Plain Language Summary: Actively noticing natural features within the environment helps boost wellbeing.

By Bethany Harries, Lauriane Suyin Chalmin-Pui, Birgitta Gatersleben, Alistair Griffiths, and Eleanor Ratcliffe.

Read the full paper here

Spending time in natural environments has long been associated with wellbeing benefits, but it is not yet understood how we can optimise our time spent in nature for wellbeing. Our study aimed to explore how we can increase the wellbeing potential of time spent in natural environments.

To do this we carried out a study at RHS Wisley in the specially designed wellbeing garden and investigated if encouraging people to actively pay attention to different features within the environment influences their wellbeing. Participants in the study were prompted to focus on different aspects of the environment. This included being prompted to focus on either natural features, such as plants and birdsong; human made features such as buildings and traffic sounds; or they were asked to sit in the garden and given no instructions, this was to see what people naturally paid attention to without any prompting.

We found that the participants who were prompted to focus on the natural features had significantly higher wellbeing scores compared to participants who were prompted to focus on the human-made aspects of the environment or given no promoting. Our findings suggest that the wellbeing effects of spending time in natural environments are greater when individuals engage in activities that involve actively noticing nature. We suggest that nature prompting in the form of information, interpretation signs, e-trails or guided tours could play an important role in increasing wellbeing for those who visit green spaces.