10 Mental Health Benefits of Spending Time in Nature

We all know — and we’ve certainly been reminded over the past year — that getting outside and interacting with our environments, even if it’s just for a brief walk, can restore and inspire us. (As architect Frank Lloyd Wright once put it, “Nature is my manifestation of God.”) We haven’t always been able to put our fingers on how Mother Nature works her magic on us — but thanks to researchers in a constellation of disciplines, we’re gaining ground all the time.

Journalist and author Lucy Jones explores that relationship in Losing Eden: Our Fundamental Need for the Natural World and Its Ability to Heal Body and Soul, both an intimate account of her own experiences and a science-based rallying cry to defend our most precious resources. “We might think that spending time in nature is nice, or that it's nice for some people who really love trees or bird-watching,” she says. “But in fact, the various and myriad ways nature connection affects our bodies, brains and minds are so significant and profound that actually we all need access to healthy and restorative spaces. Crucially, we recover from stress quickly and more completely in natural areas, which is so important at a time of instability in the world.” Want proof? We’ve got a forest’s worth.

“We all know, or intuit, that spending time in the natural world is in some way good for us but the gamechanger is that modern science is now proving unequivocally just how therapeutic nature is, and why,” Jones says. “My research into the nature and health evidence base convinced me that time spent in restorative natural environments isn't simply recreational or an indulgence, it's actually essential for our health and wellbeing. Now, especially during the pandemic, I make sure I walk in the woods or in nearby parks every day. It's as important as getting a good sleep or eating a healthy diet.”

In her book Jones cites a 2015 study of London neighborhoods that explored that very idea: comparing a census of street trees to regional health statistics from England’s National Health Service (NHS). Researchers found that residents in areas with trees and greenery had fewer antidepressant prescriptions. That doesn’t mean you can “plant a tree and ditch your pills,” as Jones puts it in Losing Eden, but a growing body of new research is finding similar associations.

While nature can’t replace most medications, it’s becoming a popular supplement, if you will, to other forms of health care. Jones writes of a groundbreaking program in the Shetland Islands, where, in 2018, clinicians pioneered prescriptions for birdwatching, rambling and beach walks to help address everything from mental illness and stress to diabetes and heart disease. Practitioners around the world have followed in their footsteps, and national nonprofit organizations like Park Rx America support initiatives to quite literally prescribe free park passes for patients across the United States. (Take two trips to Sequoia National Park and call us in the morning.)

If you’d like a bit of guidance for following a nature prescription, an innovator like Murray Hidary — a composer who’s also a certified meditation teacher and grief counselor — can show you the way. His MindTravel experiential music company offers music and meditation tracks (for setting out on your own) and in-person events like SilentWalk and SilentHike (above), where participants don headphones and follow along with a live guided meditation.

“The reason I created [these meditations] as I did is to have the ingredients of nature, music and community all in a movement experience,” Hidary explains. “And each one of those has its healing properties: when we’re out in nature we connect to the source of all things, and study after study has shown that just being around trees, being around greenery, being around the ocean and water all elevates mood and releases positive hormones that reduce stress."

“We all know what it was like to not be able to come together for a year and a half. Being able to come together safely, and be outside and moving — walking as we do… connects us deeply,” Hidary adds. “The whole thing conspires to create more relaxation, and also [foster] imagination and creativity.” (Fair warning: An HGTV contributing writer recently took a SilentWalk and found herself tearily high-fiving a tree.)

“Any time we can remove the demands and distractions of our day-to-day lives — by taking a walk in nature, as an example — we are creating space to be able to process our emotions,” Hidary says. “To allow them, and to move through them. Many of us run away from feeling our grief because we think it will go away if we avoid it long enough. But grief, like any emotion, must be felt, allowed and accepted without judgement in order to begin healing. Returning to nature engages our elemental selves which calms the nervous system and reduces stress. When we can get quiet and still we are providing a safe place for those feelings to arise. And, over time, we heal.”

Speaking of both figurative and literal safety, Jones cites a 2018 study in which researchers in Philadelphia examined how “greening” vacant lots — that is, clearing out existing human-made debris and cultivating grass and trees in its place — can affect both neighborhood perceptions toward and actual levels of crime and violence. The interventions resulted in a 29 percent reduction in gun violence (as well as downticks in vandalism and burglaries) in those areas — and residents felt both less fearful about leaving their homes and more inclined to go outside.

Researchers have known for decades that viewing natural scenes can induce states of focused relaxation; thanks to functional brain imaging, they now know we may be responding to the shapes we’re seeing. Nature teems with growths and formations that have fractal features — that is, as Jones describes them in Losing Eden, “self-repeating patterns of a shape that varies in scale, rather than being repeated exactly” [such as the ferns pictured here]. She cites Richard Taylor, a University of Oregon scientist whose work has revealed that we’re “hard-wired” to respond to fractals (as measured by changes in our brain waves) — and that can reduce our stress responses by up to 60 percent.

Studies suggest that nature might actually encourage us to nurture one another. Researchers at Carleton University in Ontario, Canada found that elementary-school students were more likely to engage in pro-social behavior (such as charity and gift-giving) after visiting a wild, forested area than they were after a field trip to an aviation museum. Another study by the same team revealed that college students who viewed nature videos were more likely to cooperate with one another — and to respond to hypothetical environmental problems with sustainable solutions — than students who viewed videos of architecture or geometric shapes. “Similar to arguments for public education,” the study authors noted in their conclusion, “providing nature access to all citizens could possibly provide a net social or financial benefit.”

You don’t have to be a binoculars-toting birdwatcher to benefit from exposure to avian life. Researchers in southern England cross-referenced mental health survey data (measuring anxiety, depression and stress) for hundreds of urban residents with early-morning and afternoon bird abundance and species richness surveys in their towns. Abundance was predictive of lower levels of those mental health attributes, but species richness was not — which is another way of saying a humble flock of pigeons can brighten your day.

Birds’ calls and other organic sounds, in turn, can have a positive effect on cognitive performance: scientists at the University of Chicago found that study subjects’ directed attention and ability to perform demanding tasks improved after hearing natural soundscapes (featuring elements like birdcalls, crickets’ chirps, ocean waves and wind). The researchers also found that the improvement wasn’t dependent on the subjects’ affective responses to the soundscapes: their perceptual and emotional reactions didn’t matter. Put another way, you might not think about the fact that opening a window to the sound of rustling leaves will help with the work in front of you — but that aural support is there all the same.