No one is more indoorsy than me. There’s nowhere I’d rather be than holed up on a sofa with a blanket and a hot tea. That’s why I feel like I’m a good person to tell you how to enjoy the outdoors when you’re an indoors person.
It took me years to learn because ourdoorsy people like different things to indoorsy people, so all of their efforts tend to be unappealing. It’s only recently that I’ve managed to find joy in the outdoors and that was mostly down to trial and error.
As you can probably guess, I also dislike exercise, so you’ll never catch going for a run in the countryside or trying my hand at climbing. I found the best way to learn to love being outdoors was to ease myself in, starting with things that I usually enjoyed doing indoors. From there I built on my likes, avoided my dislikes and eventually built up my time outdoors.
How to Enjoy the Outdoors When You’re an Indoors Person
These are my best tips for beginning your journey to take you from a Sofa Sally, to an Outdoor Octavia. This is how to enjoy the outdoors when you prefer to be inside under a blanket!
Read in the sunshine
Reading outdoors is only really a good idea if you enjoy reading. Otherwise you’re going to be doubly miserable because you don’t like reading, or the outdoors! But for booklovers who like to stay inside, reading under the warm sun is a great place to start for getting more fresh air. Either bring a book or look into a money-saving magazine subscription.
Remember to apply sunscreen and sit in the shade. You might even want sunglasses, I know that I was like a little mole the first time I tried this and wasn’t quite used the all the brightness of the sun!
Eat outdoors
Ideally cooking outdoors will lead to eating outdoors. Even the biggest bed lovers will rise from their pit to sniff a burger on the barbecue and sips an icy drink in the sunshine. If you only venture outdoors for the promise of a charred sausage, then the simple solution is to have more barbecues!
The more time you spend outdoors, the more you will feel an affinity with nature, so being outdoors will make you want to be outdoors.
Grow something
There is nothing more rewarding that reaping the fruits of your labour. I mean, you can buy a strawberry plant and literally reap the fruits of your labour, or you can grow anything you like from a seed.
The fact that you need to water and care for something every day means that if you want it to grow, you need to get outside and tend to your seeds. The buzz you get from growing your flowers (or strawberries, or tomatoes) might encourage you to get out there and do more in the garden.
You might even get a kick out of a small vegetable garden. If you love to cook, it’s a fantastic feeling to make dishes out of the veggies you grow!
Take the kids out
If you’ve got children, you’ll know just how hard it can be to keep them entertained. Taking them to an outdoor activity area tends to allow them to entertain themselves, while you get a minute to site down. Younger kids will obviously need to some help getting around, but if you’ve got some independent children who are past the toddler stage, you might get an hour or so to sit and have a cuppa.
What’s not to love about tiring out the kids and giving your brain a break? Even if this is the only time you enjoy spending outdoors, it’s better than staying in!
Take on a challenge
If you mostly enjoy time outdoors but need a bit of motivation to get going, you could take on one of many outdoors challenges. There’s a #1000HoursOutside challenge, which can be fun to attempt. If that seems a bit excessive for a beginner, you try something like the One Million Step Challenge which is a sponsored challenge to raise money for Diabetes UK. It runs over three months and works out at about 10,000 steps each day (which sounds much more doable than the total of one million that you should rack up!)