The Great Indoors: Nick Beach's Decompression Room Puts a Soothing Natural Environment Within Easy Reach

Experience speaks volumes. That’s a phrase Nick Beach learned in the U.S. Navy.

About every day of his 14-year military career, Beach awoke at 5:30 a.m., arrived at the aircraft hanger by 7 and toiled 12 hours as a hydraulics and flight control mechanic, working on F-18 fighter jets, assuring the safety of the pilots and everyone in the flight path.

“It was very stressful,” said Beach, now retired from the Navy and working toward a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Radford University. “If you are not doing your job as a mechanic, you run the risk of an aircraft going down over a civilian American population. So, it’s a little pressure – just a little – for everyone that works on those airplanes.”

When stressed, Beach finds himself attracted to natural settings, taking walks through nature, observing wildlife. But those rural, woodsy environments with birds chirping and rivers bubbling over rocks aren’t always readily available.

“The reality of our world today is that we are becoming increasingly urban and suburban, and people are moving away from natural environments and into high-density population areas where they don’t have that exposure,” Beach said. “City parks are wonderful and beautiful, but if you can still hear the jackhammer a block away, it’s not exactly bringing forth that positive environment.”

Sometimes people just do not have the time or option to get outside and away from it all, and that awareness gave Beach a brilliant idea to bring nature inward.

“How do you bring these environments to people in a meaningful way,” Beach asked himself.

The answer for Radford students, faculty and staff, he hopes, can be found in a decompression room on the fifth floor of McConnell Library. “It’s a space anyone can use at any time when they are feeling anxious or stressed or in a negative emotional space,” Beach explained.

The theme of Beach’s room creation is nature, “because there is a field of psychology that looks at nature-based interventions, and it finds natural environments can be extremely soothing, even more so than a therapeutic environment.”

Once Beach developed the idea, he still needed a way to bring nature onto campus and into the library. He collected all of the needed sights and sounds during his journey with RARE Appalachia, a summer 2023 expedition by a group of Radford student researchers geared toward studying a variety of topics related to the region’s ecology, geology and cultural heritage.

Using high-fidelity video and audio equipment –“It’s all filmed in 4K, and the audio recordings are Dolby 7.1 ambisonic,” Beach explained – he recorded hours of scenes in various remote locations throughout RARE’s Southwest Virginia journey, places that have experienced little human impact.

Inside the room, which McConnell Library staff helped build, visitors are greeted by a large TV display accompanied by a surround-sound system, beanbag chairs and plants for a more relaxing feel. Visitors may select “a scene they want to relax in,” Beach said. Each recording is about 90 minutes.

Beach, who plans a lifelong career in psychological research, plans to take his idea beyond Radford University.

“My hope is that we could use this technology to integrate into public and private institutions, where people would otherwise not get the opportunity to see these kinds of locations,” Beach explained. “Examples would be nursing homes, the Department of Veteran Affairs, mental healthcare facilities and even airports.”

The veterans Beach has spoken with about the room experience “are all very excited,” he said, to see to see what this room and environment look like in practice.

“Just taking these simple concepts and the simple tools and applying them to everyday institutions or systems could have the ability to give a resource to those that aren’t really well-adjusted to high stress environments,” Beach noted, “or that might need that escape from the world around them.”

Beach first began developing the project idea when he was a freshman at Radford, a time when he “didn’t feel competent or confident enough to pursue it,” he said, “but Dr. [Jason] Davis worked with me and gave me confidence to do it.”

“He and Dr. [Paul] Thomas have been more than encouraging for me to do this project and for me to pursue research before I graduate, and that’s important to me.”

The opportunities to do undergraduate research is one reason, Beach, a Goderich, Ontario, native who joined the U.S. Navy with a green card, chose to attend Radford as a non-traditional student.

“It’s amazing. It’s the highest possible expectation I entered academia with, to get that hands-on research experience,” Beach said.

“Experience speak volumes, and that’s what you get at Radford.”