Best Of: How Spending Time In Nature Helps Our Health

0:07If you're feeling stressed, let's pause and take a listen to this soundscape and take some deep breaths.

0:25How do you feel? Maybe a little more revived, more focused? Our next guest has made a career out of understanding exactly how nature affects our well-being. He found that just listening to nature sounds can lead to cognitive benefits. Mark Berman is the pioneer of environmental neuroscience, and he's out with the new book, Nature and the Mind, the science of how nature improves cognitive, physical, and social well-being. Berman wanted to know exactly how our physical environment affects us and why. Through his research, he found how nature improves our focus, reduces depression, and even improves our physical health.

1:01But you don't have to move to a scenic home in the country for all these advantages. Mark Berman joins us after the break to talk about his findings. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. Back with our guest in just a moment. Stay with us.

1:19Mark, it's so great to have you on the program today. Thank you for having me on the show. Let's start with these voicemails we got from some of you. I cannot tell you enough how much incorporating a daily walk in the woods has changed my outlook. I battle with chronic health issues, and I have a 30 % increase of lung capacity now and 100 % increase of joy and happiness just walking outdoors in the woods on a daily basis. Nature is my church. It's where I go to meditate. It's where I go to revitalize. It's everything to me. I recently moved to the coast of Delaware from a big city, and nothing calms me more to be in the presence of the ocean.

2:09Alisa in North Carolina, Dee in Nashville, and Susan in Delaware, thank you for those messages. Mark, how did you become interested in this area of study? It's a good question. It was kind of a long route. I think directly I had an advisor in graduate school, Steve Kaplan, who talked a lot about how interacting with different environments and in particular interacting with more natural environments can be really beneficial to our attention and our memory. And I just thought that was a really interesting idea that I hadn't really heard about, about how the actual physical environment that's around us can have a big impact on our behavior and on our health.

2:52And in particular, that interacting with natural environments could be so, so beneficial. And I think humans, we have so much control over the physical environment. I think sometimes we forget that the physical environment really affects us. And I think this kind of, you know, it really made me think about that and that, you know, a lot of environments that people are in are not very beneficial to their health and their well-being. But with some of these ideas that interacting with nature can be so beneficial to us, I thought, you know, maybe we could actually design environments using some of this knowledge to really improve human well-being.

3:29You coined the term environmental neuroscience. How do you define it? it it it means that it's how the physical and even social environment affect brain and behavior and that we have these bi-directional relationships between our brains and the environment so the physical environment that's around us affects our brains deeply and there were studies that were done in the 1960s with rodents and they looked at rodents interacting with different environments, rodents living in environments that had toys and rich social interactions versus rodents kind of just living on their own in very sterile cages.

4:07And that had significant impacts on these rodents' brains, that the rodents' brains that were in the more enriched environments had more synapses. Their brains were sort of richer than the rodents that were growing up in the depleted environments. And I think a lot of that research kind of sat for a while, and people didn't really connect it too much to humans. But the same thing is true of humans, that we're not immune to the physical environment and the physical environment that's around us has deep, deep causes and changes to our brains and to our physical health. The other thing that I think is important too is that with our brains, we're also changing the physical environment.

4:49And so it's kind of this cyclical relationship that we have where the physical environment is affecting us, but we also have the power to sort of change the physical environment in this loop. Unfortunately, it doesn't really seem like in current times that you don't often hear people say, well, you know, we designed this school so that kids would be more cooperative and that they would have better working memory, or we designed this office so that people would have less stress, they would interact more with each other, and they'd have lower rates of depression. We've kind of designed the physical spaces that we're in in cities to sort of move goods efficiently, to house people efficiently, but not really to promote human flourishing.

5:30And I think that's something that we're trying to get across in our research, but also in my book, that we really, really need to take this research seriously about how the physical environment affects our brains. And then also, too, that one physical environment that we find that's really, really good for our brains are more natural environments. and how can we get people to be more exposed and interacting with more natural environments on a regular basis? Well, it's so interesting because what you're describing, it's very intuitive. I mean, when we're growing up, when your parents want you to calm down, it's just like, go outside, go play.

