Tag: natural environment

Categories : Environmental Effects Mental HealthTags :

Prescriptions for Nature Could Fight the ‘Epidemic of Loneliness’

On By ModernMedia
Photo by Henry Xu on Unsplash

About one in three Americans and one in six people worldwide feel lonely on a regular basis, a troubling reality that has prompted some public health officials to declare an ‘epidemic of loneliness’.

A new global study presents a novel remedy. It found that nature-based social prescribing – clinicians literally prescribing things like gardening, hiking or birdwatching – can significantly reduce loneliness. Spending time in nature with others works even better, particularly for the loneliest among us, the study found.

“There has been a lot of passion about nature-based prescriptions, but not a lot of evidence,” said corresponding author Jill Litt (professor of environmental health, CU Boulder; principal investigator, RECETAS project).

Thus far, all the trials have shown promising results. The latest findings, looking at 320 lonely adults in Barcelona, appear in the October issue of Lancet Regional Health.

“We now have randomised controlled trials showing this works and the impacts last,” said Litt.

Loneliness is not about being physically isolated. Rather, it is a “subjective disconnect between one’s expectations of their social relationships and one’s reality.”

“I’ve heard people describe it like a knot in their stomach, like something is just not right,” said Litt. “You could be in a room full of people and still feel lonely.”

Chronic loneliness can increase risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression and anxiety. It can also burden the healthcare system, as people suffering from loneliness tend to visit their doctor more and are more likely to visit the emergency department with vague complaints on Friday afternoons – a phenomenon known as “Friday afternoon syndrome.”

Due to stigma, people are often reluctant to admit or don’t recognise they are lonely and assume the physical symptoms they feel are due to something else.

“Once clinicians really start to drill down to the root causes, they discover that loneliness is a big factor and the solutions may lie outside the traditional medical system,” said Litt (also a researcher with the Barcelona Institute for Global Health).

RECETAS (Re-imagining Environments for Connection and Engagement) was launched in 2021 with a $5.6 million grant from the European Union. It has since conducted randomised controlled trials in Barcelona, Spain; Prague, Czech Republic; and Helsinki, Finland; and quasi-experimental studies in Marseille, France; Cuenca, Ecuador; and Melbourne, Australia.

The newest findings centre around the site in Barcelona.

The study included 320 lonely older adults from 12 low-income neighbourhoods. Half were placed in a group of 8–10, which spent two hours weekly for nine weeks together doing things like gardening, birdwatching or nature-based art programmes along with two trained facilitators. The other half were provided the same menu of free, easily accessible nature-based activities that they could do on their own. Both strategies worked. Participants on average showed an 11% reduction in loneliness scores at three months; 12% at six months; and 17% at one year. For those who started with lower emotional wellbeing, the group intervention worked better.

Litt said that nature, with its vivid sounds, smells and sights, can act as an “additional facilitator,” augmenting therapeutic benefits.

Even being in nature alone can alleviate loneliness, the research suggests.

“Being out in nature forms this kind of reservoir of calm that we can return to later in life during stressful times,” said Louise Chawla (environmental psychologist and professor emerita, CU Boulder), who recently co-authored another paper with Litt about the role that nature can play in fostering social connections. “It’s not just restorative when you are in a place but also when you go back to it in memory.”

Public health agencies in Spain have already begun to recognise the Friends in Nature model as a best-practice for addressing the loneliness epidemic. Litt is now working to bring similar trials to the US in hopes that someday, insurers might cover things like a membership in a community garden or birdwatching club.

“We have nature in our cities and investment in our green infrastructure,” she said. “Now we need a mechanism to bridge these resources with our health systems to offer person-centred care that leverages the power of nature for healing and wellbeing.”

RECETAS project: https://www.recetasproject.eu/

Source: University of Boulder Colorado

Categories : Environmental EffectsTags :

How do the Myriad Smells of Nature Benefit Health?

On By ModernMedia
Photo by Elly Johnson on Unsplash

Contact with nature can lift our well-being by affecting emotions, influencing thoughts, reducing stress and improving physical health, as shown by studies. Even brief exposure to nature can help. One well-known study found that hospital patients recovered faster if their room included a window view of a natural setting.

