When Dr. Alison Greenwood worked as a young teacher in a London high school 30 years ago, she ended up at her doctor’s office suffering from stress. She asked for antidepressants, but instead he advised something she wasn’t anticipating, which few GPs ever suggested back then.
“He told me: ‘Well, what you need to do is get outside,’” she recalls. He advised her to jog regularly along the Thames, and the benefits were transformative. “I’ve been doing that same five kilometer jog every week since,” she says.
Today, his advice is no surprise. In recent years, green social prescriptions by GPs for mental health—often group activities like gardening or outdoor swimming—are relatively common.
But Greenwood, 58, who later switched careers and trained as a counseling psychologist, began to wonder if there was more to it, if nature is not simply a relaxing setting for mood-boosting activities and communality, but has a direct physiological impact, which should make it a clinical recovery tool—a “genuine alternative” to therapy and medication.
“I was interested in how nature itself can be used to help people get better, not just as a place to be in while you do other things because it feels nice,” she explains.
She began to research the link between nature and health, discovering that other parts of the world were ahead of the U.K. Numerous studies reveal the impact on brain and body that nature has—yet still in this country, a prescription of nature for nature’s sake isn’t widespread, as it is in countries like Japan.
Greenwood is pushing for change. In 2018, she founded the charity Dose of Nature, whose program—clinically led by Dr. Georgina Gould—has since been prescribed directly by more than 60 GPs across Richmond and Kingston upon Thames, in southwest London, and in Guildford, Surrey, to more than 2,000 patients with mental health issues, from addiction and trauma to anxiety.
Patients have an initial session with a psychologist in which they complete the standard questionnaires that NHS patients answer if they are referred for therapy, such as CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy). Then, once a week for eight weeks, they go for a walk with a Dose of Nature volunteer, to encourage them to “notice” nature.
Patients are urged to make this a daily habit. The results have been impressive. A closing session with a psychologist repeats the questionnaires and their average recovery rates stand at 59 percent, compared with 49 percent for NHS CBT. In addition, “reliably improved” rates were 84 percent last year, compared to 67 percent for NHS CBT.
So how can we administer our own dose of green? Here’s what Greenwood recommends.
Plants Give Off Antibacterial Chemicals—Get Outside and Breathe Them In
Simply breathing in green space has benefits for immune functioning. “All plants give off fighter airborne chemicals called phytoncides to protect themselves from threats—things like insects, bacteria,” Greenwood explains. “We breathe them in and their antibacterial, antiviral properties increase our natural killer cells, our white blood cells.” These attack tumor or virus-infected cells in our bodies. One trial found that if you spend two full 12-hour days in green space, it’s enough to increase the body’s natural killer cells for a month.
Dose of Nature encourages a one-hour walk a day and, if at all possible, getting outside every hour, even if it’s for a “quick coffee at the back door,” or in the dark.
Ditch the Headphones
According to Greenwood nature has “active ingredients”—and the one that can have the fastest impact on our nervous system is sound. That means you should try doing without the headphones when you’re on a walk.
“When we’re outside, we switch from our sympathetic nervous system—and its ‘fight or flight’ response—to our parasympathetic nervous system and its ‘rest and digest’ state,” Greenwood says. “Blood pressure, heart rate, cortisol levels—an indicator of stress—go down.”
This is aided by listening to natural sounds such as birdsong and the wind—in contrast, we dislike the growl of an airplane as “our brains haven’t evolved to love it.”
Get Your Hands Dirty
There’s perhaps a reason we catch kids eating mud pies, although “no one’s suggesting we should do that,” Greenwood says, laughing. But she does recommend running our fingers through soil, taking gardening gloves off and lifting it to our noses.
“Damp soil is particularly pleasing to the brain because it contains a chemical called mycobacterium vaccae, which has beneficial qualities,” she says.
Studies have shown people injected with the bacteria scored higher on well-being and cognitive tests, and demonstrated an increased proactive capacity to overcome stress.
Pick Up a Stick
“I ask our clients, ‘When was the last time you picked up a stick and banged it against a tree?’” Greenwood says.
“It’s probably not since they were six. I tell them to do it and see what fun it is,” she adds.
She explains that when we play in nature, we’re connecting with it, which in turn makes us feel secure. Dose of Nature walks, she explains, often include creativity as play, encouraging patients to make mandalas—circular configurations of symbols using leaves, petals, fir cones, pebbles.
“We don’t tend to touch nature,” she says. “And when we’re touching things that are familiar to our mammalian brains—the ‘emotional brain’—that has a reassuring effect.”
Make Yourself Feel “Small”
Feeling tiny can be positive. The way to do that is seeking out “awe and wonder” in nature—it needn’t be the Grand Canyon, it could be a starry sky or spotting the first snowdrop.
Research is relatively new in this area, Greenwood says, but “for people who have more awe in their life, there seems to be a correlation with well-being.”
She says: “When you have a moment of awe, you can have a physiological feeling, goosebumps or tingles. And it’s quite strange to be goosebumpy yet at the same time feel good, because the feeling is similar to feeling frightened.”
One theory involves a construct called “small self,” “where, in the company of inspiring nature, it’s kind of reassuring that maybe we don’t matter quite as much as we think we do,” Greenwood says. “Suddenly, we start to think, actually, it’s OK—I’m quite small and I don’t need to worry.”
Emily Retter is a U.K.-based writer