6:10I think about the young people nowadays who tell each other, look, you need to go touch grass, right? There's something deeply intuitive about being outside, being in nature, and that it does something for us. But what I hear you saying is that the scientific connection, the way that the environment changes our brains, it rewires things, the impact on the way our hearts and our lungs are operating, that's understudied. It's something we need to better understand. That's right, Jen. And sometimes, too, our intuitions aren't always correct. and what I think you know one of the more counterintuitive findings that we have from our work is that you don't even really have to like nature to get some of these benefits so we do studies where we bring participants into the lab we give them some challenging cognitive tasks that test their attention and their memory and then we have them like go for a walk in a park for 50 minutes so five zero minutes have them come back to the lab and take these memory and attention measures again, or we have them walk in a more urban environment for 50 minutes and then have them come back to the lab and take these memory and attention measures again.

7:22And it's true, like in the summer months, people really enjoy the walk in nature and they show really strong improvements in their memory and attention. But we've also had people walk in January in winter months when it's cold outside and participants that went on the nature walk didn't really enjoy the nature walk very much but they show the same memory and attention benefits as the people that walked in June or in the summer months. So to get many of these psychological benefits, you don't even have to really enjoy the nature to get the benefits. And I think too, one other thing, while I think, you know, our parents and grandparents had the right idea that we need to be spending more time in nature and to get outdoors, they didn't really know why it was working.

8:10And I think if we want to design hospitals better or design homes better or design schools better, to design workplaces more efficiently, we really have to understand what it is about nature that's leading to these benefits. I want to get into that in a moment, but I want to focus in for a moment on what you say is an attention crisis, that our modern world creates a competition for our attention. What does that competition mean for our mental health? Yeah, and it's something that one of my mentors, Steve Kaplan, used to talk about that for modern humans, the problem is not finding information.

8:50The problem is managing all the information that's bombarding us, and that requires a lot of attention. And there's been another recent book out called The Siren's Call about how new technologies are just trying to just capture our attention and not let it go, you know, to either sell us things or to keep us on devices for a long time. And we think that's causing a lot of problems. And when we talk about attention, we think it's more than just, you know, kids wiggling around in their seats at school, not being able to pay attention. We actually think that our ability to pay attention and one kind of attention we call is directed attention.

9:31That's where you as an individual person are deciding what you're paying attention to. We think that this ability to direct attention underlies a lot of other behaviors like our ability to have self-control, our ability to have good social interactions with each other, our ability to be less aggressive, that all of that requires attention. And in modern society, with so many different devices and technologies vying for our attention, we kind of have less of this attentional store in the bank. It's getting depleted. And that's one thing, too, that we talk about directed attention, that this ability of humans to direct our attention, to choose what we're paying attention to, we can't do it forever.

10:17We become mentally fatigued and we can't focus anymore. And I think we've all had that sensation at the end of a long workday where you're kind of just staring at the computer screen and it's hard to focus. We call that a directed attention fatigue state. You also might be becoming irritable at the same time. You're lacking patience. And that's the time that we think you should be taking a break in nature and not sort of scrolling your social media feed as your break. We're talking to Mark Berman. He's director of the Environmental Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Chicago. ago. He's also the author of the new book, Nature and the Mind.

10:54I want to touch on what you call soft versus hard fascination and how that comes into play. Yeah. So we think that humans kind of have these two main forms of attention. One is the directed attention, which I just talked about, whereas you as an individual person are deciding what you're going to pay attention to. That's different from another kind of attention that we call involuntary attention or sometimes it's called bottom-up attention and that's the kind of attention that's automatically captured by interesting stimulation in the environment so bright lights loud noises those things automatically capture our attention and we don't really have a lot of control over it and it's thought that that kind of attention is less susceptible to fatigue or depletion so you don't often hear people say oh i can't look at that beautiful waterfall anymore It's just so gorgeous.

