Mental Health: The benefits of being in nature

Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's post!

Today we thought we would talk to you on the benefits of being in nature for your mental health. This has been a much talked about subject recently, so it felt fitting that we would do a post about it.

Fresh air and exercise have long been used as ways to make you feel better, whether you are suffering from a physical ailment or issues with your mental health. Just spending time outside is known to generate many positive emotions, including happiness and feeling calmer just to name a few. Over longer periods of time, it is shown to help with anxiety and depression. Although it obviously can't solve the underlying problems, it can definitely help us.

However, it is less known how vital it is that the nature is 'high quality' in order to gain these effects to their full extent. This 'high quality' nature is often litter-free and clean, both of which are important if you are hoping to build a meaningful connection with your surroundings. The only issue with these 'high quality' areas of nature is that they aren't always accessible to those who need them the most, for example if they are far away from those living in cities, as well as not being safe for everyone to visit.

In society, especially in cities, we generally associate nature with something far away, something exotic like a rainforest or mountains that we must travel for miles to see. But nature is all around us. Even in the biggest of cities, you can normally find places to go. When designing and building cities, we need to focus on adding green spaces. Many cities have parks or green corridors. These may not be completely natural and do not magically transport you to far away from the cars and the people, but they are a brilliant starting point. National parks are also amazing places, if you have any near you, but you don't need to travel for hours. You can experience nature wherever you are. Even reading books or watching documentaries can have similar mental effects if you really have no other options.

The more people come to respect nature and to love the world around them, the more they will want to protect it. It's so important to respect and conserve the world around us. At the end of the day, we all depend on nature, not only for the air we breath, the water we drink and the food we eat, but also for our mental health.

Your Green World Blog Team💚

Sources:
https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/our-work/research/nature-how-connecting-nature-benefits-our-mental-health
https://www.mind.org.uk/media/9648/nature-and-mental-health-2021-pdf-for-download-pdf-version.pdf

Images:
Fall colors starting to arrive in Atlanta - Piedmont Park, owned by Peter Ciro (on flickr.com), is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
View of the Bow Bridge and boaters on a The Lake on a warm fall day in Central Park, Manhattan, owned by Diana Robinson (on flickr.com), is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

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