Natural Settings Like Plants Help Support Mental Health
The study “Green is Good For You,”[1] by Rachel Kaplan, PhD and Stephen Kaplan, supports a natural environment as being supportive of positive mental health. They call these environments “restorative environments,” and they explored nature’s impact on mental functioning, physical well-being, and social relationships.
They looked at two different types of attention and how they impacted mental function. Directed attention is the attention we put into work or solving problems. Too much directed attention can lead to “directed attention fatigue” which includes irritability, distractibility, and impulsivity.
Fascination attention is automatic. The natural fascination with nature helps people recover from directed attention fatigue.
“People don’t have to head for the woods to enjoy nature’s restorative effects, the Kaplans emphasize. Even a glimpse of nature from a window helps. In one well-known study, for instance, Rachel Kaplan found that office workers with a view of nature liked their jobs more, enjoyed better health and reported greater life satisfaction.”
In one study, for instance, he asked participants to complete a 40-minute sequence of stroop and binary classification tasks designed to exhaust their directed attention capacity. After the attentionally fatiguing tasks, the randomly assigned participants spent 40 minutes walking in a local nature preserve, walking in an urban area, or sitting quietly while reading magazines and listening to music. After this period, those who had walked in the nature preserve performed better than the other participants on a standard proofreading task. They also reported more positive emotions and less anger.
The impact of nature goes beyond just mental perception. Roger S. Ulrich, PhD, director of the Center for Health Systems and Design at Texas A&M University, found that nature helps the body heal.
Ulrich investigated how patients recovering from abdominal surgery were affected by the view of of trees from their hospital room windows. He discovered that patients who had a view of trees had better recovery times, had less complications, and required less medication than patients who had views of brick walls.
Surrounding yourself with nature removes focus from one’s own problems. It allows the mind to find some stillness in the natural patterns of life. The blowing of the wind through the leaves and their reaction to the wind. Our consciousness is taken back to the wonder of the natural patterns of life, which effects our senses in so many soothing and healing ways.
Surround yourself with as much nature as you can to balance the stressfulness of directed attention.
[1] Green is Good For You
Tags: nature supports mental health
