In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Rand Wilson — a psychologist who traded a windowless office for the open trail — to talk about forest bathing, nature-based therapy, and why our physical and mental health are far more connected than most of us realize.
Welcome back to the podcast. Today we're sitting down with Dr. Rand Wilson, a psychologist whose work centers on healing through nature. We wanted to start by getting to know who he is and how he ended up where he is now.
From the Jersey Woods to a Windowless Office
Rand's story begins in childhood. He grew up in New Jersey, where the woods were essentially his backyard, and that's where his connection to nature first took root. Living near the ocean, he surfed his whole life — in the water all summer and, with a thick enough wetsuit, all year round. The forest and the ocean became his two earliest connections to the natural world. His family also camped, mostly in the Poconos and the Pennsylvania mountains, which is where he first developed what turned out to be a lifelong affinity for mountains — there's even a word for a lover of mountains, an orophile.
For grad school he moved to San Diego, his first big adventure. He chose the California School of Professional Psychology partly for the clinical training and, by his own admission, at least half for the surfing — his logic being that if the waves were always good, he'd skip fewer classes than he had in undergrad. (It worked exactly as planned.) After grad school, he was accepted into a VA internship in Madison, Wisconsin — a dramatic change in climate, but a wonderful three years in a city he loved.
When his family relocated from New Jersey to Florida, he and his wife moved down too, and he spent the next decade in the VA system. His specialty was PTSD — he worked in the PTSD clinic at the West Palm Beach VA — along with mindfulness-based therapies, particularly Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a form of CBT. He loved the work and found it deeply rewarding, but he spent that entire decade in a windowless office, and he could almost feel his battery depleting, something being drained physically and spiritually.
At one point he hung a wall-length tapestry of a forest trail in his office to trick himself — and his veteran clients gave it unanimously positive feedback. That's when something clicked. Around the same time, he came across research on forest bathing by chance, and the pieces started connecting: maybe the future of his career could be outdoors, using nature to amplify the work he was already doing.
Three Years on the Road
By the end of those ten years, Rand was thoroughly burnt out from office life. He and his wife had been following full-time RV families on YouTube, so in 2023 they sold their house and set out with their two kids. What was supposed to be one year turned into nearly three, because it took a while to find a place to settle.
He treated the first nine months almost like a sabbatical or a field study — immersing himself in nature, camping every day. They weren't exactly roughing it (a 38-foot fifth wheel with eight-foot ceilings and a ceiling fan), but they walked out the front door each morning to a forest, mountains, or the ocean. He saw it as informal training for his transition into nature-based therapy, and it's when he started making the "trail therapy" videos he posts on Instagram and TikTok. Each video came from a new, beautiful spot.
By the time they wrapped up, they'd done two full loops around the country, visited somewhere between 20 and 30 national parks plus countless state parks, and made friends they still keep in touch with — one family they traveled with recently came to visit for a week. Now he feels he's in a position with a deeper connection to nature, ready to share it with a wider audience.
"Just Do It": On Taking the Leap
One thing Rand noticed on the road: he never once told someone their story and got a "why would you do that?" Every person responded with some version of "I've always wanted to do that — the timing just isn't right." There's something universally enticing about leaving everything behind to explore.
His advice is simply to do it, if you're financially able and ideally have work you can do virtually. And it's more accessible than people assume — once you free yourself up and get on the road, living can be quite cheap. They stayed in national forest campgrounds for five or ten dollars a night; fuel was the biggest expense. You don't need hundreds of thousands of dollars saved up, and you'll never look back in your late 80s wishing you hadn't gone. Any disruption it causes, you can repair afterward — and it'll be worth it.
What Drew Him to Trail Therapy
The seed was planted back at the VA when Rand started reading about forest bathing and came across the book Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv, who coined the term "nature deficit disorder." He realized he had his own version of it after a decade in that office. When even a cheap polyester forest tapestry made his clients feel more relaxed and grounded — exactly as the research predicted — he started to feel it was almost a disservice to do therapy indoors. He needed to take people outside and reintroduce them to nature so they could reap those benefits.
His time on the road only deepened that conviction. Now he can't imagine returning to a full-time office — it would feel like putting a wild animal back in a cage.