11:46I have to take a break or, oh, I can't watch this really interesting movie anymore. It's just so interesting. I'm just tired out. I have to shut it off. So the idea with this attention restoration theory, which is this theory about how we can use nature to restore our directed attention, is that if you can find environments that don't place demands on directed attention while simultaneously having interesting stimulation to activate involuntary attention, you could restore or replenish this precious directed attention resource and natural environments are one sort of example now to get directly at your question jen about the soft versus hard fascination let's go back to the waterfall example when we look at that beautiful waterfall it captures our attention it's interesting but it doesn't really capture all of our attentional resources we can kind of mind wander and reflect while we're looking at that beautiful waterfall So we say it softly captures our attention.

12:40If we're walking around in Times Square, that's also super interesting. Lots of stimulation to capture our attention, but Times Square kind of captures our attention in a very harsh way and doesn't really let go. You can't really mind wander or think about other things in Times Square. That attentional grab in Times Square is just all-consuming. So we think that the kind of stimulation that can capture your attention in a softly fascinating way is going to be more restorative of your directed attention. And we think a lot of natural stimulation kind of meets that criteria, like going to your local park where you feel safe, that it doesn't tax directed attention and has softly fascinating stimulation to activate your involuntary attention.

13:22Well, it makes me wonder whether our experience or the benefit of being in nature changes if we add stimulation to that experience. So I can note a difference if I go for a walk between the walks I do in just silence, where I'm just walking and listening to the bird song, the occasional car passing by, you know, saying hello to neighbors, or when I have my earbuds in and I'm listening to a podcast or making a phone call, you know, really maximizing the efficiency of that time. Does that have an effect on how beneficial that space can be for us? Yes, absolutely. And we would definitely recommend that if you want to get the most bang for your buck and the nature experience or the nature walk, you want to take the earbuds out, you want to leave the smartphone at home and just let all of your senses be captured by the stimulation in nature.

14:21If you're listening to a podcast, you know, that's going to require directed attention and you're not going to be attending to the bird song or the different kinds of stimulation as well in nature. So we definitely recommend that if you want to get the most restorative experience in nature, you want to kind of eliminate all other kinds of distractions and just be able to let your mind and your involuntary attention be captured by all that stimulation in nature. Vance emails, nature is where I go to feel happy and where I go to feel sad. My wife is currently battling breast cancer and when time allows, I run far into the mountains of western North Carolina.

15:00And when I'm alone, I sob and scream and breathe. Then I feel better and can more adequately care for my wife. And Mark in Massachusetts says, I'm listening to you now while hiking the Appalachian Trail in New Hampshire. I have a chronic disease, depression, and anxiety. I've hiked 600 miles on the Appalachian Trail this year, and it has taught me to rethink my fears before letting them take control. Moving beyond attention, Mark, how does nature affect our mood and even those experiencing depression? Yeah, those are very powerful stories. And, you know, in my book, we talk about how there are many people that use nature as a way to help with grieving and to help us when we're under mental distress.

15:47You know, we've done studies where we've taken participants who have been diagnosed with clinical depression and we find that brief walks in nature can be very beneficial to them, both for their attention but also for their mood. So I think, you know, there's a lot to unpack here. We definitely think that nature, its ability to improve our attention actually can improve with mental health. Because you can imagine when people are grieving or if they're having a strong depressive episode, it's very hard for them to concentrate and focus. So if nature can help to increase our ability to focus, it kind of helps us to deal with the issues that are bothering us.

16:31Let's head to a quick break. when we return, we get into how nature affects how we think and what we think about.

16:42Now back to the conversation with these messages we got from you. I enjoy spending time in nature because it's one of the few moments that I feel like I don't have to compromise. When I'm fully present and I'm in a wild space, I feel like I get to just bring my own awareness and who I am to that moment. For most of my life, since I was 16, I'm now 66, I've worked outside. It's very freeing. It exposes you to really what's going on around you and nature. My family just recently got a puppy and a bonus that I did not expect was the amount of early morning walks I would be taking. And it's really been a new rhythm to my week to start my days outdoors.

17:31It's just a beautiful, nice way to wake up every day. Holly, Diane in Maryland and Holly in Ohio, thanks for those messages. Mark, what does the science tell us about how long we need to be in nature or in connection with nature to experience a positive effect? It's a great question. And we don't have all the answers yet. There have been studies that suggest you want to try to get about 120 minutes per week, so maybe about two hours per week, maybe spread out throughout the week. In some of our original studies, we found that the walk was, we found benefits after a 50-minute walk, so a 5-0-minute walk, although we've found you can even get benefits from just looking at pictures of nature or listening to nature sounds.

