Increased nature relatedness

Increased nature relatedness is a heightened felt sense of kinship, belonging, or identification with the natural world.

As a drug effect it is acute and dose-proportional; unlike baseline nature connectedness, it arises within the experience rather than reflecting a standing personality trait, though in some cases a degree of the shift persists after the substance wears off. It ranges from a mild softening of the usual distance between self and environment to an overwhelming sense of being woven into the living world.

It is uncommonly reported relative to other thinking effects associated with psychedelics. It is most commonly induced at moderate to high doses under psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin mushrooms.

Increased nature relatedness is felt as a loosening of the habitual boundary between oneself and the living environment: plants, animals, weather, and landscape register not as backdrop but as presences with their own weight and significance.

It commonly arrives alongside a quieting of analytical thought and a turn toward sensory openness, making colors more arresting and ambient sounds more absorbing. Attending to it tends to deepen it — noticing the texture of bark or the movement of wind pulls the feeling further in. At higher doses under psychedelics, the distinction between self and natural world can feel nearly continuous.

Increased nature relatedness arises through different pathways depending on the drug class:

• Psychedelics — act primarily at 5-HT2A receptors, disrupting default-mode network activity associated with self-referential processing; as the ordinary sense of a bounded, separate self loosens, the felt distance between self and environment diminishes, and the natural world takes on heightened salience and felt kinship.

How much each pathway contributes in a given case is not fully understood.

Who experiences it, and how strongly, varies widely. Higher doses raise both likelihood and intensity. Set and setting are especially influential — natural outdoor environments during the experience strongly amplify it, while indoor or urban settings tend to suppress it.

An openness to non-ordinary states and a prior appreciation for the natural world appear to lower the threshold for its emergence. Expectation plays a role too: going in with an intention toward nature tends to be self-fulfilling.