TellUs: What Happens Mentally When We Reconnect With Nature

Nature and mental health

Nature is a magical thing. It is all encompassing and changes day by day. Flowers bloom and die. Bees buzz busily, providing their daily purpose of pollinating plants. Leaves tumble off the trees in autumn and thrive again in spring. Colours, scents and physiques alter all year round. If you look into your garden, a local park or any area of greenery you can daily, if you really focus you will spot differences in that area every single day. So why am I mentioning all of this? Well this blog will be discussing how nature has a positive impact on mental health. Obviously these impacts vary from person to person and so do the levels of impact. So take this blog as just an overview, not specific to individuals! 

I thought we should start with an interesting study. The study we’re discussing is published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, its aim was to research the emotions and feelings evoked by viewing nature as opposed to man-made objects. The study split individuals into three groups, each having an assigned condition to view: nature, human-built or business-as-usual. They had to pay attention to whichever condition they were given in their daily lives, photographing it and writing down the emotions these items provoked. It was stated that “post-intervention levels of net positive affect, elevating experiences, a general sense of connectedness (to other people, to nature and to life as a whole) and prosocial orientation were significantly higher in the nature group compared to the human-built and control groups”. The study also stated that “qualitative findings revealed significant differences in the emotional themes evoked by nature vs. human-built objects/scenes”. Therefore in this study nature proved to cause a positive psychological effect on people.

The mental health organisation Mind suggests nature as benefitting those that struggle with mental health. Some of the benefits of involving nature in your everyday life is as follows:

• Improve your mood
• Reduce feelings of stress or anger
• Help you take time out and feel more relaxed
• Improve your physical health
• Improve your confidence and self-esteem 
• Help you be more active
• Help you make new connections
• Provide peer support

As it is seen as more fact than fiction - that nature benefits mental health - there is now a therapy relating to it, ecotherapy. Ecotherapy is a formal type of therapeutic treatment which involves doing outdoor activities in nature. There isn't one single definition of ecotherapy, but it's often used to describe a regular, structured activity. These activities range from green exercise to horticulture and so forth, but always have the element of working and experiencing nature at its core. 

So this is all well and good, but what is it in our bodies that actually causes this response to nature? Biologically what is happening inside of us that sparks this reaction of calmness and feeling of relaxation, just to name a few? Recent investigations revealed that being outdoors reduces stress by lowering the stress hormone cortisol. Besides that, it also makes us immune to allied problems like hypertension and tachycardia (Lee J, 2011). 

The sun and sunlight is important when discussing nature and its link to mental health, as little sunlight means we receive less vitamin D. Vitamin D in the body helps our immune system fight off diseases and not getting enough has side effects of increased anxiety and fatigue. Studies have indicated that a large chunk of the population today is deficient of the ‘sunshine vitamin’. This is reinforced by a study done in 2013, its aim was to display how the weather in polar regions contributes to peoples emotions. The results were as followed: “the lack of sunlight and extreme weather conditions in these regions impact the cognitive functioning, anxiety levels, and causes a static low mood condition for its inhabitants”. 

Many argue that physically, mentally and spiritually our bodies are more at ease outside because for thousands of years that's where we primarily spend the vast majority of our time. Even when we started living in houses, many jobs were manual, labour jobs requiring many hours being spent outside. However nowadays, for a lot of us, we work inside. Therefore it is argued that our bodies chemically aren’t adapted to these man-made environments, where we spend the longest amount of time in and this takes a toll on us mentally. Remember our mind and body are connected. 

I hope this blog was informative and that it has encouraged you to try and reconnect with nature a little more. Nature is free, asks for nothing in return and provides amazing benefits for us. 

“A walk in nature walks the soul back home” - Mary Davis

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Check out my previous blog: https://www.tellusabouttheenvironment.com/2019/08/tellus-beginner-guide-to-carbon.html