Paoli, Pennsylvania is a small town with a local out-of-town hospital. Patients of this hospital are accommodated in wards overlooking a small courtyard.
In the early 1980s, a scientist visited the hospital to collect information on patients who underwent gallbladder surgery between 1972 and 1981. Gallbladder surgery is common and generally does not cause any complications. However, in the 1970s, most patients took a week or even two to recover from surgery before they could return home.
Some took longer to recover than others. The scientist had a thought: maybe such a discrepancy in the timing of recovery is due to the elusive difference between the wards of the hospital? Some of the hospital wards overlooked a brick wall, while others, a little further down the corridor, were directly opposite a small group of deciduous trees. Apart from the view from the windows, the chambers were otherwise identical.
When the scientist looked at the medical records of the postoperative recovery of patients, he was amazed that the patients in the wards overlooking the trees felt much better than the patients in the wards that looked out onto the brick wall. On average, the latter were discharged from the hospital a day later. In addition, they were much more depressed and in more pain.
The nurses recorded an average of four complaints from each such patient. Their notes include such comments: “Needs comfort” and “upset and crying”. As for the patients from the wards overlooking the trees, no more than one complaint was received from them during the entire recovery period. However, only a very small proportion of the tree-view wards required more than one dose of a strong pain reliever in the middle of their stay.
As for patients with a wall view, they needed two or even three doses. Apart from the view from the windows, the patients were the same, and they underwent a completely identical course of treatment in the hospital.
Each patient from the tree view ward was matched to a patient similar in age, sex, weight, smoker or non-smoker status from the wall-view ward. The attending doctors and nurses were closely monitored. Given that all of these factors were in control, the only explanation for why the tree-view patients recovered faster was that they were lucky enough to occupy the nature-view rooms.
These results are surprising because the effect is very significant. It significantly surpasses the effects of many other targeted treatments in the course of treatment. On some measures, patients with a view of nature felt four times better than those who looked at the wall.
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Convincing results usually generate a wave of skepticism, but many studies have shown similar effects. In one, two environmental psychologists studied 337 parental couples living with their children in five rural areas around New York City. They determined the "closeness to nature" of each family's home, assigning points for views of nature from the window, assessed the presence of plants in the house and a lawn in the yard. Some of these children experienced very little stress as they grew up, rarely fought, and received punishment at school. However, others were cocky and found it difficult to get along with their parents.
When researchers measured the level of happiness and well-being of students in school, they noticed that those who faced adversity were depressed and had low self-esteem. The exception was made by those students who lived closer to the natural environment. The presence of nature seemed to protect them from the stress experienced by other children who lived mainly in an artificial environment.
In an even more specific study, researchers asked hundreds of parenting couples how their children with attention deficit disorder behaved in various games. Children with this disorder are often overly agitated and distracted. However, parents noted that outdoor activities, such as fishing or soccer, put their children in a calmer and more focused state.
However, this did not mean that children who spent more time on the street were happier, interacted more actively with other children, or were more energetic. In fact, those who sat at home in a room with a view of nature were calmer than children playing outside in an artificial environment devoid of grass and trees.
So what makes the natural environment different from any other? Why can't a quiet street landscape, for example, have the same impact as a calm natural landscape? Architecture has its own beauty and some people prefer an urban environment to a natural one. So why does nature itself have such a powerful regenerative effect?
The answer is that the natural environment has a unique set of features that set it apart from human-made objects. Just before the beginning of the 20th century, one of the first prominent founders of modern psychology, William James, explained that human attention comes in two different forms. The first is directed attention, which allows us to focus on complex tasks such as driving a car or writing. Reading a book also requires focused attention, and you may feel like you start to lose concentration when you get tired or when you read for several hours without interruption.
The second form of attention is involuntary attention, which comes to a person in a natural way and does not require any mental effort. As James wrote, “unfamiliar things, moving objects, wild animals, bright colors, beautiful things, words, bumps, blood, etc. etc. - all this involuntarily attracts our attention.
Nature restores mental activity in the same way as water and food restore the body's strength. The chores of daily life, such as maneuvering in traffic, making decisions and value judgments, and dealing with strangers, can be tiring. Everything that the man-made environment takes away from us is returned to us by nature. You might say that there is some mysticism in this statement that is not supported by science, but the essence of this question lies in the concept that psychologists have called the theory of attention restoration or TVI.
According to this theory, the urban environment is tiring because it forces us to direct our attention to specific tasks (for example, avoiding a collision in the traffic). She attracts our attention at an increasing pace, as if addressing us: "Look here!", And then saying: "Now look over there!" All these requirements tire us, and in the natural environment we do not have to face them.
Forests, streams, rivers, lakes and oceans - all of them require very little of us, although they lure, grab us and rivet our attention. The difference between natural and urban landscapes lies in how they control our attention. While artificial landscapes constantly push us to focus on attention, the natural landscape allows us to think as much or as little as we ourselves would like, and also allows us to replenish depleted resources of mental activity.
Healers in Japan and Germany have long been talking about the benefits of natural therapy, realizing the fact that mankind has lived 99.99% of its time in the natural environment. The Japanese version of nature therapy is shrinin-yoku or forest bathing, which requires practitioners to take long walks in the woods while breathing in the scent of trees to complement the forest atmosphere. The German Kneipp therapy also requires its patients to exercise in a forest area. These types of alternative therapies are not a useless fad in these cultures. Researchers have found that there are many benefits to patients undergoing this therapy.
Among other things, compared to people walking in urban areas, patients who practiced shirin-yoku had lower blood pressure, less rapid heart rate, and lower cortisol levels, a measure of no stress. People observing natural species do not just feel happier and more comfortable - this therapy is extremely useful for those building blocks of their psychological health.
The natural environment provides calmness and good mood. This is partly due to the fact that people experience less stress in such an environment. The possibility of a stressful situation emerging in such an environment is extremely small compared to the trials and worries that most of us experience in an artificial environment. These include conflicts at work, traffic jams and roaring children on board international flights. By stimulating ourselves in a certain way, people can overcome such situations, but we cannot use such a scenario when we are faced with a powerful source of stress, which transfers us from a state of comfort to a state of eustress (positive stress), and sometimes leads to a dangerous state of distress (severe disorder) …
Some places of interest, including actively visited natural environments, are so beneficial that psychologists today believe it is possible, on this basis, to offer a cheap and effective way to reduce the impact of certain cancers. One team of researchers found that women newly diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer performed much better at thought-related tasks if they immersed themselves in the natural environment for two hours every week for about two months. Such treatment began from the moment women were diagnosed and continued after surgery during the recovery period. Like many frustrated patients struggling with life-threatening diseases,women found it difficult to perform mental tasks immediately after diagnosis. The condition of those who spent time in the natural environment was constantly improving, and they regained the ability to pay attention to solving various urgent tasks related to mental activity. At the same time, patients who did not undergo a recovery course in their natural environment found it very difficult to solve similar problems in the study.who did not undergo the course of restoration in the natural environment, it was very difficult to solve similar problems within the framework of the study.who did not undergo the course of restoration in the natural environment, it was very difficult to solve similar problems within the framework of the study.
Obviously, attention is not a recovery, but patients with more acute mental perception receive a more tangible effect from such treatment, they adhere to the treatment regimen more carefully, and behave more prudently in the process of recovery. Of course, nature is not a panacea, but such treatment is an inexpensive and effective way to reduce the impact of illness and reduce the effects of everyday stress.
Adam Olter is Associate Professor in the Department of Marketing and Psychology, School of Business. Stern University of New York. His book Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave was published in March 2013.
Original publication: How Nature Resets Our Minds and Bodies
