“Nature Is Weird”: 50 Interesting Pics And Facts About Mother Nature Shared By This Account

People have always been looking for peace by getting back to nature. Even little things like a walk in the park can have tremendous benefits on our mental health. Science backs up these benefits.

“People have been discussing their profound experiences in nature for the last several 100 years—from Thoreau to John Muir to many other writers,” researcher David Strayer of the University of Utah argues. “Now we are seeing changes in the brain and changes in the body that suggest we are physically and mentally more healthy when we are interacting with nature.”

In one recent experiment conducted in Japan, participants were assigned to walk either in a forest or in an urban center (taking walks of equal length and difficulty) while having their heart rate variability, heart rate, and blood pressure measured. The participants also filled out questionnaires about their moods, stress levels, and other psychological measures.

Results showed that those who walked in forests had significantly lower heart rates and higher heart rate variability (indicating more relaxation and less stress), and reported better moods and less anxiety, than those who walked in urban settings.

Scientists believe that being in nature offers a different kind of beneficial effect in reducing stress, which may be even stronger than the one produced by exercise alone.

Moreover, in a series of experiments published in 2014, Juyoung Lee, GGSC director Dacher Keltner, and other researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, looked at the potential impact of nature on the willingness to be generous, trusting, and helpful toward others, while considering what factors might influence that relationship.

After being exposed to the more beautiful nature scenes, participants acted more generously and more trusting in the games than those who saw less beautiful scenes, and the effects appeared to be due to corresponding increases in positive emotion.

But although the benefits of being in nature are obvious, people’s disconnection from nature has been growing rapidly. A recent study conducted by professors Selin Kesebir and Pelin Kesebir uncovered a shrinking of nature in our collective imagination and cultural conversation. They looked at millions of fiction books, thousands of songs, and hundreds of thousands of movie and documentary storylines.

What they found was that nature features significantly less in popular culture today than it did in the first half of the 20th century, with a steady decline after the 1950s. In fact, for every three nature-related words in the popular songs of the 1950s, for example, there is only slightly more than one 50 years later.