18:21And there we had people view the nature scenes for about 10 minutes or listen to nature sounds for about 10 minutes. Other researchers have found that kids with ADHD, if they go for about a 20-minute walk in nature, they can show improvements that are about equivalent to a dose of Ritalin, which is pretty amazing. So I think we don't yet know everything the dose response relationship yet I think many of us would say the more the better but it also might matter the kind of nature that you're being exposed to if you can be in a more immersive natural environment that's probably going to produce stronger effects that maybe last longer than say you know looking at a picture of nature or looking out the window of nature so we don't know yet we I would kind of say the more you can get the better but also being kind of mindful about when you take the break.

19:16So if you're a morning person and you're very energized in the morning, maybe you want to take your break later in the day when you're starting to feel mentally fatigued. If you're somebody that has a really hard time getting started in the morning and you feel kind of mentally groggy in the morning, maybe you want to take that nature walk or have that nature interaction at the beginning of your day to get refreshed. So I think that's another thing that we want to be mindful of is monitoring our own mental health and our own directed attention to try to figure out when the best time for us would be to take that break in nature.

19:52We got this question from Carl who asks, does what you do in nature matter, walking versus biking? Yeah. So we know that you don't want to have the earbuds in or be on the cell phone that we think that and other people have shown that that can kind of cancel some of the benefits. Just sitting in nature can have benefits and definitely we've tested walking in nature. Biking or running in nature can also be beneficial. I would just say that if you're biking and you're going much faster, you know, you're zooming through nature much more quickly and your brain then might not have as much of an ability to digest the nature that you're being surrounded by and depending on the difficulty of the biking you know you it might require some focus as well so you know we do think that to get the the biggest benefit you kind of want to be able to take it slow and um and just uh be able to go slow and let all that nature be seeped in by all of your senses that we think that will lead to the biggest benefit but if it's you know So running in nature, biking in nature versus no nature, we would definitely recommend you definitely go for the bike ride in nature or go for the run in nature to get that extra exercise in nature.

21:11But if you do have a little bit more time, we do think the slower you can take it, you might actually get more of that mental brain boost. Well, I'm wondering about the many people who don't live in or maybe even have access to a quote-unquote natural environment, right? There may not be a park nearby. There may not be, you know, an arboretum where you can go for a hike. But there may be birdsong or some trees on your block. How much do we benefit from pieces of nature? Yeah, we can benefit a lot from just pieces. And it's a great point that you're making, Jen, because many of us don't have access to nature.

22:01Or what's even more depressing is some of us do have access to nature, but that nature may not be well-maintained or people may not feel safe in that nature, and then the nature is not going to have the benefit that it was intended to have. But there's just incredible research showing that, yeah, just having pieces of nature can have these benefits. And there was this one seminal study by Roger Ulrich in the 1980s where he was studying a single hospital corridor in a Philadelphia hospital, and he was looking at patients' recovery from gallbladder surgery. And Roger looked at the views out of people's windows on this hospital corridor, and some of the hospital rooms had views of modest nature, like a patch of trees and maybe some grass.

22:46And other hospital rooms had views of like a brick wall, like the other side of the hospital. And it turned out the patients that had the views of nature out of their hospital window, they recovered from gallbladder surgery a day earlier, and they used less pain medication than the people who had the views of the brick wall. And you might be thinking, well, maybe wealthier people or more educated people or younger people got the rooms with the nature view. But no, that wasn't the case. Patients are just randomly assigned to these different rooms. um so so it's just amazing that just this view of nature out of your window could have these healing qualities and there again like you were mentioning that's kind of piecemeal we're not actually having people walk in actual nature it's just a view out of their window um can have these effects and we even find too again that just looking at nature pictures or listening to nature sounds um can have some of these not necessarily the health benefits but it can have some of the attention benefit.

