Seeing Green: The Importance of Nature for Our Health

By Eva M. Selhub and Alan C. Logan
Published on November 5, 2020
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Viewing nature scenes, such as this sunrise at Picture Lake in the North Cascade Mountains, fosters positive thoughts and lowers anger and aggression.
Viewing nature scenes, such as this sunrise at Picture Lake in the North Cascade Mountains, fosters positive thoughts and lowers anger and aggression.
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Shinrin-yoku is a Japanese term meaning
Shinrin-yoku is a Japanese term meaning "basking in the forest." Japanese researchers found reduced levels of stress hormones in subjects who took walks among trees.
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Keeping even a plant or two within view of a workspace has been shown to reduce the amount of sick leave workers take.
Keeping even a plant or two within view of a workspace has been shown to reduce the amount of sick leave workers take.

What is forest bathing, and how does it work? Do plants really help people? Can nature make us happy? Learn about all this and more in this article about the connection between nature and mental health benefits.

As Western society has developed, we have retreated from the Great Outdoors, placing greater importance on technological pursuits and human creations. Mounting scientific evidence reveals that by pushing ourselves away from nature, we not only have distanced ourselves from crisis-level environmental problems, but we’ve also begun to lose contact with a vital mental-health tool. By denying ourselves time in green space, we risk rejecting an essential part of our heritage — a truth that, ironically, we are now able to see more clearly because of advances in medical technology.

The Science of Green Space

Healers within various medical systems, from India’s Ayurvedic medicine to Traditional Chinese Medicine, have long advocated for the importance of nature. Indeed, in many cultures, it’s regarded as a form of medicine. But the notion that trees and flowers can influence psychological well-being remained largely untested in a scientific way until 1979, when behavioral scientist Roger S. Ulrich examined the mental influence of nature scenes on stressed students. His psychological testing showed differences in mental states and outlooks after the students viewed various environmental scenes. The nature scenes increased positive feelings of affection, playfulness, friendliness, and elation. Urban views, on the other hand, significantly cultivated one emotion in these students: sadness. Viewing nature tended to reduce feelings of anger and aggression, and urban scenes tended to increase these feelings.

Encouraged by his findings, Ulrich set up a similar experiment to measure brain activity in unstressed, healthy adults. His team discovered that seeing natural landscapes was associated with increased production of serotonin, a chemical that operates within the nervous system. Almost all antidepressant medications are thought to work by enhancing the availability of serotonin for use in nerve cell communication, hence its moniker, “the happy chemical.” A follow-up study showed that green spaces acted as a sort of visual Valium: The nature scenes fostered positive thoughts, and lowered post-stress anger and aggression.

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