14 Days in California: A Trip I Booked Because the Research Said I Had To

I didn’t book this trip because I had the time. I booked it because I recognized something in myself that nine years of nursing has taught me to recognize in my patients: that particular flatness that settles in when someone has been running on empty for far too long.

Fourteen days. Monterey to Big Sur, up through Yosemite, along the Mendocino Coast, into the Redwoods, through Sonoma, ending in San Francisco. I mapped it out on a Sunday afternoon, still decompressing after a 7-to-7, the kind of shift where you walk to your car at 7:30 pm, and the sun is still up, yet somehow it feels like an insult.

I leave in two days. I am not sorry about it.

“Burnout doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it just shows up as not caring whether you go outside anymore.”

That’s the thing about burnout in nursing; it’s insidious. It doesn’t always look like breaking down in the medication room. Sometimes it looks like clocking out into a perfectly good evening and having no desire to do anything with it. I used to walk out after a 12-hour shift, feel the fresh air hit my face, and exhale. Then one day, I stopped noticing.

I’m not alone in that. Studies suggest that anywhere from a third to nearly 70% of nurses are experiencing significant burnout, a figure that spiked sharply during and after the pandemic and hasn’t fully returned. A third of us. Possibly more. That’s not a personal failing. That’s a public health problem wearing scrubs.

What the science says

There’s a peer-reviewed study I’ve been sitting with that notes nurses who spent one 20-minute break per day in a hospital garden showed measurable reductions in emotional exhaustion and depersonalization after just six weeks. A garden. Twenty minutes. Lead researcher Roger Ulrich called it a legitimate clinical intervention, not a perk. I read that and felt something loosen in my chest, because I had been treating the thing that saves me like an indulgence I had to earn.

A 2023 study in the Journal of Clinical Nursing added another layer: nurses with deeper connectedness to nature scored lower on burnout and higher on compassion satisfaction; the capacity to still feel moved by the work. Psychological resilience partially mediated the relationship. Nature doesn’t just restore you in the moment. It rebuilds something structural.

So, I’m going

I’m going to stand under the Redwoods until the scale of them resets whatever has gotten too small inside me. I’m going to watch fog roll over the cliffs at Big Sur; that’s Attention Restoration Theory in action, the brain finally releasing its grip on directed attention after twelve hours of relentless clinical focus. I’m going to sit in Yosemite Valley and let it do what hospital gardens can only approximate.

This is not a vacation. It’s a clinical intervention I am administering to myself. And I’m going to write about every mile of it here. I'm calling it dispatches from the coast. If you’re a nurse who needs someone to say the research backs you, consider this your permission slip.

See you on the trail…

 Yours in hiking boots,

 The Nurse Hiker