Walking in the woods could really benefit your mental health

Do you ever ruminate? Rumination is when you keep reminding yourself of the bad things that are going on in your life. You’re obsessed with negative thoughts.

Stanford Ph.D student Gregory Bratman, a specialist in Psychological Ecosystem Services, has been looking for ways to break people out of this cycle, which can lead to depression. So he organized an experiment.

Listen to Rossire: Dave interviews Gregory Bratman

He first gave 38 healthy people from the Bay Area a survey designed to evaluate how prone they were to mulling over negative thoughts.

“We asked them how much they were ruminating on a questionnaire that’s been used in many psychological studies. We scanned their brain, focusing in on this area of the brain that’s active during rumination. Then we randomly assigned them to a nature walk or an urban walk.”

Half of the test subjects spent 90 minutes walking in a nature preserve near the campus and the rest walked along the busy El Camino Real.

“We see an uptick in the rate of mental health issues, especially anxiety disorders and depression, in urban areas. Urban life gives us many benefits, many great things, but it also, some work has shown, can increase levels of stress and possibly, though we ourselves aren’t quite sure on this yet, elevate baseline rumination. So we were seeing if we take people, who are urbanites and suburbanites, and give them a nature experience &#8212 does it decrease their baseline rumination?”

The answer is yes. He tracked people via cell phone – to make sure they walked the whole time – then conducted brain scans.

“What we found is that the nature group reported ruminating less and also had less neural activity in the part of the brain that tends to be active when one is ruminating.”

How much less?

“For a 90 minute walk, quite dramatic.”

Bratman is not sure exactly how a walk in the woods achieves this, since it’s not just the exercise but where you get the exercise that has the beneficial effect. Maybe trees and sun work some kind of as-yet-undiscovered magic. But the fact that it shows up on brain scans implies a real effect on mental health.

In Japan, it’s called Forest Bathing, and it’s convinced Bratman that cities need more parks.

“My work leads me to believe, and those of others lead me to believe, that urban parks are really important in this equation. Not to the exclusion of preserved wilderness areas by any stretch, but it all adds up.”