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The practice of forest bathing is a mindful, meditative experience where we allow our senses to become attuned to nature by spending time walking through woodlands. Numerous studies have shown that immersing ourselves in the natural world in this way can have significant health benefits, but could we ever bring this practice to a clinical setting? Could nature immersion provide alternative and effective treatments to patients suffering from a wide range of ailments?
The answer to that question is the subject of the new book “Good Nature” by Kathy Willis, a professor of biodiversity at the University of Oxford. In it, she draws on the available evidence to show not just the health benefits of being surrounded by nature, but also the quantitative data that shows how doctors could prescribe time in the natural environment when forming treatment plans for their patients.
By exploring how different forms of nature interact with the body, she discovers how touching wood makes us calmer, the long lasting effects of walking through a pine forest, and why urban sounds are so annoying.
In this interview, she spoke to Live Science about what made her investigate the impact of nature, how looking at savannas can make us feel more relaxed, and why we should be filling our houses with spider plants.
Related: ‘The prescription is nature': How satellites can show us the healing effects of nature
Alexander McNamara: Why did you first explore the impact nature had on health?
Kathy Willis: I was working on a large intergovernmental project looking at the ecosystem services provided by nature when I kept coming across this paper that really piqued my interest. It showed that gallbladder operation patients who could look out the window and see trees had less drugs for pain and they recovered much faster than those who looked onto brick walls.
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I was interested in the fact that it wasn't that the trees were cleaning the air and the air was better, therefore the people were better. It was that there was a direct relationship between your sense of sight and recovery rate. It seemed to be some mechanism happening in the body that was resulting in faster recovery rates and less pain, related to seeing nature.
And that's where the whole journey for me started, thinking about what is going on, how does that work?
AM: I guess we take it for granted that we see all the plants and nature around us, but we overlook that as well as a psychological impact on us, it can actually have a physiological one too.
KW: Yes, with this study it was showing a direct physiological response to seeing green and I was interested to know what happened in the body to actually make them recover faster. But then I started to look at the other senses.
