Benefits of a Little Nature

Brick or Bark? Terrace or Tree? Pollution or Pollen? Leveler or Leaf? 

This week's blog will highlight a couple studies that can help improve the qualitiy of your life in the work or home spaces that you frequent the most by simply adding a little nature.

The first study done by Ulrich in 1984 looked at patients in a hospital who either had a window view of something nature-ous (like a tree), or a view of something un-nature-ous, (like a brick building).

Turns out, those who had a the nature-ous view had shorter hospital stays, received fewer negative evaluations by nurses, and had to take less pain medication.

What?! You mean to say, that how fast your body heals can be influenced by if you have a little nature in your life or not? It's true.

The US Environmental Protection Agency in 1989 reported that Americans spend an average of 90% of their time indoors.  Wow. Think about that for a second. Ninety percent!

In addition, a statistic from the Kaiser Family Foundation reports kids are spending about HALF as much time outdoors as they did 20 years ago. Plus kids ages 8-18 spend an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes every day on some kind of media.

So what happened to nature? Is it still there? Does something like this really exist?

Or are we doomed to a life of this instead?

It's likely that you have some responsibilities in the latter, making it harder to get to a place of the former.  But there are things that you can do in order to incorporate more of the former into the latter.

According to a study done by Raanaas et.al. in 2011, adding a small plant or even a picture of a plant to your workspace may improve your phsyical and mental health.

So could your work or home or hospital space use a little something?  Perhaps you just might be able to feel the benefits of a little nature in your life by inviting it in :)

(One last note: In some places you aren't given the option of adding a plant or a picture of a plant. In that case, you might consider the benefits of nature visualization.  So make sure to watch for our new new forrest visualization recording coming soon! Until then, check out these other visualization recordings that can help improve the quality of your life: https://caps.byu.edu/audio-files)

Giving Yourself a Bonus of Time

What is one thing that all of us living on this ball of mass called the Earth have in common?

Twenty-four hours in a day.

Of course, how you spend those 24 hours can vary quite drastically.  Some might spend the majority of their time working at a desk job, or perhaps travelling. Others may be taking care of children or the elderly; still others might be playing music or fighting wars. In some cases people might spend most of their hours looking for food or working in mines and sweat shops- just simply trying to survive for another 24.

The point is, no matter who you are, the objective measure of time will be the same for everyone, and most people feel that there is simply not enough time or money in 24 hours to do all that they would like.

Know the feeling?

So why would you want to give up a precious 10 or 15 minutes of rotating earth time to sit around and try to think about nothing? Scientists have gathered the following so far about how meditation can positively affect our minds as well as our bodies:

Point is, it's good for you.  Just like going to the gym, but mind-focused.

"Great," you might be thinking to yourself, "just one more thing I have to add to my impossible to-do list. I have to get the kids to school, clean the house, pay the bills, get groceries, turn in the project that's due tomorrow, take the car to the repair shop and a million other things.  Not to mention I haven't even showered today. There simply isn't time."

So now we come back to time. Here are a couple simple ideas from behavioral economics that can help us change our perception about how we view our time and how 10 or 15 minutes is possible without making us feel more stressed about wanting to de-stress.

1. Simply write it down in your calendar somewhere. 

This suggestion comes from the idea of default options. Default options are basically what happens when no choice is made. You just go with whatever box is already checked, whatever is already on your calendar, and with whatever movie your friends have already chosen.  

So if it gets to next Saturday, you might look at your calendar, and since 10 minutes of meditation is already the default plan, you are more likely to go with it. Your future self will thank you.

2. Plan in bonus time. 

This idea comes from the findings of loss aversion. Loss aversion is basically when it hurts to loose something more than it feels good to get something. For example, the feelings from having to give up10 dollars of your own money feels a lot worse than getting a bonus 10 dollars.  

So instead of feeling like you have to give up an extra 10 minutes of your time, it will make you feel more free to just find a bonus 10 minutes of time you don't have to sacrifice. You can do this by scheduling regular things slightly longer, and when you get to it, since you were planning on that amount of time being used up anyway, you'll have the extra time for a little brain break. 

For example, when you go grocery shopping you might not know exactly how long that will take. Sometimes the lines are really long for check-out, and sometimes they are not.  Plan on them being longer, so a) if the lines really are long, then you don't have to feel stressed, and b) if they are indeed not that long, you just found yourself a bonus 10 minutes!

Those 10 minutes are all yours. You can do with it whatever you want! You are free to free your mind. Suggestions might be to take the long way to your car. Stop at the park on the way home for those 10 minutes. Simply close your eyes and notice what sensations you feel in the moment without having to change anything. Turn on soft music and simply appreciate what it feels like to be alive for just 10 minutes.

Of course there are more ways than just these to manage time effectively and different ways that you can meditate. For a list of basic relaxation methods click here, and for more time management tricks feel free to take a look here.

In the end, those bonus ten minutes can get you from feeling like this:

To this: