We’ve learned a lot about mental health over the past twenty years: we know mental health disorders are treatable medical conditions that can respond well to evidence-based treatment, we know lifestyle changes can support evidence-based therapeutic approaches, and we know having a robust social network, practicing mindfulness, learning stress reduction techniques, and simple recreational activities like spending time in nature can improve our overall mental health, quality of life, and general well-being.
However, from that list, one thing we don’t know is exactly how spending time in nature improves mental health. At first blush, we can easily formulate a simple explanation. If we live in a city, or an area without much greenspace, we know that when we spend time in nature, we relax. We recharge. We often return feeling refreshed and ready to get back to our daily lives.
But that’s just descriptive. It doesn’t explain why nature has that effect on us. Why do we feel relaxed and refreshed after we spend time in nature? What is it about greenspace that has a positive effect on how the think, feel, and act?
Three studies published recently explore this topic. In this article, we’ll briefly review the results, which all point in one direction: contact with nature improves mental health by enhancing a mechanism we’re all born with, in varying degrees, called emotion regulation.
Emotion Regulation, Nature, and Mental Health
Here are the three studies we’ll discuss:
1. Contact With Nature for Emotion Regulation: The Roles Of Nature Connectedness and Beauty Engagement in Urban Young Adults offers solid foundational ideas that help us organize our thinking on this topic.
2. The Role of Nature in Emotion Regulation Processes: An Evidence-Based Rapid Review offers specific types of emotional regulation that contact with nature enhances and thereby improves mental health.
3. Associations of Nature Contact with Emotional Ill-Being and Well-Being: The Role of Emotion Regulation offers evidence on the connection between nature, emotion regulation, and emotional well-being.
We’ll start with the first study, performed in China and published in December 2023. In that study, researchers lay the groundwork for understanding how contact with nature affects mental health, beginning with a review of the research that leads to this widely accepted assertion:
Contact with safe natural environments is associated with improved physical and emotional health and improved overall well-being.
The forms of nature contact that promote positive mental health include:
- Being physically present in a natural environment:
- Forest
- Beach
- Mountains
- Indoor space with vegetation:
- Includes homes with houseplants
- Immersion in virtual natural environment:
- Includes television, virtual reality, or phone-based apps
In addition, contact with nature can be divided in three categories:
- Unintentional contact includes exposure to greenspace/nature at home or in/around home neighborhood
- Direct contact involved intentionally visiting natural spaces
- Indirect contact involves experiencing nature through television programs, the internet, and/or some form of virtual reality
In this study, researchers concluded:
- Both direct and indirect contact with nature predict connectedness to nature
- Direct and indirect contact with nature enhances cognitive appraisal, or the process by which we assess and react to situations/external stimuli in our environment
- Direct and indirect contact with nature reduces expressive suppression, or a type of emotion regulation whereby we inhibit the external manifestation of an ongoing internal emotional state
- Contact with nature, whether direct or indirect, affected cognitive appraisal only among people with the default “…tendency to appreciate natural beauty.”
As we mention above, this study lays the groundwork for understanding the topic. The results show that direct or indirect contact with has a positive impact on two types of emotion regulation: it improves cognitive appraisal and reduces expressive suppression, both associated with positive mental health and wellness.
Let’s take a look at the results of the second study.
Contact with Nature: Impact on Worry and Rumination
The second study drilled down on the types of emotion regulation affected by contact with nature. This meta-analysis – meaning a study that synthesizes the results of a group of studies – is relevant because of the significant number of studies the researchers examined. This team identified twenty-seven studies on the impact of nature on mental health.
After a thorough review of all twenty-seven studies, the research team concluded that overall, exposure to nature has a positive impact on:
- General emotion regulation
- Emotion regulation strategies, including:
- Decreasing rumination
- Decreasing worry
- Adaptive emotion regulation strategies, including:
- Mindfulness
- Cognitive reappraisal
This meta-analysis advances our understanding by confirming that across a wide variety of study designs and methods, results consistently show contact with nature improves emotion regulation, and two adaptive strategies – mindfulness and cognitive reappraisal – can help people significantly reduce rumination and worry, two mental health symptoms associated with both depression and anxiety.
Now let’s look at that third study.
Contact with Nature: Impact on Well-Being and Ill-Being
This study focused on two components of contact with nature and their impact on well-being and ill-being: frequency and duration.
Note: we’d never heard the phase ill-being. If you hadn’t either, it means what it appears to mean: the opposite of well-being.
The research team hypothesized that increased frequency and duration of contact with nature would enhance well-being and decrease ill-being, and that enhanced well-being and decreased ill-being would be the result in improved emotion regulation.
Here’s what they found:
The following components of emotional well-being improved with increased frequency and duration of contact with nature:
- Positive affect
- Life satisfaction
- Purpose in life
The following components of emotional ill-being improved with increased frequency and duration of contact with nature:
- Negative affect
- Perceived stress
Finally, the following emotion regulation techniques changed with increased frequency and duration of contact with nature:
- Contact with nature decreased the use of distraction, i.e. intentionally thinking about something other than worries/problems/sources of stress – to address emotion.
- Contact with nature decreased the phenomenon of rumination, i.e. repetitive thoughts focused on the cause of stress/distress.
- Contact with nature increased use of cognitive reappraisal, i.e. the process whereby an individual seeks to change an emotional response to an experience by changing the way they think about/perceive the experience.
The research team summarized their results as follows:
- Increased contact with nature was associated with greater well-being and reduced ill-being.
- Changes in emotion regulation were associated with greater well-being and reduced ill-being.
- The improvements in well-being were partly explained by the observed changes in emotion regulation.
We’ll discuss the results of all three of these studies below.
How Contact with Nature Improves Mental Health
Being out in nature doesn’t work for everyone.
However, the people for whom it does work – meaning they like it, and it makes them feel better – can use contact with nature as a quick, easy, accessible way to improve mental health. Data from the first study we share shows that either direct or indirect contact with nature can improve mental health, and contact can be with nature in real life (irl) or nature in virtual/screen -based environments. Results from that study included an interesting finding: people with a default tendency to appreciate natural beauty experienced more positive outcomes from contact with nature than people without a tendency to appreciate natural beauty.
The second study showed contact with nature improved mental health by improving adaptive emotion regulation strategies – mindfulness and cognitive reappraisal – which resulted in decreased symptoms associated with mental health disorders.
The third study – a comprehensive meta-analysis – confirmed the results of the first two studies and added two more benefits of contact with nature:
Increased life satisfaction and an enhanced sense of purpose in life.
The primary takeaway from these three studies is that contact with nature – in many forms – improves mental health by improving emotion regulation in various ways, including improved cognitive reappraisal, improved mindfulness, reduced distraction, and reduce rumination.
The research team that conducted the third study also learned important information we saved for the end of this article: the amount of time in nature needed to experience the mental health benefits. We’ll close with that helpful information:
- To improve positive affect (get in a better mood), spend at least 3.25 hours per week in contact with nature.
- To experience greater life satisfaction, spend at least 6.14 hours per week in contact with nature.
- For an enhanced sense of purpose in life, spend at least 2.54 hours per week in contact with nature.
That’s all doable, even for people with busy schedules – now it’s on you to get out there and experience the mental health benefits of contact with nature.
