Landscape of native riverine vegetation in an urban stream of Chongqing, China.

By Ralf Buckley, Mary-Ann Cooper, and Linsheng Zhong.

Read the full paper here.

Spending time in nature is good for our mental health. If you’re stressed or depressed, a few hours in a forest or ocean might cure you better than pills or shrinks – this is the idea behind nature therapies. At national scale, they might save a lot of money, but your health insurance won’t yet pay for them, because they need prescriptible products with certified providers and charge codes, so researchers are trying to design nature therapy courses with all the costs and components packaged together efficiently, like a course of occupational therapy. 

To do that, we need to know what it is about the experience of time in nature that makes us less stressed. Experience operates through our senses, so we need to know what specific sensory experiences in nature, people find important and memorable, and how that might differ between different people. In this study, we focussed on forests, in four countries: Australia, Chile, China and Japan. We found that in all four countries, forest visitors told us about very similar experiences.

They noticed the shapes and colours of trees, but also the sounds of wind rustling leaves, and birds singing, and running water. They noticed the smells of flowers, but also of tree leaves, and bark, and earth. They enjoyed the smell of clean air and the taste of clean water, and the feeling of touching the trees and rocks. They noticed air temperatures, either warm or cold. With these observations, we were able to make a list of specific sensory experiences, for example, not just sounds, but sounds of birds singing and water running. The list was the same for all four countries.

We don’t yet know which of these is most important for mental health, and whether some people focus on one sensory experience, and other people on different experiences. We know from earlier research that people see their emotions are an important step between senses and wellbeing, but we don’t yet know whether they are essential. Our next step will be surveys at large scale, to ask these questions quantitatively, and construct testable products.