The study shows that “people living near more green space reported less mental distress”
“In England researchers from the University of Exeter Medical School recently analyzed mental health data from 10,000 city dwellers and used high-resolution mapping to track where the subjects had lived over 18 years. They found that people living near more green space reported less mental distress, even after adjusting for income, education, and employment (all of which are also correlated with health). In 2009 a team of Dutch researchers found a lower incidence of 15 diseases—including depression, anxiety, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, and migraines—in people who lived within about a half mile of green space. And in 2015 an international team overlaid health questionnaire responses from more than 31,000 Toronto residents onto a map of the city, block by block. Those living on blocks with more trees showed a boost in heart and metabolic health equivalent to what one would experience from a $20,000 gain in income. Lower mortality and fewer stress hormones circulating in the blood have also been connected to living close to green space”. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/call-to-wild-text
Nature has an effect even if you don’t go into it
“An epidemiologist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland…did a large study that found less death and disease in people who lived near parks or other green space—even if they didn’t use them. “Our own studies plus others show these restorative effects whether you’ve gone for walks or not,” Mitchell says. Moreover, the lowest income people seemed to gain the most: In the city, Mitchell found, being close to nature is a social leveler.” http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/call-to-wild-text
Studies into the effects of the images and videos of nature
“In Sweden physician Matilda van den Bosch found that after a stressful math task, subjects’ heart rate variability—which decreases with stress—returned to normal more quickly when they sat through 15 minutes of nature scenes and birdsong in a 3-D virtual reality room than when they sat in a plain room. A real-life experiment is under way at the Snake River Correctional Institution in eastern Oregon. Officers there report calmer behavior in solitary confinement prisoners who exercise for 40 minutes several days a week in a “blue room” where nature videos are playing, compared with those who exercise in a gym without videos. “I thought it was crazy at first,” says corrections officer Michael Lea. But he has experienced the difference. “There’s a lot of yelling really loud— it echoes horribly,” in the plain gym, he says. “In the blue room they tend not to yell. They say, ‘Hold on, I got to watch my video.’”” http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/call-to-wild-text
Better performance, lower stress and lower levels of violence associated with nature
It is suspected “that nature works primarily by lowering stress. Compared with people who have lousy window views, those who can see trees and grass have been shown to recover faster in hospitals, perform better in school, and even display less violent behavior in neighborhoods where it’s common. Such results jibe with experimental studies of the central nervous system. Measurements of stress hormones, respiration, heart rate, and sweating suggest that short doses of nature—or even pictures of the natural world—can calm people down and sharpen their performance.” http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/call-to-wild-text
Health benefits of spending time in nature
“A 15-minute walk in the woods causes measurable changes in physiology. Japanese researchers led by Yoshifumi Miyazaki at Chiba University sent 84 subjects to stroll in seven different forests, while the same number of volunteers walked around city centers. The forest walkers hit a relaxation jackpot: Overall they showed a 16 percent decrease in the stress hormone cortisol, a 2 percent drop in blood pressure, and a 4 percent drop in heart rate. Miyazaki believes our bodies relax in pleasant, natural surroundings because they evolved there. Our senses are adapted to interpret information about plants and streams, he says, not traffic and high-rises.” http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/call-to-wild-text
Nature’s potential to “make us nicer as well as calmer”
“Korean researchers used functional MRI to watch brain activity in people viewing different images. When the volunteers were looking at urban scenes, their brains showed more blood flow in the amygdala, which processes fear and anxiety. In contrast, the natural scenes lit up the anterior cingulate and the insula—areas associated with empathy and altruism. Maybe nature makes us nicer as well as calmer.” http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/call-to-wild-text
Nature makes us nicer to ourselves
“Stanford researcher Greg Bratman and his colleagues scanned the brains of 38 volunteers before and after they walked for 90 minutes, either in a large park or on a busy street in downtown Palo Alto. The nature walkers, but not the city walkers, showed decreased activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex—a part of the brain tied to depressive rumination—and from their own reports, the nature walkers beat themselves up less. Bratman believes that being outside in a pleasant environment (not the kind where you’re getting eaten alive by gnats or pummeled by hail) takes us outside of ourselves in a good way. Nature, he says, may influence “how you allocate your attention and whether or not you focus on negative emotions.”” http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/call-to-wild-text
Improved Executive Attention Skills
“A few years ago, for example, in an experiment similar to Bratman’s, Stephen Kaplan and his colleagues found that a 50-minute walk in an arboretum improved executive attention skills, such as short-term memory, while walking along a city street did not. “Imagine a therapy that had no known side effects, was readily available, and could improve your cognitive functioning at zero cost,” the researchers wrote in their paper. It exists, they continued, and it’s called “interacting with nature.”” http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/call-to-wild-text
