Why nature walks are good for the brain

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Some people dream of putting on a backpack and walking a couple of tens of kilometers throughout the working week. Others agree to eat their own tie, just not to sleep on the ground.

Your brain doesn't care whether you love nature or not. He needs green space. Nature is a life-giving balm and this has been proven by years of research. Communication with nature improves mood, memory, attentiveness. And when you consider that people have moved to cities, outings to nature are becoming more and more important.

In Russia now more than 70% of the population lives in cities. More than half in the world. Human life has changed. And what is most interesting, the massive move to high-rise buildings is combined with the same rapid growth in the number of mental disorders.

City brain

There are many reasons why the number of people with mental disorders is growing. Experts talk about a reduction in free time (including for children), economic difficulties, the lifting of moral prohibitions on seeking psychological help, and a number of other factors.

A large number of diseases are associated with anxiety and depression, which are common among urban residents. Psychologists have long suspected that city life negatively affects the brain.

In 1984, biologist Edward Osborne Wilson described the reasons for the positive influence of nature on human mental well-being in his book Biophilia. He suggested that humans have an innate urge to seek connections with plants and animals., published in the journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, summarized data from 20 studies comparing urban and rural residents. It turned out that affective disorders are 40% more common in cities. Anxiety neuroses are also more typical for city dwellers. The difference is only partially explained by demographic differences between cities and towns.

There is also no reason to think that gloomy individuals go to cities, and all merry people tend to stay in the countryside. In 2013, it was published: over 18 years, 10,000 people were interviewed, moving to and from cities. Subjects reported an increase in well-being and a decrease in stress when they lived in a green area approximately 4 km in diameter. The improvements were modest, with about a third of the subjects attributing the change to marriage, for example, but across the population, the data has great potential.

A study by the magazine found that people who grew up in the countryside cope with stress better than people who grew up in the city, judging by the activity of the amygdala, the brain region responsible for anxiety and learning. But the residents of the city and the village do not differ in their own assessment of stress, as well as their behavior in stressful situations.

Other studies have shown that walking in green areas improves mood and cognition in both depressed and non-psychiatric people. The landscape outside the window is associated with better concentration and control over impulses. Green spaces around the home reduce cortisol (stress hormone) levels and reduce anxiety, according to patients.

Why greens are important

It is even less clear why greens have such an impact on our health. Recent research has shown that you don't need to travel far and wide to protect your brain.

Stanford Environment Institute researcher Gretchen Daily surveyed 38 people. On campus, the participants' brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants also filled out questionnaires in which they described the presence of obsessive thoughts, in particular about a negative attitude towards themselves and their actions.

The 19 participants then went on a 90-minute walk along the congested main street. The rest went for a walk along the cobbled path among the hills, around the radio telescope, which stood not far from the campus. The routes have been specially selected to appreciate the practical benefits of a short rest every day.

After returning, the participants filled out the questionnaires again. Those who walked in nature had much better results. And after walking around the city, the feelings of the subjects did not change.

The work of the brain after communicating with nature has also changed. The part of the brain responsible for feelings of sadness and self-digging showed less activity, which was not the case in people walking along the route. And these changes cannot be explained only by the difference in heart rate and respiration rates.

There is something pacifying in nature, and this is not associated with light physical activity and a break from work. What exactly is not yet clear.

Identifying these specific factors is now the number one challenge for researchers.

Meanwhile, the world is already planning cities with regard to access to natural islets. In Cape Town, attention is paid to the distance from future schools to parks: children should not spend a lot of time on the way from the place of study to the green zone. In Stockholm, they refer to "natural rays" embedded in the urban space in the form of parks and squares. Some researchers are trying to calculate how many trees should grow on one street in order to improve the psychological state of passers-by. We have to fight for every square centimeter of greenery if we don't want to go crazy. Moreover, it is easy to destroy a corner of nature, but to return it to the urban environment is much more difficult.