For busy people who live in urban areas, it can be difficult to get out around nature – even if it’s just for a walk in a park. It may seem obvious, but research is now showing that this lack of exposure to green spaces could really pay a toll on mental health and actually change our brain.
Gregory Bratman, a graduate student at the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources at Stanford University, has developed his research based on the fascination about how urban living affects our psychology. In one study, he and his team found that people who walked around the greener areas on Stanford’s campus felt happier afterward, compared to those who spent time walking near heavy traffic.
As The New York Times highlighted, Bratman and his team’s second study took the same general concept but approached it from a deeper, neurological level. They wanted to know how a walk could affect our tendency to brood. The Times explained how the define this psychological behavior.
Brooding, which is known among cognitive scientists as morbid rumination, is a mental state familiar to most of us, in which we can’t seem to stop chewing over the ways in which things are wrong with ourselves and our lives. This broken-record fretting is not healthy or helpful. It can be a precursor to depression and is disproportionately common among city dwellers compared with people living outside urban areas, studies show.
The team gathered 38 healthy people who live in cities and gave them a questionnaire to determine where they currently stand with the brooding tendency. Also they checked for brain activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex using scans that track blood flow through the brain. If the flow was high in that area that would indicate that it’s more active (brooding).
They found that those who walked alone (with no headphones) along the highway didn’t experience changes, but those who walked in the park had better results both on the questionnaire and the brain scan.
There are many elements that contribute to our psychological health Bratman pointed out, as The Times reported.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
But generally speaking, all of us who live in urban areas could really do ourselves a favor if we put more effort into getting outside more often. Even if it’s just for a walk in the park.
Photo: Flickr user Paul Hudson
