Optimizing nature interventions

Stress, adversity, and anxiety can have deleterious effects on autonomic functioning in the body (e.g. Thayer et al., 2010), as well as on mental health and cognitive functioning. Recent research has suggested that nature reduces autonomic measures of stress, as measured by blood pressure (Ideno et al., 2017) and heart-rate variability (Cheng et al., 2021). Similarly, there is research documenting improvements in mental health following nature exposure (Bettman et al., 2016; Bettman et al., 2022). However, there is still a lot of work to be done to optimize nature’s benefits. For example, while there are many documented improvements of increased HRV following a short (1 hour) nature walk, our recent work shows a decrease in HRV following a longer, 5-day exposure. This suggests that there may be optimal “doses” of nature for stress reduction. Our lab seeks to answer the following questions:

  1. What is the dosage of nature that is most optimal for reductions in stress, and improved mental health outcomes? There is currently little work systematically examining how different durations or frequencies of nature exposure affect stress, mental health, and cognitive performance. It may be possible that shorter exposures that are regularly built into daily routines may be more effective than single, multi-day interventions.
  2. Does mental health improve for “extreme” doses of nature? (i.e. thru-hiking) There are some individuals who usurp their normal routines to spend an exorbitant amount of time outside in nature, hiking trails such as the Appalachian Trail on the East Coast. How do these individuals fare before, during and after their hikes?
  3. Who does nature exposure work best for? It is currently unclear the role in which preference for nature plays. For example, do you still reap the same benefits if you hate nature, or are inexperienced with nature? Furthermore, research on nature and human health is currently overrepresented by W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich & Democratic) populations (Henrich, Heine & Norenzayan, 2010), limiting applications to a global population.
Tentsite off of the Pacific Crest Trail