What Forest Bathing and Nature Therapy Actually Look Like
Forest bathing is a Japanese practice studied since the 1980s. The term shinrin-yoku translates to "forest bathing," and it's the simple but powerful practice of mindfully immersing yourself in a forest. You move slowly, checking in with each of your senses — what you hear, what you feel underfoot. Crucially, it's not hiking: there's no set pace, no waterfall to reach, and it usually doesn't cover much ground. It might include some seated meditation, and for those who know how (or have a guide), even foraging and snacking on forest foods can be part of it.
Nature-based therapy — what Rand mainly does now in central Missouri — is conducting actual psychotherapy sessions outdoors. He'll often open with five or ten minutes of mindful walking on the trail, then transition into whatever the client is working on. For therapists, insurance makes this tricky, but even just walking outside or holding a session on a safe trail can have a powerful impact. You don't have to change anything else — bring nature into the equation and it does the work for you.
Therapy by Phone, on the Move
About 40% of Rand's caseload is still in Florida, which he can't see in person. So he offers walking phone sessions: both he and the client find a spot with good reception, head outside — on a trail or just around the neighborhood — and do the session through audio while walking.
He stumbled onto this by accident when a client texted asking to walk during her session. He loves anything that reduces screen time, so he agreed — and that session was unlike any other. He'd been seeing her over video for months, but the insights and connections she made, even her voice and pace, were noticeably different. It convinced him there's something special about engaging your body while doing therapy, and it opened up this whole alternative.
Walking Side by Side vs. Sitting Face to Face
There's a meaningful difference between walking and talking with someone versus sitting across from them in direct eye contact. Rand is careful not to disparage office-based therapy — the work is still genuinely useful and valuable in that form — but it can be improved upon.
Drawing on his PTSD work with veterans, he points out how strange it always seemed to seat someone directly across from him and watch their every move while they walked through a horrific trauma during exposure therapy. In PTSD, avoidance is central — the person doesn't want to think or talk about it — and the traditional setup adds the pressure of being watched. Walking side by side removes that: no direct eye contact, no worry about being judged or seen becoming tearful.
He thinks it also better symbolizes the actual therapeutic relationship. As a therapist, he doesn't see himself as the authority in the room — more like a passenger beside you, or a consultant a business brings in for guidance. He's looking out the windshield with the client at life, exploring which routes to take. Standing next to each other, looking forward, simply fits that dynamic — and makes it more comfortable and effective for clients.
(As if to prove the point, his "feathered co-workers" could be heard chirping in the background throughout the conversation — birds he can usually identify with the Merlin app.)
When Physical and Mental Health Are Intertwined
Rand sees physical and mental health constantly affecting each other — the arrow points both ways. Sometimes clients arrive with physical complaints like brain fog; sometimes they come in explicitly for mental health. But there's almost always a physical component present.
A striking fact: virtually every diagnosis in the DSM, the diagnostic manual for mental health providers, includes some component of sleep disruption. Nearly every one of his clients struggles with sleep in some form, and it's almost always either a cause or an effect of their mental health struggles. Beyond sleep, there's low motivation, low energy, brain fog, and inflammation, which is deeply tied to brain health and the gut-brain connection. He rarely sees someone struggling psychologically whose physical health is otherwise dialed in — the two go hand in hand.
This mirrors what we see with patients: lifestyle changes have to be in place for hormone therapy to deliver its full benefit, and sleep is at the top of that list for a lot of things. Rand uses a metaphor that resonated with his more reluctant veteran clients: the therapy work is like driving lessons — learning to change behavior and your relationship with your thoughts and emotions — but your body is the vehicle. If you're pouring sand into the gas tank, the driving lessons won't take. You have to address both sides of the coin.
The Barrier of Asking for Mental Health Help
It's often easier for people to bring physical complaints to their doctor than to seek mental health help, partly because they don't connect the two — and Rand sees this as a real barrier, especially in older generations. Sometimes it's an unwillingness to acknowledge mental health symptoms, as though needing therapy means something is wrong with you. So someone goes to the doctor with heart palpitations that turn out to be stress, or with vague low energy they assume must be a thyroid problem, when it may be psychologically driven. He's careful never to say one purely causes the other — they're so deeply connected that they feed off each other and show up together.