Knowing more about nature’s effects on our bodies could not only help our well-being, but could also improve how we care for land, preserve ecosystems and design cities, homes and parks. Yet studies on the benefits of contact with nature have typically focused primarily on how seeing nature affects us. There has been less focus on what the nose knows. That is something a group of researchers set out to change, publishing their approach in Science Advances.

“We are immersed in a world of odorants, and we have a sophisticated olfactory system that processes them, with resulting impacts on our emotions and behaviour,” said Gregory Bratman, a University of Washington assistant professor of environmental and forest sciences. “But compared to research on the benefits of seeing nature, we don’t know nearly as much about how the impacts of nature’s scents and olfactory cues affect us.”

Bratman and colleagues from around the world outline ways to expand research into how odours and scents from natural settings impact our health and well-being. The interdisciplinary group of experts in olfaction, psychology, ecology, public health, atmospheric science and other fields are based at institutions in the US., the UK, Taiwan, Germany, Poland and Cyprus.

At its core, the human sense of smell, or olfaction, is a complex chemical detection system in constant operation. The nose is packed with hundreds of olfactory receptors, which are sophisticated chemical sensors. Together, they can detect more than one trillion scents, and that information gets delivered directly to the nervous system for our minds to interpret – consciously or otherwise.

The natural world releases a steady stream of chemical compounds to keep our olfactory system busy. Plants in particular exude volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, that can persist in the air for hours or days. VOCs perform many functions for plants, such as repelling herbivores or attracting pollinators. Some researchers have studied the impact of exposures to plant VOCs on people.

“We know bits and pieces of the overall picture,” said Bratman. “But there is so much more to learn. We are proposing a framework, informed by important research from many others, on how to investigate the intimate links between olfaction, nature and human well-being.”

Nature’s smell-mediated impacts likely come through different routes, according to the authors. Some chemical compounds, including a subset of those from the invisible realm of plant VOCs, may be acting on us without our conscious knowledge. In these cases, olfactory receptors in the nose could be initiating a “subthreshold” response to molecules that people are largely unaware of. Bratman and his co-authors are calling for vastly expanded research on when, where and how these undetected biochemical processes related to natural VOCs may affect us.

Other olfactory cues are picked up consciously, but scientists still don’t fully understand all their impacts on our health and well-being. Some scents, for example, may have “universal” interpretations to humans — something that nearly always smells pleasant, like a sweet-smelling flower. Other scents are closely tied to specific memories, or have associations and interpretations that vary by culture and personal experience, as research by co-author Asifa Majid of the University of Oxford has shown.

“Understanding how olfaction mediates our relationships with the natural world and the benefits we receive from it are multi-disciplinary undertakings,” said Bratman. “It involves insights from olfactory function research, Indigenous knowledge, Western psychology, anthropology, atmospheric chemistry, forest ecology, Shinrin-yoku – or ‘forest bathing’ – neuroscience, and more.”

Investigation into the potential links between our sense of smell and positive experiences with nature includes research by co-author Cecilia Bembibre at University College London, which shows that the cultural significance of smells, including those from nature, can be passed down in communities to each new generation. Co-author Jieling Xiao at Birmingham City University has delved into the associations people have with scents in built environments and urban gardens.

Other co-authors have shown that nature leaves its signature in the very air we breathe. Forests, for example, release a complex chemical milieux into the air. Research by co-author Jonathan Williams at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Cyprus Institute shows how natural VOCs can react and mix in the atmosphere, with repercussions for olfactory environments.

The authors are also calling for more studies to investigate how human activity alters nature’s olfactory footprint — both by pollution, which can modify or destroy odorants in the air, and by reducing habitats that release beneficial scents.

“Human activity is modifying the environment so quickly in some cases that we’re learning about these benefits while we’re simultaneously making them more difficult for people to access,” said Bratman. “As research illuminates more of these links, our hope is that we can make more informed decisions about our impacts on the natural world and the volatile organic compounds that come from it. As we say in the paper, we live within the chemical contexts that nature creates. Understanding this more can contribute to human well-being and advance efforts to protect the natural world.”