Member-only story
I have reported multiple times how nature is good for your health.
For example, in my article on the simple benefits of walking I also show how nature helps in multiple ways such as by lowering stress hormones or increasing human natural killer cells, critical for your immune system functioning. There are multiple other factors — I also reported on how biodiversity correlates with better well-being but also how air quality can have multiple positive impacts.
So, with all of this it should be crystal clear that exposure to nature is good for us human beings. Well, it is clear, but on the other hand there are so many studies using different methods, measuring different impacts of well-being, interacting in different ways with nature, with different population groups. This can make it hard to draw definitive conclusions or to give sweeping generalisations. Enter Lam Thi Mai Huynh et al. from the University of Tokyo.
This group of researchers have conducted a systematic review of the literature and identified 301 studies for inclusion into this. From this they were then able to identify 16 different mechanisms with which people engage with nature which could for example be cognitive, developing knowledge of nature, or cohesive, developing a relationship to nature.
