EXPOSURE TO NATURE BENEFITS HUMAN HEALTH

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Last week my friend and I were walking in the bay area in Falmouth, and eventhough the weather was cold, the sky was blue making me really enjoy the surrounding area. I do not know why I enjoy being outside and walking in nature. That activity makes me more relaxed and calm. My curiosity about this topic recently led me to a number of news articles and other sources explaining how exposure to nature can benefit human health. The “Green and Blue Spaces and Mental Health” report issued by the World Health Organization, for example, explains how exposure to nature boosts mood, mindset, and mental health (Colino, 2023). There is indeed a body of research that shows how exposure to nature can benefit our health and well-being.

For a start, researchers find that nature has restorative elements that benefit our bodies. As stated in a National Geograhic magazine article by Stacey Colino, the restorative element of nature lies in nature’s ability to draw humans’ involuntary attention (Colino, 2023). Involuntary attention refers to the state of being spontaneously attracted to or focused on something interesting from their natural environment, without intending to. For example, a popular outdoor activity in Japan called ‘forest-bathing’ shows that short exposure to nature will draw people’s involuntary attention. In that activity people simply walk in a forest being casually aware of their surroundings, but without consciously focusing on anything, which can be tiring. Research has shown that ‘forest-bathing’ relieves depressive symtoms, reduces people’s blood pressure, and improves people’s mental health.

The other reason why exposure to nature can benefit our health is that it gives our brain a break. For example, a 2022 study conducted by the Lise Meither Group for Environmental Neuroscience showed that there is a possitive effetct from short exposure to nature on the human brain (ScienceDaily, 2022). The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the activity of the amygdala, a part of the brain associated with stress processing, in a group of volunteers before and after a one-hour walk in a national forest or a urban street in Berlin. Researchers found that while there is no increased activity in the amygdala after the walk in an urban street, the amygdala activity is decreased in the brains of volunteers after an hour walking in nature. Greg Bratman and his colleagues from Stanford University also found that there is decreased activity in subgenual prefrontal cortex, which is connected to depresive rumination, in the brains of volunteers aftera 90-minute walk in a large park in Palo Alto (Williams, 2015). That evidence shows that nature has the ability to make our brains relaxed and calm.

Moreover, exposure to nature can also boost our creativity. David Strayer, a cognitive psycologist at The University of Utah, has his own research on how our brain waves react when we are in nature (Williams, 2015). Strayer has demonstrated that a group of people who participated in his three-day outdoor activities performed 50 percent better in creative problem solving tasks. Strayer’s hypotesis is that spending time in nature helps the prefrontal cortex of the brain to rest. Exposure to nature gives people a chance to re-calibrate their senses, and for that reason, they are able to perform better, the researchers believe..

In conclusion, there is a whole body of research that has been done to observe the conection between nature and human heatlh. Although scientists have not been able to provide a clear explanation of how exactly nature affects human health, they are able to show evidence that exposure to nature allows our brains to rest, boosts our creativity, and restores our health.

References

“Call to the Wild: This Is Your Brain on Nature.” Magazine, 8 Dec. 2015, www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/call-to-wild?loggedin=true&rnd=1707090130429. Accessed 3 Mar. 2024.

“How Does Nature Nurture the Brain? Study Shows That a One-Hour Walk in Nature Reduces Stress-Related Brain Activity.” ScienceDaily, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/09/220906114334.htm.

“Nature Really Is Good Medicine. Science Can Explain Why.” Premium, 6 July 2023, www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/power-blue-green-spaces-health-well-being-mental-health.