How Some Places Ease or Stress Our Nervous System

By Michael Youngblood

We tend to think of the nervous system as an internal circuit board that’s full of reactions and responses. But more and more, researchers are recognizing something that Indigenous cultures have always known:

Our environment is one of the most powerful inputs to our nervous system.

Over the past year, I’ve been fascinated by how the places we inhabit shape us. My curiosity has led me through geography, anthropology, environmental psychology, neuroscience, and beyond. Across fields, one idea keeps emerging:

Place drastically affects our physiology and our nervous system.

This matters more today than at any point in human history. For nearly all of our species’ existence, humans lived their entire lives within one familiar landscape. Today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau data, the average American relocates about 12 times in their lifetime.

My framework below isn’t a peer-reviewed model (though it’s informed by thought leaders across these disciplines). It’s a useful lens — a way of paying attention to how place interacts with our nervous system.

Whether we realize it or not, place is a silent partner in many major decisions. We can factor this lens in when we’re:

Considering a move
Choosing a home
Planning a sabbatical
Booking a vacation
Buying a second home
Designing a remote-work lifestyle
Or simply noticing why certain places make us feel more alive, grounded, or creative

This framework can also inform policymakers, developers, conservation groups, and regional stakeholders who want their sense of place to have a positive effect on the people who live, love, or travel there.

When you start to see place through the lens of how it makes you feel, the world opens up. You begin to understand why some environments support your wellbeing or sense of excitement or growth — and why others pull you off center.

I’ve come to see this as a kind of inner geography.
Here’s the first half of my map.

1. The Grounding Landscape

Regulation → Safety → Grounded

Have you ever stared off at an open horizon, fire, or landscape and gotten lost in a daydream? A sense of ease takes over your nervous system, lightens your load, and you drift through thoughts at a rhythm that puts you at ease.

Grounding Landscapes are the places where your internal rhythm slows. Your breath drops into your body. You feel at ease, relaxed, and safe in a way you didn’t realize you needed.

This isn’t just a mood. It’s a neurobiological relationship between your body and your surroundings.

Environmental psychologists Stephen & Rachel Kaplan, through their Attention Restoration Theory, showed that the brain operates with two primary forms of attention:

Directed Attention

Used for work, focus, screens, and planning.
Easily fatigued.
Dominant in modern life.
Overuse leads to burnout and reduced creativity.

Involuntary (Effortless) Attention

Activated by what the Kaplans call soft fascination — flowing water, trees moving in the wind, fire, clouds, long, open views.

In these environments, attention replenishes itself automatically. Natural landscapes don’t drain the nervous system — they restore it. They give the brain back the bandwidth modern life erodes.

Grounding Landscapes create the conditions for that restoration.

Reflection Question: If your directed attention is overstimulated, where can you go to access these soft fasciations?