De-Stressing with Nature

Written by Burkholder Brothers Landscaping Tuesday, October 11 2011 11:46

I don’t know about you, but it seems like things just keep getting busier. One of the most difficult tasks in life is finding and maintaining balance – everyone struggles with it at some point in life, and for many it’s a constant battle. Maybe that’s why it's so relaxing to be out in nature. When you’re surrounded by plants and animals, it takes you back to the beginning – back to the way things were before we interrupted the cycle and balance of our natural environment. It’s refreshing to see the beauty, stability, and peacefulness of nature.

Landscape Architecture blog, The Dirt, recently posted a great article on how nature has been shown to help people de-stress. In this article, Michael Posner, professor emeritus at University of Oregon says that our brains get fatigued after working long periods at a time. According to Posner, a break in itself does not help deal with stress; the quality of the break is what matters. Dr. Marc Berman of the University of Michigan found that memory and attention span quality improved by 20 percent when subjects walked through an arboretum versus walking down a busy urban street, which left subject without any cognitive boost. Berman also found that simply looking at photos of nature helped improve cognitive attention span. So create a de-stressing environment for yourself, whether it is real plants or photos of plants.

Read this article for more info: http://dirt.asla.org