If you’ve ever gotten in an argument with a stranger online, it’s very possible that they told you to go “touch grass”.
“It’s almost always an insult for somebody who doesn’t go outside much,” senior Devin Cable said. “Someone’s staying inside, staring at the screen for too long. They’re saying they need to go outside and touch grass.”
Some people, like the developers of the “Touch Grass” app, think this can actually be good advice.
“I feel like if you’re just wasting your day, scrolling TikTok or doing whatever, then ‘touch grass’ could be good advice,” senior Beau Graham said. “But if you’re inside working or studying, it’s not always good advice.”
It’s definitely not nice to tell someone to “touch grass,” regardless of how much you think they might need to. If you really care about someone, you might instead encourage them to go outside and reconnect with nature to improve their mental and physical wellbeing.
“‘Touch grass’ means to go ground yourself,” senior Cherish Rock said. “It’s basically a way of saying, ‘Go take some time to yourself’, but it’s not the best way to say it.”
Spending time outdoors and connecting with nature can be very grounding, and it has powerful effects on the human psyche.
“I use it for my own mental health, as a way to sit with the world, since it’s so chaotic,” Rock said. “It helps me center myself and figure out how I want to move forward and make my own decisions. I go to the beach every year, and I’ve had moments where the outdoors: — the beach, rivers — have helped me move forward, especially when I’m very lost.”
College can be a very stressful time in an individual’s life. Busy schedules and heavy workloads make it difficult to prioritize spending time outdoors, but spending time in outdoor public spaces can bring students together and strengthen the entire community.
“Outdoor spaces are a really important subset of public spaces,” said Krista Paulsen, program lead of Urban Studies and Environmental Studies. “Places like the Quad, the pathways around campus, the plaza by the ‘B’ — those kinds of public spaces that welcome people and where people can make connections with one another are really important in terms of people having a sense of social connectedness.”
“To the degree that connections to outdoor spaces allow us to connect to one another, that can also be a plus in terms of people’s mental health,” Paulsen said. “So if we have the opportunity to see people that we care about and do things that we find fun and enjoyable — those things bolster our mental health.”
“There’s the ‘biophilia hypothesis’, which basically says that human beings get a sense of wellbeing when they’re connecting with nature,” Paulsen said. “It can reduce our stress hormones and lower our blood pressure and things like that. There are folks who strongly believe that contact with nature and natural spaces really does a lot for people’s emotional wellbeing and mental health.”
Boise State’s campus offers several great outdoor spaces for students, including tennis and beach volleyball courts and open, grassy fields perfect for outdoor recreation. The Boise Greenbelt and other nearby walking, running or biking trails can be great places to reconnect with nature.
Students can even incorporate time spent outdoors with their education. Students can study, read or do homework at outdoor tables and benches, take outdoor lunch breaks or walk along the greenbelt as they sip their morning coffee.
Engaging in these healthy, outdoor activities can significantly boost students’ overall wellbeing. Spending time outdoors, and encouraging friends to join, can lead to a happier, healthier and more connected campus community.
It may not be the nicest thing to say, but maybe everyone could benefit from touching grass a little more often. You probably don’t need an app to do it, but it might be worth a try.
Anything that inspires you to spend more time outdoors, feeling the sun on your face and reconnecting with nature, is probably a good thing.