23:48But why, Mark? It makes sense to me that being outside, because there's so many, there's so much stimuli, right? There's smells, there's sounds, there's the wind that you feel, but just looking at a picture or just listening to a sound, what's happening in our brain that makes us react? Yeah. So we think part of it has to do with how our brains process fractals. So So to explain what a fractal is, if you imagine a snowflake, a snowflake has a particular shape. And if you put that snowflake under a microscope and zoom in, it also kind of has the same shape. And if you zoom in a little bit more, it also has the same shape.

24:29So it doesn't matter at what spatial scale you look at that snowflake. It's got the same characteristic shape. And you can think of the same kind of thing happens with a tree, like a tree, like a maple tree. it's got the trunk that then branches out into big branches that branches onto smaller branches that branches out even smaller branches that branches out to the leaves and the leaves have veins that branch out so it's kind of interesting that you know even the leaf of the maple tree mimics some of the same patterns as the whole maple tree so again this this tree is sort of scale free it doesn't matter as much at what zoomed in or zoomed out with spatial scale you look at the tree has got the same characteristic shape and that's also called fractalness and it may be that our brain sort of processes fractal stimulation easier than the stimulation that were presented in the urban environment that doesn't have this scale for equality another thing that we're finding is that we may compress these nature pictures down into less information than the urban images.

25:39So for example, our computers and our phones do something that's called JPEG compression to save memory space on our computers and our phones. Our computers and our phones use this JPEG algorithm to kind of remove some details from the images. Our eye can't see it, but it saves room on our computers that it takes an image that maybe was 100 megabytes and gets it down to 10 megabytes. And we actually find that nature pictures get squished down into fewer bites or fewer bits, less information than the urban scenes. And we think that maybe our brains are kind of doing the same kind of thing that we evolved in nature.

26:19Our brains might be sort of tuned to this nature stimulation and we can kind of just look at it more fluently and easily and it doesn't stick as much. And that's another thing that we actually find too is that nature images, people don't remember them as well than the urban pictures. And you might think, oh, that's a bad thing because you want to remember things. But we think that's actually a good thing. It just means that this nature stimulation, it might actually be kind of like eye candy. It just doesn't stick so much. And actually, one of the reasons why nature tends to be less memorable is because it's more compressible that we can press it down.

26:54So we think that's part of it. But then to get back to your other point, like why would seeing nature out of my window help me speed recover from gallbladder surgery? Well, it might be because, again, brain and body are tied together. And if looking at that stimulation is kind of easier for us and maybe it uplifts our mood, maybe that can have some healing quality to it. Brian says, I'm a schoolteacher who's interested in how the school outdoor environment can affect learning. Mark, what does the research tell us? Well, it definitely tells us, for example, younger kids who go to these forest schools where they're out in nature a lot and getting their hands dirty and dirt, their immune systems actually function better probably because they're ingesting some of the microbes of nature.

27:44So that can be beneficial. And then they're also being out in nature. They're getting these attention benefits that we think will lead to better self-control and better behavior. I do kind of wonder sometimes, like, do we want to have all of our teaching out in school? You know, can you do calculus if the wind is blowing your papers around and the sun is in your eyes? You know, I'm not entirely sure about that yet, but we definitely think about, you know, going to school and on an eight hour day. What if we had six hours of instruction and two hours of a break in nature? The students might learn better than just eight hours straight of instruction.

28:20Sharon emails this. How can older adults living in senior communities and care settings take advantage of the benefits of exposure to the natural world when they aren't able to get outside independently? And this is a really interesting question, Mark, because you studied the effect of trees on our physical health. But there are people who, for a variety of reasons, have trouble accessing the natural world. So how would you answer Sharon's question? Yeah, it's a great question. And we know at least for the attention benefits, you know, some of these older adults could get the benefits from nature pictures, nature sounds.

28:59But also, you know, I think, you know, in the book we write about trying to induce a nature revolution. And I think part of the nature revolution would be bringing more nature indoors. So you could imagine designing these long-term care facilities a little bit differently where maybe you actually do have trees that are growing indoors. And maybe they could actually be fake trees. We even find that sometimes even artificial nature that mimics the patterns of nature can have some of these benefits. So I think for these adults that don't have the easy access trying to bring the nature indoors could be really beneficial.