Do you live in the city? Surrounded by buildings, oftentimes not even very many trees in sight? I know how you feel!

Life is full of stress, there are so many things to worry about and we all often end up with so many responsibilities. The stress of the daily grid of life can really wear you down after a while. You may not even realize that you are stressed sometimes, but your body will know!

Those of us that love the outdoors can tell you, there is just something about being outside in nature. It really helps finding a sense of calm inside, it's relaxing, it's refreshing. But of course that's all just anecdotal! There isn't any actual research showing a benefit to mental health from being out in nature...

I think nature is arguing with that thought

Or Is There?

This post describes work published January 13, 2017 in the journal BioScience titled "Doses of Neighborhood Nature: The Benefits for Mental Health of Living with Nature."

Why Were The Authors Even Studying This?

They discuss in their introduction that anxiety is a huge economic drain on society. They state that in Europe alone anxiety and mood disorders cost over 180 billion Euros in lost revenue.^[2] That's quite a lot of wasted potential productivity!

The authors cite a variety of articles (some just opinion pieces) which postulate that one of the drivers of the ever increasing issues with depression and other mood disorders in modern society are derived from us living in cities, living sedentary lives and generally being disconnected from nature.^[3]

It is important to note also that the authors recognize the actual causes of depression are complex, ^[4] but there have been a number of studies performed discussing how nature does have some psychological benefits.^[5] As well as a variety of theories (the attention-restoration theory and stress-reduction theory are mentioned by the authors) which postulate that exposure to nature both helps you overcome mental tiredness from doing tough tasks, and helps prevent a negative bodily response when exposed to a source of stress.

Okay, deep breath, quick break, view some nature!

They Wanted To Answer Two Questions

1. What components of nature are linked to positive mental-health outcomes?
2. For those linked components is there a threshold for the mental-health response?

So they wanted to see what it is about nature that gets people feeling better, and how much of that nature component was necessary before people had a positive mental effect.

Answering That First Question

They polled people through an "urban lifestyle questionnaire" to get information on general stress levels of people in a given area (they were looking at cities in England: Milton Keynes, Luton, and Bedford). They then tried to quantify some "key" aspects of nature, which they defined as:

1. Amount of Vegetation
2. Abundance, variety and "richness" of the singing of birds present at various times of the day including morning, and afternoon.

What Did They See?

This Image Is A Figure From [1]

They correlated their investigations of amount of vegetation and birds in the areas where the polled people lived, with their responded level of stress, anxiety and depression. The above plot shows these relationships. If you see ** that means that p<0.001 and if you see * then that means p<0.05 (the smaller the p value, the more statisitically relevant a result is). What does this plot show us?

Well it shows that the people reporting the highest amounts of stress, anxiety and depression all had a statistical correlation with being around less "nature", they had less vegetation surrounding them, and less exposure to birds. However the greatest effect was having vegetation.

Answering That Second Question

The second question was: is there an amount of "nature" that is needed to result in a mental health benefit? The biggest benefit was in having vegetation around, so they plotted the amount of vegetation against the odds of being either depressed, anxious or stressed.

This Image Is A Figure From [1]

Here in these plots the higher the number on the Y axis, the less likely one is to be (depressed, anxious, stressed) and as we can see depression shows a markedly better result (especially at greater than 20% vegetation cover), as the amount of vegetation increases. So being around even a little bit more plants just makes people happier. The response for stress and anxiety IMO show a non significant correlation in this regard (their error bars are just huge). Still, a benefit to depression rates is still very interesting!

The Authors Conclusions

The authors state that this study shows a quantifiable reduction symptoms of poor mental health if even a minimal threshold of vegetation is met. They feel that this serves as a justification for modifying the plans for neighborhood design in cities to ensure that enough vegetation is present.

What Does This Mean To Me?

Get out and into nature if you are feeling depressed, this study does indeed put a some numbers onto what many of us have anecdotally known. Being in nature does really help calm us down on the inside! Nature is wonderful and being in tune with it can help you live a happier and more fulfilled life. It can be hard sometimes to make time for being outside and taking a break from our hectic schedules, but the health benefits seemingly there. You just have to walk outside, take a deep breath and spend some time in a place with a bit less glass and concrete, and a bit more green.

Sources

1. https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/biosci/biw173
2. http://www.braincouncil.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Cost-of-Disorders-of-the-Brain-in-Europe-EurNeuro2011.pdf
3. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4dac/c3048f7c1fd9cbc3708384ed5a11848d3281.pdf
4. http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/206/6/456
5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4204431/

All Non Cited Images Are From Pixabay.com And Are Available Under Creative Commons Licenses

Any Gifs Are From Giphy.com and Are Also Available for Use Under Creative Commons Licences

** This BioScience article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution License**

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