When Andy Wasley completed a 280-mile hike in Scotland, he was overcome by a flood of emotions that forced him to confront trauma and years of mental illness. It was the start of another long journey—an exploration of the complex link between adventure and mental health.
It’s just after midday, late summer 2022, but the sun isn’t shining and I’m wet to my bones. It has rained constantly in the few hours since I set off from a tiny cottage isolated on a barren peat bog—a saturating drizzle that has smudged the landscape into a beige, horizonless pall. A succession of muddy slips and treacherous river crossings punctuate the tedium before dissolving again into the rain.
I’m nearing the end of my second attempt on the Cape Wrath Trail, a grueling 280-mile (450-kilometer) route through Scotland’s spectacular west Highlands. My journey started 20 days ago, and ends minutes from now at Cape Wrath, Great Britain’s storm-blown north-westernmost tip. My map tells me I should be able to see the lighthouse that marks the journey’s end, but everything is lost in the murk.
The wind picks up, snapping at my loose rucksack straps and stinging my face with a final blast of rain before parting the mist and revealing the lighthouse. At once, I’m overcome by a surge of intense emotions: Sadness, joy, frustration, anger—and feelings I can’t even name.
I stagger across Cape Wrath Trail’s closing yards, drop my rucksack, rest my head on the lighthouse’s cold stone wall, and weep. Over decades of long-distance hiking, I’ve had my share of emotional finishes, but this feels new and disturbing. Deep in my soul, I know something huge has happened to me, but in the moment, I can’t say what—or why.
It has taken me months to even begin to answer those questions. At the time, I put my outburst down to a profound sense of vindication after completing a hike that I had tried, and failed, to complete once before. But nearly a year on, I’ve learned that other things were at play—deeper truths about my mind and my relationship with the outdoors.
I have always struggled with mental illness—depression, anxiety and serious emotional instability, all rooted in parental neglect and abuse I suffered as a child. Like many trauma survivors, I tried to manage these conditions in isolation: Psychotherapy and medication for depression; meditation for anxiety, anger and my other emotional troubles. While none of this could cure me, it helped.
Hiking helped me, too—as it helps many people who experience mental illness, an issue that affects at least one in five people in the USA and Australia, and at least one in six in England. The Mental Health Foundation reports almost three in four adults in the UK saw mental health benefits from contact with nature during the pandemic, and authorities like Mental Health America and the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence extol the mental health benefits of exercise and contact with nature.
Contrary to my long-held assumption that adventure is basically good for me, a complex picture was emerging; one that suggested a need for nuance in the way we talk about the outdoors and mental health.
There’s some evidence to support this. Contact with nature has been shown to be linked to psychological wellbeing, and recreation in wild landscapes—including backpacking, hiking and camping—has been shown to reduce stress and anxiety. Separate studies from the Universities of Giessen and Canberra indicate that structured adventure activities can have benefits for young people struggling with depression, and another, by researchers from the University of Southern Denmark, suggests long-distance walking itself can offer psychological benefits.
This all rings true to me. The outdoors is where I get to meet who I’ve come to think of as my best self—confident, capable, strong and creative. Alone in the mountains, I feel free from worry, able to turn my attention away from my messy inner life, and to focus instead on the weather, the hills and the steady beat of my own footsteps.
Little surprise, then, that my own industry (I write about hiking for magazines in the UK) presents a roundly upbeat view of the link between adventure and mental health. Features, social media posts and marketing campaigns abound, dressed with pictures of people smiling on mountain summits. I have made those pictures, and written those stories. I know they’re true.
But my emotional collapse at Cape Wrath left me wondering if they tell the whole truth.
I still don’t know what Cape Wrath had unlocked in me, but it did lead me to seek trauma therapy for the first time since my early 20s—and, at my therapist’s urging, an assessment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition marked by chronic restlessness, inattentiveness, forgetfulness, impulsivity and serious emotional instability. The underlying causes are poorly understood, but are widely held to include low levels of a neurotransmitter, dopamine, that is linked to emotional regulation and mental stimulation.
