Science-Backed Reasons Why Nature Improves Your Mental Health
If You Struggle With Depression or Anxiety, Nature Could Be Your Answer 🌱
Do you have anxiety or depression? According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, about one in four adults over the age of eighteen struggle with mental illness in the United States. 9.5% of adults live with a depressive illness. This can include major depression, bipolar disorder, or dysthymia.
And a whopping 18% of adults suffer from an anxiety disorder. Anxiety disorders consist of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and phobias. These statistics show you you’re not alone.
If you have a mental illness, then you know how difficult it can be to live with the symptoms. Mental illness can have a negative effect on all aspects of your life. From work to relationships to everyday tasks.
Luckily, you can take simple steps to improve your mental health. And also lessen the intensity of the symptoms you experience. Spending time in nature has science-backed benefits for your mental health.
[Disclaimer: This information is not meant to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of a therapist or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.]
How Does Being Outdoors Help Your Mental Health?
First of all, what exactly counts as “nature?” The Mental Health Foundation categorizes nature into “green spaces” and “blue spaces.”
Green spaces include places like parks, forests, indoor and outdoor gardens. Even trees in the city count as green spaces. Blue spaces include places such as rivers, beaches, canals, and wetlands. Think plants for green spaces and water for blue spaces.
With that definition, everyone has access to some kind of “nature”. And there are many ways that getting outside can improve your mental health. Nature does this by promoting your connection with the natural world. It enhances your social connections and reduces your stress hormone levels.
Promotes Connection With The Natural World
Nature improves mental health through a sense of connectedness with the natural world. It builds a closer relationship and emotional attachment to your natural surroundings. People who strengthen their connection with nature tend to feel happier.
A strong connection to your natural environment increases happiness by:
🌱 Promoting positive emotions like calmness, joy, and creativity
🌱 Reducing negative feelings coming from depression and anxiety
Better connectedness decreases negative emotions and increases positive ones. This improves your mental well-being because it combats feelings of loneliness.
Enhances Social Connections
Nature helps fight against feelings of loneliness by fostering more social connections. When you leave your home and go outside, it makes it more likely you will meet new people and make new connections.
Plus, studies found nature can also increase your connection in your current relationships. The secret? It gives you a sense of awe and beauty. How does that benefit your relationships?
Awe and beauty gained from nature increases:
🌱 Your attention to other people
🌱 Your tendency to help and assist others
🌱 Your desire to spend time with loved ones
Not only does nature encourage new relationships, it also improves your current ones. It helps you stay more present and active with your loved ones. Healthier relationships, in turn, relieve the stress that unhealthy relationships can cause.
Reduces Stress Levels
Stress isn’t an outright villain, it plays an important part in keeping you safe. It’s a natural response to situations that threaten your safety. BUT, when you have too much of it, stress can lead to adverse effects on both your physical and mental health.
In terms of mental health, high stress levels in your body can present through increased:
🌱 Irritability or aggression
🌱 Feelings of a loss of control
🌱 Insomnia, fatigue, or exhaustion
🌱 Sadness or crying spells
🌱 Concentration or memory problems
Time outside exposes you to peaceful and calming environments. This greatly lowers your cortisol levels. Cortisol (the stress hormone) causes you to experience feelings of anxiety. When you lower your cortisol levels by spending time outside, you also reduce feelings of stress. How great is that?!
How Can You Bring Nature’s Benefits Into Your Life?
Nature brings calm into your life in so many ways. Take a look at some of the ways you can enjoy nature (and its amazing benefits) at home.
Using Your Senses to Connect With Nature
While you’re in nature, pay attention to your five senses (sight, smell, touch, hearing, and taste). It increases your sense of connection with your surroundings. Paying attention to your senses is a technique often used in mindfulness practices. It helps with grounding yourself in the present moment.
Try this:
🌱 Going on a mindful walk outside where you try and notice as many different flowers as you can
🌱 Sitting on a park bench and seeing how many different things you can hear and smell
🌱 Finding a spot on the grass or on a beach, take off your shoes, and notice what the ground feels like against your feet
Being mindful is being curious. Get interested in how nature affects your senses and pay attention to that. Your brain will thank you later.
Exercise Outside
Exercise has its own benefits on mental health. And those benefits increase when paired with the healing properties of nature. The combination of getting your heart rate up, fresh air, and sunshine helps to boost your mood.
