Walking every day for 1 hour in the woods gives benefits against lo stress and it makes us feel good like nothing else. Stress, anxiety, blood pressure are significantly lowered, as long as we walk in nature, not in the city.
Walking in nature is good for you, we know it, but a scientific study managed to conduct a field experiment and reveals that for lower stress levels and obtain many other benefitsjust walk for an hour in a natural environment: forest, forest, meadow.
What happens to our brain if we spend an hour in nature? The activation of the amygdala is loweredwhich is a bit of a stress detector radar and processes the brain’s response.
Walking for 1 hour every day in the woods is the real stress reliever and the benefits are immense
Science has been investigating the benefits of being in nature for years, especially in relation to our sedentary lifestyle. Sportoutdoor24, if we want, was born precisely for this reason, to tell how, where, why and when to leave the house and immerse yourself in nature in an active way.
A team from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development has finally explained how much we need to walk every day to ward off anxiety and stress with proof that stress-related brain activity can be reduced by doing a walk in a nearby forestjust like our ancestors could do.
The natural environments that hosted our ancestors for millions of years, to the point that we don’t realize it but cities represent a radically new type of habitat. Living there is comfortable and has advantages but the consequences for our health, physical and mental, are important. Anxiety, depression, overweight, cardiovascular problems, reduction in cognitive abilities and good mood.
Is it better to walk in nature or in the city?
The German study, published in Molecular Psychiatry, investigated this issue and hints at a solution. And that is that spend very little time in the wild nature it brings a series of physical and mental health benefits that should give us pause.
For example: lower blood pressure, reduced anxiety and depression, improved mood, better concentration, better sleep, better memory and faster recovery from illnesses.
Nothing revolutionary compared to many other studies, but here there is an important novelty: the researchers conducted tests directly in the woods and arrived at suggests HOW MUCH we need to be in nature to have these benefits. Just one hour.
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An hour’s walk in nature to feel good
No need to put off the work and do the Appalachian Trail. An hour’s walk in the woods affects the amygdala, the small structure in the center of the brain involved in stress processing, emotional learning, and responses to stimuli.
The researchers, with the help of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), monitored volunteers during a one hour walk in an urban environmento (a busy shopping district in Berlin) o natural (Berlin’s 3,000-hectare Grunewald forest).
The result is that after the walk in the woods the activity of the amygdala is reduced, supporting the idea that nature can trigger beneficial effects in brain regions involved in stress. And, apparently, this can happen in just 60 minutes.
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Why walk for an hour every day
In addition to the pleasure of the walk in the forest, the participants felt a greater recovery of attention than those who took urban walks. Those who walked in the city saw neither an increase nor decrease in amygdala activity. What does it mean? That walking in the woods is very different than walking in the city as for benefits. Stress probably does not increase or decrease when we walk in the city, while it is significantly lowered if we walk in nature.
“This definitely speaks in favor of the effects nature’s salutogenicas opposed to urban exposure that causes additional stress,” the researchers write.
Photo by Kai-Chieh Chan Pexels
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2024-02-14 10:33:56
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