The Mental Health Benefits of Being in Nature
I want to continue expanding on my last blog article, in which we saw how awe has a profound effect on our mental well-being. In this article, we will expand the concept to examine nature in general and what research has uncovered about how and why it helps our mental health.
Awe and nature are close relatives. Both move us out of self-preoccupation and into something larger than ourselves. Both reliably improve mood, perspective, and the capacity to keep going through difficult periods. Yet nature has been studied for much longer, across more populations, and with a wider range of methods. What that research now shows is striking. The relationship between time in the natural world and our mental wellbeing is among the more robust findings in modern psychology, and we are beginning to understand the specific mechanisms in the brain that explain why.
A Global Pattern: Nature Connectedness Predicts Wellbeing
The strongest evidence we have for nature’s effect on mental health comes from a variety of cross-cultural studies rather than from a single country or community. For example, a recent analysis published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology drew on a dataset of nearly 37,000 participants across 75 countries, collected by an international consortium between 2020 and 2022. The lead author, Lea Barbett, and her colleagues set out to test whether what psychologists call nature connectedness, meaning the degree to which a person feels emotionally and cognitively linked to the natural world, would predict wellbeing across very different cultural contexts.
The answer was yes, and consistently so. People who reported higher nature connectedness also reported greater purpose in life, more hope, higher life satisfaction, more resilient coping, more optimism, and greater mindfulness.
The associations ranged from small to large, and although a handful of countries showed that individual measures did not reach statistical significance, the overall pattern held worldwide.
This matters because it tells us something important about what is happening. If the benefits of nature were a function of a particular culture’s relationship with the outdoors or of a country’s park system, we would expect the data to look very different. Instead, the relationship appears to be something more fundamental, something tied to who we are as a species. The researchers concluded that nature connectedness is particularly important for communities with limited access to nature and to social resources. In other words, this is also true for many individuals living in large cities.
Attention Restoration: How Nature Refills a Depleted Mind
If we accept that nature is good for us, the next question is why. One of the most influential answers comes from the work of Marc Berman, now a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. In 2008, while a graduate student at the University of Michigan, Berman conducted a now classic study in which 38 students walked the same distance through either the trees of an arboretum or the busy streets of downtown Ann Arbor. Before and after each walk, the students took a test of attention and working memory.
The results were difficult to ignore. Walking through town improved performance slightly. Walking through nature boosted scores by nearly 20 percent. The participants did not need to enjoy the walk to receive the benefit. They did not even need to walk in pleasant weather. A cold January walk produced the same effect as a July one.
Berman’s explanation draws on attention restoration theory, first proposed in the 1980s by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan. The premise is straightforward. Our capacity for directed attention is finite. Modern urban life constantly depletes it, demanding vigilance amid traffic, noise, screens, and the steady stream of decisions that fill a working day.
Nature offers what the Kaplans called soft fascination. It engages our attention gently, through the rustle of leaves or the movement of water, without demanding the kind of effortful focus that drains us. The mind is allowed to rest, and the capacity for attention is replenished.
More recent work has begun to support this theory with brain imaging. Amy McDonnell, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Utah, ran a similar walking study and measured participants’ brain activity with EEG. Those who walked in nature showed reduced brain activity immediately after the walk, followed by stronger, more efficient activity during a subsequent attention task. The brain, in other words, appears to quiet during the nature exposure and then return to work in better shape.
A Kinder Relationship with the Self
The benefits of nature go beyond attention. They reach into how we relate to ourselves. The largest survey of its kind to date, conducted by researchers at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, asked more than 50,000 people across 58 countries about their experience with nature and their sense of self. The lead author, Viren Swami, found that connecting with nature was associated with a more positive body image, defined not as superficial confidence but as love, respect, and care for one’s physical self.
Two mechanisms appeared to drive this effect. The first was self-compassion, the capacity to be kind to oneself in moments of difficulty. Time in nature, the researchers observed, opens up a state of cognitive quiet. The senses are engaged but not assaulted. The mind is given room to process thought with less strain, and that easing of mental load makes self-criticism less reflexive and self-kindness more available.
The second mechanism was restoration. Half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas. In the United States, that figure is closer to 80 percent. The mental fatigue that builds up in those settings, where the senses are constantly negotiating noise, screens, and crowds, has a measurable effect on mood and self-perception. Stepping into a park, watching a ladybug cross the back of your hand, or sitting beside moving water provides a kind of mental rinse.
In my clinical work, I have seen this play out repeatedly with high-achieving professionals who, at times, may be harsh with themselves in ways they would never be with a friend. Even brief encounters with natural settings, including the immersive ones I use during certain sessions, often soften that inner voice enough to begin genuine therapeutic work.
