Regularly spending time in green spaces is something that can improve your mood in a variety of different ways, and can actually uplift your life as a whole. If you currently find few, if any, opportunities to regularly get into the great outdoors, making nature walks a part of your normal routine – and finding time to visit parks, or to do a bit of gardening on a daily basis – may have some remarkable benefits. Here are 5 ways in which spending time in green spaces can improve your life.
By Team Savant
Image: Josephine Baran
Not long over 100 years ago, virtually everyone — including in Western nations – lived in rural environments, and had lives that were in some way connected to agriculture.
Today, we live in a very different world, with more and more people inhabiting cities, large towns, and other urban environments, and with our connection to the natural world rapidly diminishing. Although urban living has certain key benefits, many people have noticed that there is something missing when they don't regularly spend time in green spaces. It’s partly for this reason that Victorian style greenhouses and other attractive garden features continue to be so popular.
By helping you to gain greater clarity of mind and better perspective
One of the issues that affects huge numbers of people on a regular basis, is a sense of overwhelm, mental "turmoil," and difficulty experiencing clarity of mind and clarity of perspective, as a whole.
It's a simple fact of life that we all end up feeling overwhelmed from time to time by the various a bits of information coming at us 24/7 that we have to process and make sense of – and that's before you even factor in the ups and downs of our careers and interpersonal relationships, and all the rest.
Mindfulness practices, including various forms of meditation, yoga, and "intentional eating," are just one avenue that people can take to try to experience a greater degree of mental clarity, and to gain a bit of distance from their tumultuous thoughts.
Regularly spending time in green spaces, however, may have the same kinds of benefits – as the natural world automatically has a different "pace," and feel that our everyday urban lives do.
Outdoors in a park, or in the forest, your attention is drawn outwards to the trees, plants, animals, the sun and air, and is drawn away from your emails, your social media profiles, your workplace preoccupations, and all the rest.
The explosion in popularity of outdoor-centred activities such as “forest bathing" in recent times is a testament to the fact that regularly spending time outdoors can be deeply rejuvenating, and can help to provide a much greater sense of mental clarity.
By helping you to destress consistently
The great outdoors seems to have great stress-busting benefits, as long as you aren’t doing some survival challenge in the Arctic, and aren’t threatened by dangerous wild animals.
Research has apparently found, for example, that doing exercise in the outdoors leads to significantly greater feelings of well-being and positivity than doing exercise indoors – even though the exercise is good for you in either event, and helps to promote the release of endorphins, among other things.
In the other words, you get to appreciate the harmony of nature, you can breathe in fresh air, and you can more easily let some of your stress and tension wash away for a time.
By helping to connect you to a sense of something greater
One of the things that we all look for in life, in order to live the most meaningful lives possible and to feel as though we are in proper "alignment," is a sense of connection to something greater.
It's very significant that, over the ages, many individuals – including great poets – have found spiritual fulfilment and connection in the great outdoors.
In a more everyday sense, the natural world really is something that we are all a part of, and it's something that is "greater" than all of us, in the sense that we are all embedded in it, and dependent on it even if we barely see a patch of grass, or a single tree, over the course of our daily lives.
Connecting with a sense of something greater and more transcendent can help to give life a much deeper and richer sense of purpose and direction, it can help us to make sense of ourselves in the world, and it can help us to destress and to reset our priorities so that they are aiming in a healthier direction.
Getting outdoors into green spaces as often as you can, therefore, is one great way of connecting with a sense of something greater.
By helping waking you up and energising you
Sedentary living is well known to cause – or at least to dramatically contribute to – a sense of lethargy, depleted energy, and fatigue.
It's not only a matter of being physically immobile, though, although this is definitely a major part of it. It's also a matter of being indoors too much.
If you're feeling fatigued and jaded sitting at your desk, or lounging on your sofa at home, it is almost guaranteed that you will find yourself feeling significantly more energised after a short while if you go into a green space and walk around for time.
Just one reason for this is that the air we breathe inside buildings is often stale and even toxic, although we seldom realise it. Breathing in fresh air – particularly near trees and bodies of clean water – can have a powerful rejuvenating effect in and of itself. And there are plenty of other things about the great outdoors that might be energising.
By distracting you from your usual frustrations for a time
It's already been touched on that really spending time in green spaces can help to distract us from our everyday concerns – but it's worth underscoring the point that these moments of calm can be extremely beneficial.
Finding windows of time where you are calmer and more relaxed, and are able to "step back" from your everyday concerns a bit, can have a very powerful effect in terms of helping to facilitate problem-solving, among other things.