Try this:
🌱 Go on a hike or a nature walk
🌱 Sign up and go to an outdoor yoga class
🌱 Join a running group
🌱 Take your normal workout routine outside
Exercise and the outdoors both decrease your levels of cortisol. It only makes sense to pair them together to get twice as much benefit. Feel all that stress and nervous energy get released when you move your body and fill your lungs with fresh air.
Combine Creativity And Nature
Take your creative hobbies outside to double those positive mental health benefits. Nature boosts creativity, so your art might benefit as well. The outdoors has inspired countless artists in their pursuit of creating masterpieces. But you don’t have to be Picasso to enjoy creative hobbies outside.
Try this:
🌱 Go to a park with your sketchbook
🌱 Paint on your porch or balcony
🌱 Collect plant samples to press and use for art projects
🌱 Try nature photography (you can use your phone if you don’t own a camera)
Any activity that gets your creative juices flowing works. You allow yourself to escape everyday life a little when you let yourself get lost in a creative project. Nature makes it that much easier to enter a state of flow. And traveling to remote places with no cell signal is not necessary.
Bring The Outdoors to You
While everyone has access to some kind of nature, not everyone has access to great expanses of wilderness. But that doesn’t mean you don’t get the benefits of nature too. There are ways you can bring nature to you, instead of having to go searching for it. Studies show when you watch a nature documentary, you lower your feelings of anger and stress.
Try this:
🌱 Watch a nature documentary
🌱 Decorate your home with some house plants
🌱 Plant a vegetable or flower garden
You’ll reap benefits with anything that brings the outside to the inside. And the state of your mental health will improve. But you aren’t always at your best. Sometimes anxiety and depression want to keep you isolated and inside. It seems hard to include these things into your regular routine.
Tips for Motivating Yourself to Get Outside When Depression & Anxiety Want to Keep You in Bed
When depression and anxiety get in the way, you can make it easier on yourself. Take motivation out of the equation. Break things down into small steps. Find an accountability partner. Practice self-compassion.
Start Small
This isn’t all or nothing. You don’t have to become a complete nature freak to find nature helpful. Take it slow, one step at a time. Tell yourself you will go outside for five minutes. And five minutes only. Not an hour, not thirty minutes, not fifteen minutes. Five.
Larger amounts of time can feel overwhelming. And then you get stuck and don’t want to go out at all. So start small. And chances are you’ll stay out longer once you get yourself up. And hey, if five minutes was all you can do today, that’s okay. You did something hard and pushed through it.
Start small. Start with five minutes outside, or even one if that feels better. Practice makes perfect, and pretty soon you’ll be able to spend more and more time in nature.
Find an Accountability Partner
Telling someone you’re going to do something makes it more likely that you’ll follow through. So tell a friend what you will do outside and better still if you invite them to tag along. Inviting a friend will help give you the motivation to show up and the added plus of social connection.
Practice Self-Compassion
It’s okay to feel overwhelmed. Depression and anxiety can make everyday tasks seem impossible. Catch yourself when you compare to others. Take note of when you berate yourself for not doing enough. As long as you’re trying, that’s what counts.
Be gentle with yourself. It’s fine if you want to get outside, but don’t end up doing it. Take it one step at a time. It will get easier, I promise. Shaming yourself over what you did or didn’t do today won’t help you get outside tomorrow.
Your Future Is Green (And Blue)
Nature won’t cure your anxiety or depression by itself. But it can aid in reducing the intensity of your symptoms and promote healing. The great thing about going outside is there are no serious risk factors involved.
In order to get the most out of nature, experts recommend that you spend at least five hours per month outside. In the Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative, Florence Williams writes,
“…The results supported the earlier five-hours-a-month recommendation. But the researchers also noted the dose-response relationship: the more nature, the better you feel. To elevate mood and stave off depression most reliably, Tyrvainen told me, ‘five hours per month is the lowest amount of time to get the effect, then after, if you can go for ten hours, you will reach a new level of feeling better and better.’…
…Five hours per month means getting out there in the verdure a couple of times a week for about thirty minutes. To achieve ten hours a month requires spending about thirty minutes in nature five days per week.”
Get outside and find those green and blue spaces near you. Treat your body and mind to nature’s medicine, you got this! 💪
For more on mental health — check out our previous article on How to Protect Yourself Against Mental Health Discrimination at Work.
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