Going over my life story with a psychiatrist who specializes in the disorder, I could identify a pattern of inattentiveness, impulsivity, risk-taking and emotional dysfunction stretching back to my childhood—a pattern that included a number of reckless misadventures in the great outdoors.
Adventure-seeking, the psychiatrist told me, is not uncommon for people with ADHD. Adventurous activities offer a potent mix of physical, mental and emotional stimulation—it’s catnip for dopamine-starved brains. My lifelong attachment to adventure was not in itself diagnostic, but my reckless and impulsive decisions on hikes ranging from Scotland to Guatemala helped to complete a picture that the psychiatrist said was pretty clear. “You know what the answer is,” she told me. “You have ADHD. The right time for you to be treated for this was 30 years ago. The second best time is now—so that’s what we’re going to do.”
Understanding I have ADHD has since helped me to make some sense of my experience on the Cape Wrath Trail. Folk with ADHD often underestimate the negative outcomes of risky behavior or overestimate the benefits. In retrospect, I can see all of this at play in the accident that ended my first attempt on the trail.
The accident, in April 2019, happened in Knoydart, an especially rough part of the Cape Wrath Trail early in the route. Towards the end of this difficult section, I had fallen and hurt my left hip and shoulder. The next day, I tried to complete two days’ hikes in one. It was “only” another 10 miles, I reckoned, and completing it early would bank me a rest day.
In truth, this was a spur-of-the-moment decision made when I reached my intended campsite early and decided not to spend half a day alone in my tent. I made no attempt to account for the atrocious weather, difficult terrain or my own injuries, and hiked on up to a mountain pass where I fell on snow and badly hurt my left knee.
My psychiatrist told me ADHD likely contributed to my snap decision and subsequent blindness to the escalating danger I had put myself in. My trauma therapist suggested my childhood experiences could have played a part too, prompting an unease with loneliness and a need to prove myself tough and capable that drove me on towards catastrophe.
There are many mental illnesses and difficulties—many people with ADHD and eating disorders, bipolar and multiple personality disorder. But not every experience or illness fits into the box of ‘going into the outdoors will make you feel better.’
And as for my emotional surge when I finally completed the hike? Vindication, for sure—but only for moving past an accident that could have been avoided if I’d only had a better handle on my mental health.
Months after returning from Scotland, I had to face a new and complex truth about my outdoor activities. Hiking is where my mental health can be at its very best; but it’s also where my untreated ADHD and trauma led me into serious danger. Contrary to my long-held assumption that adventure is basically good for me, a complex picture was emerging; one that suggested a need for nuance in the way we talk about the outdoors and mental health.
“We’re often oversimplifying what’s an immensely complicated subject,” James Roddie, a professional mountain and wildlife photographer based in Inverness, Scotland, says. Roddie has lived with the eating disorder anorexia since his late teens. He credits a move to Scotland, after dropping out of university, with helping him to connect with the outdoors in a new way and aiding in his recovery. But he worries about the generally upbeat nature of stories and social media posts about mental health and the outdoors.
He points to his experience with anorexia as an example. Hiking in Scotland’s mountains initially helped him to feel strong again, but soon he found himself skipping meals on big days out. “It only took so long before I began to regress into being out in the hills, feeling hungry and thinking, ‘I quite like that, so I might just not eat the food I’ve got,’” he says. “If you’ve managed to finish the hike and you’ve eaten less food than you’ve taken with you, that fuels the anorexia. It becomes a habit again, which is exactly what happened.”
For Roddie, part of the problem is the way people talk about mental health. “I think we still like to only talk about ‘normal’ mental health issues such as depression and anxiety,” he says. “That’s not to underrate how serious those things are—I’ve had long periods of depression and anxiety myself. But I think there’s so many more mental illnesses and difficulties; so many people with ADHD and eating disorders, bipolar and multiple personality disorder. But they don’t all just fit into the box of ‘going into the outdoors will make you feel better.’”
If we don’t talk about those conditions, he suggests we perhaps risk sending people into the outdoors without an adequate understanding of the risks they might face—either because of the usual demands and dangers of adventure activities, or because their mental illness leaves them especially prone to additional risks.
