I've been seeing a pattern in clinic that I want to name.
Patients coming in with anxiety that has no clear object — just a hum they can't turn off. People who can't sleep but can't tell me why. Kids whose moods are flatter or more reactive than they used to be. Parents who feel disconnected from their families even though everyone is in the same house every evening. None of these people are doing anything obviously wrong. Their labs are often fine. They're not in crisis. They just feel off in a way that's hard to articulate and hasn't responded to the usual interventions.
When I dig in, the same thing keeps surfacing. Not always the cause — but always part of the picture. The constant pull of screens. Feeds that never end. Content engineered specifically to make one more minute feel effortless. Notification systems designed to interrupt whatever you're doing and reward you for switching your attention. And the cost of all of that isn't just time, although it is that. It's a deeper erosion — of the capacity for stillness, for presence, for the kind of slow unstructured attention that actually builds connection. With other people. With your environment. With yourself.
We scroll through someone else's garden instead of standing in our own yard. We consume instead of notice. And over time, the nervous system forgets what it feels like to just be somewhere, doing one thing, with no feed to check.
I don't think this is a character failure in any of my patients. I think it's an environment problem. We've built a world that trains our reward systems to need novelty at a pace that real life — real relationships, real rest, real seasons — can't match. And then we wonder why real life feels insufficient. The kids feel it too, often more acutely than the adults. They just have fewer tools to articulate what's happening.
There's a clinical case to be made for spending real time outside, doing something slow, with your hands. Sun exposure for vitamin D and circadian regulation. Movement that isn't structured exercise. Soil microbe exposure, which we're learning matters more than we used to think. Attention restoration — there's actual research on the cognitive recovery that happens when you spend time in natural environments versus built ones. And the simple regulatory effect of doing one thing, slowly, without checking your phone.
Which brings me to gardening.
May is when Colorado gardeners make their annual act of faith. Around Mother's Day, we collectively decide that the promise of sunshine outweighs the risk of frost — a date that has nothing to do with data and everything to do with tradition and optimism — and we put things in the ground.
I want to recommend it, genuinely, as a clinical intervention. Not because of the tomatoes, although those are great. Because gardening operates on a completely different clock than everything else in your life. You can't rush it. You can't optimize germination with a better morning routine. You plant something, water it, and then you wait. You come back the next day and almost nothing has changed. And then one morning something has, and you didn't make it happen — you just didn't get in the way.
A garden asks you to show up consistently, pay attention to what's actually happening instead of what you expected, and accept that the timeline isn't yours to control. Your phone is engineered to make one more minute feel effortless. A garden makes thirty minutes feel like exactly what it is — thirty minutes of being alive and outside and paying attention.
You don't need a farm. A few containers on a porch will do it. Herbs are almost impossible to kill in a Colorado May. Go in on a plot with a neighbor. Bring your kids out and let them be bored next to you while you water. That last part matters more than you think — some of the most connective time you can spend with another person is time where neither of you is performing or producing anything. Just being in the same place, doing something slow, together.
If the symptoms I described at the top sound familiar — the hum, the sleep that won't come, the disconnection — this isn't the whole answer. But it's a real piece of one. Plant something this month. Leave your phone inside when you go check on it. Let the quiet feel like enough.
—Stephane