Most of us are aware, on some level, that we should spend more time outside. We’re also aware we should drink more water, call our mothers, and stop doomscrolling at 1 a.m. Awareness has never been the problem.
There’s now actual science for why ignoring that first item on the list is making things worse. Marc G. Berman, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago and author of Nature and the Mind, has spent his career in what he calls environmental neuroscience — the study of how your surroundings physically change your brain. His position, per a recent Men’s Health feature, is that nature deprivation is fueling the stress, chronic disease, and loneliness numbers we keep pretending are someone else’s problem.
The mechanism is attention. Berman draws on attention restoration theory, developed in 1992 by University of Michigan psychologists Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, which breaks attention into two types. Directed attention is what you’re burning through right now — at work, in traffic, on your phone. It fatigues. Involuntary attention is what engages when you’re walking through trees with nowhere to be. It doesn’t.
“A lot of these natural environments sit right at this nexus of being softly fascinating,” Berman said. Your brain gets a break without realizing it’s taking one.
Read the complete article at VICE
