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)