Enjoyment Matters More Than Frequency
A recent study from Taiwan adds an important qualification to all of this, one that I think is particularly relevant for the achievement-oriented professionals I see in my practice. Pei-shan Liao and colleagues at Academia Sinica published a paper in the Journal of Environmental Psychology examining how different kinds of contact with nature relate to happiness and life satisfaction. They drew on a nationally representative sample of more than 1,800 Taiwanese adults and combined survey data with local environmental data on temperature, rainfall, and air quality.
What they found surprised them. Enjoyment of nature, meaning the emotional engagement and pleasure people reported when they were outside, was a strong and consistent predictor of both happiness and life satisfaction. The frequency of outdoor activity, however, was not. In fact, after adjusting for other factors, more frequent participation in outdoor activities was associated with a small negative effect on well-being.
There are two possible explanations. People who love nature may engage in outdoor activities more often than circumstances allow, leading to dissatisfaction with the gap between desire and reality. Alternatively, people who are already struggling may seek out nature as a coping strategy, which obscures the positive effect in the data.
From my perspective, I see a practical lesson here. Nature is not a box to check. Logging hours in the park while mentally rehearsing the next meeting will not yield the benefits described in the research. Many individuals often want a prescription they can follow. Unfortunately, nature does not work that way. The benefit appears to live in the quality of attention we bring to it, not in the quantity of time we accumulate.
Nature as a Pain Buffer: New Findings from Neuroscience
Some of the most striking recent work on nature and mental health comes from the University of Exeter. Researchers there, including Dr. Alex Smalley and Max Steininger, published a study in the journal Pain examining whether immersive virtual-reality nature scenes could change how the brain processes physical discomfort. They simulated chronic nerve pain in healthy participants using mild electrical stimulation, then exposed them to either a fully immersive 360-degree virtual nature scene or a standard 2D video.
The participants in the virtual reality condition reported significantly less pain. That relief continued for at least five minutes after the experience ended. More importantly, brain imaging showed that the effect was not due to belief or expectation. The immersive nature scenes activated the insulo-thalamic pathway, a brain region involved in pain suppression. The brain was responding less strongly to information about where the pain was coming from and how intense it felt.
The implication is significant. We now have brain-scanning evidence that immersive nature, even in simulated form, engages the body’s built-in pain-suppression system. For people living with chronic pain, for those recovering from surgery, or for anyone who cannot easily access an outdoor environment, this opens a meaningful clinical option.
This is one of the reasons I incorporate nature-based virtual reality sessions into my work with clients, particularly those seeking help with meditation, stress management, and pain-related concerns. The settings I use range from forest paths to coastal scenes to mountain vistas, and they allow clients who are housebound, mobility-limited, or simply too depleted to plan an outing to receive the documented benefits of exposure to nature within a therapeutic setting. You can read more about how this works on the virtual reality therapy page.
Bringing It Into Everyday Life
The research offers some practical guidance, though I would caution against turning any of it into a rigid prescription. Even short doses of nature appear to matter. One study found that as little as 20 minutes in a local park, whether spent sitting on a bench or moving through the space, improved measures of wellbeing. Water environments work as well as wooded ones. Rivers, lakes, and coastal settings offer benefits similar to those of forests and gardens.
The smartphone, however, undermines all of this. Swami’s research team was direct on this point. Time spent in nature while scrolling on your phone reduces the benefits of being outdoors. The point is not the location. It is the attention. If your senses are pulled into the device, the leaves and the birdsong cannot do their work.
For those who want to expand their relationship with nature, birdwatching deserves more attention than it usually receives. It builds a sense of curiosity about the natural world that compounds over time. Some clinicians and researchers have also pointed to its quiet effect on hopefulness, particularly during periods when the broader news environment is difficult to bear. Walking the same path week after week and gradually noticing who lives there changes the relationship.
The simplest version of the recommendation is this. Find a natural setting you can return to. Leave the phone in your pocket. Pay attention.
One Last Parting Thought
The thread running through this research is the same one I drew on in the previous article about awe. What helps us most is what moves us out of the tight loop of self-preoccupation and into contact with something larger and steadier.
Nature does that reliably. It quiets the mind, softens the inner critic, restores attention, and, at the deepest level, appears to engage the brain’s own systems for managing pain and stress. For the executives, parents, caregivers, and professionals who find their way to my practice, this is not a matter of aesthetic preference. It is a clinically meaningful intervention with a substantial evidence base, and one of the most accessible interventions any of us has.