He also speaks highly of his experience bridging mental and medical care at the VA. The VA gets a lot of bad press — largely because it's enormous (he believes it's still technically the largest socialized healthcare system in the world) and any failure makes national news in a way a local clinic's never would. But he's never worked anywhere with such opportunity to collaborate closely with a client's other providers, all in the same building. He could walk a client straight to their doctor, communicate directly, even put in an order for a dietitian appointment. That kind of integration could and should happen outside the VA too — it would benefit clients enormously.
How Issues Shift Across the Lifespan
Outside the VA, Rand works with a wide range of ages — college students through older adults, men and women — and the issues differ by stage of life. Earlier on, people are figuring out who they are and what they want, wrestling with self-doubt, depression, and social-connection issues. In midlife, a new set emerges: marriage and relationship issues, the relationship with their children, the stress of modern parenting (nothing like how earlier generations parented), career transitions, hormonal changes, and approaching retirement. (That said, he does occasionally meet young clients who are wise beyond their years.)
Our own practice skews a bit narrower — roughly 30s to 70s, mostly people deep in the parenting years — and we see a strong influence from hormonal and metabolic changes, especially perimenopause driving brain fog and fatigue. There's a statistic floating around that something like a third of perimenopausal and menopausal women who show up at their doctor are handed antidepressants instead of being offered therapy or lifestyle changes that could help.
"They Don't Have a Zoloft Deficiency"
This connects back to access to care. The largest prescribers of antidepressants are family doctors and general practitioners, who in many cases haven't had the extensive training a psychiatrist would. We all hear it in our own friend circles — someone mentions low energy and bad sleep, and the immediate response is a low dose of Zoloft. This is exactly why Rand appreciates functional medicine: there has to be more investigation, more exploring, more consideration of the whole context of a person's life. You can't understand any living organism, least of all a human, without understanding their context. People aren't walking around with a Zoloft deficiency — if anything, they may have a nature deficiency.
He also notes that the chemical-imbalance theory of depression was never actually established and has been debunked for years, yet it remains a simple, convenient story to tell while handing over a prescription. One of his supervisors, Dr. James Lickel, studied what happens when you tell a client their depression is biologically caused versus situational or lifestyle-related. The difference in people's expectations about whether they can get better was striking — and sad. Tell someone it's biological and they tend to settle into it: "Well, that's it, I just have to take this pill." Even if a case were purely biological, framing it that way without offering an avenue for healing, meaning, and purpose isn't helpful.
Getting Started With Mindfulness — Just Walk
For anyone who says they can't sit still or their mind is too busy, Rand's simple answer is to go for a mindful walk. There are hundreds of guided recordings online if you need help. Walking is the same psychological process as seated mindfulness, but engaging the body keeps the mind slightly occupied, so it doesn't drift as easily as it would sitting with your eyes closed.
He frames mindfulness with a muscle metaphor. We have two opposing "muscles" in the brain: cognition (thinking, planning, remembering, judging) and present-moment awareness through the five senses. Every other creature on the planet leans on the second one — but we wake up using the thinking muscle and run it until we fall asleep, sometimes longer. Mindfulness is like switching on a muscle that's atrophied and slowly strengthening it. Naturally it feels awkward at first; the thinking muscle is "huge and jacked," so you keep falling back into it. Part of the work is patience. And for some people — Rand includes himself — moving outdoors while practicing simply fits their biology better than sitting still.
Finding Nature, Even Without Access to It
If you can't reach a trail or a professional like Rand, just getting outside for a walk is the best place to start. For those with genuine access to parks, even in cities, use them. But he's mindful that some people truly don't have easy access to nature, so he offers alternatives:
Any private outdoor space — a backyard, a balcony, even a patch of grass. Get down on the ground and you'll find as many interesting things there as on a big wilderness trip.
House plants — there's research on their benefits. He filled his house with plants and had his best winter ever for dry nose and sinus problems. The relationship you form with a plant — caring for it, the sense of meaning and purpose it gives — has a real psychological effect on mood. There's even some science suggesting plants recognize their caretaker within a certain distance.
That sense of relationship matters, because a lack of social connection is often the real driver of mental health issues. A well-known 2010 meta-analysis found that lack of social connection was a better predictor of early mortality than smoking and obesity.
On Public Lands and Central Park
When it comes to urban nature, Central Park is a perfect example — running there surrounds you with like-minded people and connection while immersing you in green space that puts the mind at ease. It was a remarkably wise decision to preserve that land early on, given how valuable the real estate would otherwise be. It echoes the saying about people planting trees in whose shade they'll never sit.
