Support Mental Restoration/Ease Stress

Dang and team studied how people spend time on green roofs.  They report that their research focused on a green roof space in Sydney, Australia which included “a garden, a concrete open space and a raised grass area amounting to 1,200 m2, [that] is above parts of the university’s library and classrooms, and is easily accessible by staff, students, and members of the public. . . . users, most commonly, relaxed or socialised on the green roof, with exercise a far less frequent activity.

Anyone who is familiar with Ulrich’s work in the 1980’s won’t be surprised by a study presented at the 2022 Scientific Forum of the American College of Surgeons (ACS) Clinical Congress.

Moll and colleagues found that kids are mentally refreshed by the same sorts of things as adults.  The researchers share that via a literature review of studies related to people from 0 – 19 years old they determined that “Results show that exposure to nature has significant restorative effects. . . . The main objective of this systematic review was to evaluate and synthesize the extant evidence about the effects of exposure to nature on restoring cognitive, emotional, social and behavioural resources for children and adolescents.

Loder and Stoner review studies related to nature (plants, nature views, etc.) in work environments.  They share, for example, that “Research has shown that contact with nature

Sudimac, Sale, and Kuhn confirm the value of taking walks in natural areas.  They share that they “conducted an intervention study to investigate changes in stress-related brain regions as an effect of a one-hour walk in an urban (busy street) vs. natural environment (forest). . . . findings reveal that amygdala [the amygdala is involved in stress processing] activation decreases after the walk in nature, whereas it remains stable after the walk in an urban environment. These results suggest that going for a walk in nature . . .

Sun and colleagues studied the experiences of pregnant people in green spaces.  They had “pregnant women between 8 and 14 weeks’ gestational age . . . view one of three, 5-min, VR [virtual reality] videos of an urban scene with different green space levels (i.e., non-green, moderate, and high) after a laboratory stressor, the Trier Social Stress Test. . . .  We found that visual exposure to a green space environment in VR was associated with both physiological and affective [mood] stress reduction among pregnant women, including lower systolic blood pressure . . .