Nessa Chileshe, a creative professional in Cardiff, Wales, also has ADHD. Like me, she was diagnosed later in life, and has had to reckon with the same challenges I’ve faced since learning I have the condition. Speaking to her is like having my own experiences reflected back at me.
“When I started talking about it, people were quick to tell me it’s a ‘superpower,’” says Chileshe. “Is it? I have no energy left to socialize with anyone any more, and I’m up almost all hours of the night.” Her forgetfulness and impulsivity, racing ideas, distractibility and risk-blindness have put her in difficult situations in the outdoors too—as when a simple three-hour hike in the English Midlands turned into a daylong ordeal after a wrong turn took her six miles off route without a phone, money or means of navigation.
“I wasn’t in danger,” she recalls, “but when I got back, I found myself feeling really guilty. I was so ill-prepared. So irresponsible.”
“We need more truth from people. Things like, ‘I turned around today because this happened to me, because this is who I am, and that’s fine’ … We need to normalize our mental health difficulties a bit more.”
- James Roddie, photographer
Her feelings recall my own sense of shame after my accident in Scotland. Listening to Chileshe, I’m now struck by the way we have both recast ADHD-addled decisions into judgments on our self-worth. No-one wants to go on a hike and feel stalked by shame—but this is our reality, and it can feel jarring to see social media and publications dominated by upbeat stories that don’t even try to reflect that reality.
“If you’re expecting to have a specific result by going for a walk, and you come back and it’s actually made you feel worse, you might feel worse still because it hasn’t worked for you,” Chileshe says. “Really, it’s OK to not be OK.”
Still, all that research into the benefits of contact with nature, adventure and the rest can’t be entirely wrong. Eva Menezes Cunningham, a psychotherapist who uses nature therapy to help people through trauma, acknowledges that adventure can present some serious difficulties for people. But, she says, this is perhaps part of the point of it.
“We want to learn to welcome all the feelings,” she says. “Whether that’s the joy, the hope, the shame, the pain, or the rage. The more we increase our emotional understanding—and we can do that in therapy—the more we’re increasing our emotional landscape. By getting out in different weather, and by reminding ourselves that nature is beautiful whatever it’s doing, it can help us accept our own varied emotions.”
For me, this is a truth that underpins my experiences. Adventure can be grueling, mentally taxing and exhausting—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Adversity can be good for us. But perhaps we need to see more honesty about what this can really mean—stories about when things go wrong, about the risks we can face because of the very conditions we’re trying to ease. Stories that tell us it’s OK to not be OK.
“We need more truth from people,” says Roddie. “Just things like, ‘I turned around today because this happened to me, because this is who I am, and that’s fine’ … We somehow need to normalize our mental health difficulties a bit more.”
Honesty with readers has always been important to me; but honesty with myself is something I’m only just learning to value. When I come to tell the full story of my next big hike, I hope I’ll be able to acknowledge the role my mental health plays in the adventure.
I don’t have long to wait for the opportunity. This month, I’m heading to the Kungsleden, a 250-mile hike through northern Sweden—my first as a diagnosed ‘ADHDer’. I ask Menezes Cunningham for her advice on how to make the most of the experience.
“There are going to be moments when the views are breathtaking,” she says. “Moments when you’re feeling grounded and empowered. And there are likely to be moments where you feel you’ve gone too far, and you can’t do it. Recognize that’s all part of the journey, and there’s not anything wrong with you for having those feelings.
“It’s important to honor how far you’ve come. You can have fun, you can test yourself, you can find a way to build strength, to build stamina, to build endurance. And you’re choosing it for yourself.”
I choose adventure because I know it can help me to improve my mental health. It will take the rest of my life to learn everything I can know about how adventure, ADHD, trauma, and depression shape my journeys. But as I pack my bags for Sweden, I simply hope my newfound self-awareness helps me to be more honest about the journey that lies ahead of me—whether it ends with an exhausted flop into a hostel bunk or, more likely, with a flood of tears by a Swedish lake.
Either way is fine by me.
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Andy Wasley is a freelance travel writer, photographer and videographer based in London. His writing and photography on adventure travel, hiking, culture and LGBT issues has been published internationally, featuring destinations across the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe.