Rand has developed a deep appreciation for national parks and public lands — he wears a "public land owner" shirt and a "public lands forever" hat. He sees it as a genuinely remarkable idea this country produced: that preserving land and access to nature is more important than any financial gain or development it could otherwise yield.
Reframing Lifestyle Change
Rand is an ACE-trained "functional psychologist," so reframing lifestyle change is central to his work — and he's big on metaphors. Beyond the vehicle metaphor, much of his work centers on self-compassion and self-love.
He notices that clients with unmet physical-health goals — "I really need to exercise, I need to lose weight" — are usually operating from shame. Everything in life can be framed as moving toward something or away from something, and health behaviors are too often framed as moving away: away from bad health, away from a body you dislike, "I've been bad, I haven't been to the gym." He works to flip that into an act of self-love. What will being stronger and fitter allow you to do? What will eating well and feeling good open up — playing with your grandkids, being around to watch them grow up and graduate? That one reframe — from escaping a problem to moving toward something you want — changes everything.
The other key technique is shrinking the goal. A goal that isn't happening usually isn't a motivation problem; it's too big. So make it smaller. The first step with a client might be just putting running shoes by the front door, or pulling out exercise gear, or signing up for the gym membership online without going that day. Get it so small it takes no motivation or effort, and you're able to initiate the sequence — after which it often takes off on its own.
This matches our own approach: build a consistent pattern. It doesn't have to be a one-hour workout every day. Start small, and if that's not attainable, go smaller. You have to set yourself up for success, because consistency is what produces it — and small wins are what get consistency started, snowballing from there.
It's like the famous speech about making your bed to change your life. Rand is a fan of "micro workouts" — that's basically how he exercises now. After a short morning mobility routine, he does one set each of push-ups, pull-ups, a plank, and some squats or weights. Four things, about five minutes, then back to his day — maybe repeated a couple more times later. It's so simple he never has to motivate himself, and it works: he feels strong and fit. For most people, those little "exercise snacks" throughout the day add up, and asking someone to spend 90 minutes or two hours in a gym — especially parents or people whose energy is tanking — is a big ask. Most people don't actually love the gym environment anyway; it can feel overstimulating, loud, full of grunting and slamming weights, hardly the place to find motivation when you're just starting.
Discomfort, Self-Compassion, and Exposure
Getting started on anything new is uncomfortable, and everybody likes their comfort. But whether it's a new hobby or talking to someone you didn't think you could approach, discomfort is how we build self-confidence. That's hormetic stress, and it applies to psychological and behavioral change too. The most effective treatments in psychology are variations of exposure therapy — putting yourself in front of something uncomfortable and learning to change your relationship with it.
The key is working through that initial discomfort from a place of self-compassion. Rand offers an image: if a small child is afraid of something, you don't shove them in and tell them to deal with it. You put your arm around them and say, "I'll go with you. Let's check this out together." That's the relationship we want to have with ourselves as we walk through uncomfortable new behaviors.
First Steps if You're Feeling Stuck
For anyone feeling stuck — anxiety, depression, chronic stress, or just a sense that something's off — Rand's advice is to start simple. If you're not sure you're ready to dive into full psychotherapy, begin with self-care: light movement and getting out into nature. The research shows that about two hours a week outdoors, spread across the week, creates significant benefit, and even 10-minute sessions can produce a meaningful drop in anxiety. The payoff is enormous relative to the small investment.
When it comes to more complex issues — things you've struggled with for years without the right support network around you — that's when it makes sense to look for a counselor or therapist. The line gets crossed when a problem becomes chronic, you've tried various things, and you don't have the proper support. Those are the conditions where therapy becomes a good idea.
Where to Find Dr. Rand Wilson
Website: thepathtowellbeing.com (private practice)
Social media: Dr. Rand Wilson / Trail Therapy on Instagram and TikTok
Currently offering: individual psychotherapy; group forest-bathing classes in development in Missouri; an upcoming online course on mindfulness in nature
Long-term dream: getting back on the road to host multi-day forest-bathing and mindfulness retreats in cool locations around the country
He's only about two hours from Kansas City, and we're hoping to bring him out for an in-person group workshop on our nature trail — so stay tuned for that.
Thanks again to Dr. Wilson for sharing his time (and his feathered staff). Have a healthy day, and we'll see you on the next adventure.
