The following is an extract from our nature newsletter Wild Wild Life. Sign up to receive it for free in your inbox every month.
I always find that in December it’s hard to resist reflecting on the past 12 months and setting goals and hopes for the year ahead. For me, 2023 was a year to step back from leisure time in nature, to focus instead on welcoming a new member of my family. It’s the second time in recent years that I’ve been unable to get outside as often as I’d like (the first being the lockdowns of 2020) and it’s left me reflecting on the particular benefits of time spent in nature.
Coming out of the acutely stressful early years of the covid-19 pandemic, it now seems widely acknowledged that gardening and other “green therapy” activities are good for us. Many people turned to outdoors activities for the first time during lockdowns, found they made them feel better and have stuck with them. There’s a person claiming that gardening “saved my life” on nearly every episode of Gardener’s World, my TV programme of choice during my house-bound year of morning sickness and night feeds. And I have multiple friends who began birdwatching in 2020 as novices, and who now make me jealous with all their beautiful sightings.
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Even if you already know that time among plants, animals and the rest of nature is good for you, you might still be surprised at the weight and breadth of evidence showing just how good for you it really is. Much of this essentially seeking to find shortcuts for harnessing nature for the benefit of health. For example, a study in Japan found that just looking at plants alters brain activity and is associated with reduced stress, anger and sadness, as well as lower blood pressure, muscle tension and pulse rate. Being able to see plants and trees from post-operative hospital wards has been linked to better mood, fewer surgical complications, less painkiller use and a shorter stay. Studies like these aren’t exceptions – similar findings are published time and time again.
There’s one result that I find simultaneously inspiring and depressing: that seems to be enough to improve a person’s self-esteem and mood. It’s inspiring, because how hard can it be for all of us to add an extra 5 minutes of nature to our daily routines next year? But the thought that we’re so starved of nature that even the tiniest dose of it can be beneficial also strikes me as pretty miserable.
When it comes to finding a scientific answer for why nature is so good for us, I always end up a little unsatisfied. References to E. O. Wilson’s concept of biophilia – the idea that humans need and seek connection with the natural world – abound, but providing a full, scientific explanation for why we like nature is perhaps a bit like trying to do the same for why people like chocolate. Yes, you can talk about how the fat content of chocolate makes it melt pleasingly at mouth temperature, but that doesn’t quite capture the whole of the experience, does it?
It seems pretty self-evident to say that a walk in nature or an afternoon spent weeding is good cardiovascular exercise. That sunshine helps you make vitamin D and regulates your circadian rhythms. Or that walking clubs, birdwatching groups and community gardens can enrich your life with social interaction. But none of that seems sufficient for explaining the feeling I get listening to a robin singing loudly on a cold dark day, the loosening behind my temples.
One idea that I keep coming back to is attention restoration theory, which I first read about in żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ last year. As my colleague Catherine de Lange wrote, much of daily life involves directed attention, a mode in which we have to suppress distractions so that we can focus on writing an email or reading a report. Suppressing distractions is, essentially, exhausting. But involuntary attention is much more fun – it’s when our attention is captured by stimuli around us and we’re able to just go with it, noticing how the light is catching on a dry dead leaf or the cracks in an icy puddle. This seems to give our brains the break from focused thinking that we crave.
Perusing the scientific literature on the benefits of nature can feel a bit dystopic – can we help the sick get well with the merest reminder of the long-lost wild, a picture of a tree? But let’s be more optimistic as we prepare for the year ahead. Five minutes of nature a day may be enough to improve your mood, and if you really want to reap the benefits, aim for more than 2 hours a week. That’s not quite as impossible as it might sound – 25 minutes every weekday would get you there, be it coffee on the garden patio every morning, a walk in the park at lunchtime or exploring with the kids after school.
I’m going to start small – just 5 stolen minutes in my garden each day. I hope that by making more time for nature to look after us, it’ll motivate us in turn to put more time into looking after nature.
