Restoration and stress relief through physical activities in forests and parks

Abstract

A field survey assessed the restorative effects of visiting an urban forest and a city park in Zurich, Switzerland. Respondents rated their headaches, level of stress, and how balanced they felt both prior to visiting the outdoor location and at the time of being interviewed. Suffering from headaches and stress decreased significantly, and feeling well-balanced increased significantly. The recovery ratio for stress was 87%, and the reduction in headaches was 52%, in terms of the possible improvements on five-point rating scales. With respect to feeling well-balanced, the observed changes amounted to 40% of the possible enhancement. Positive effects increased with length of visit, and individuals practising sports (e.g., jogging, biking, playing ball) showed significantly higher improvements than those engaged in less strenuous activities (e.g., taking a walk or relaxing). These findings support previous research on how exercise in green spaces promotes well-being and recovery from stress.

Introduction

In contemporary western societies, many physical illnesses, including coronary disease and cancer, are strongly related to sedentary, physically inactive lifestyles, and chronic stress (Krantz and McCeney, 2002; Breckenkamp et al., 2004; Kopp and Réthelyi, 2004). Urban planners are thus challenged to improve the health and well-being of citizens by creating public spaces that facilitate recovery from stress and motivate people to become physically active. People tend to favour green spaces like nature reserves, woodlands, and urban parks for recovering from stress (Bell et al., 2005). This preference appears reasonable against the background of Ulrich's stress reduction theory (SRT; Ulrich, 1981, Ulrich, 1983; Ulrich et al., 1991) and Kaplan and Kaplan's attention restoration theory (ART; Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989; Kaplan, 1995), both of which hold that green spaces are especially conducive to restoration. ART is mainly concerned with cognitive processes and proposes that natural spaces facilitate the restoration of attention capacities that can be depleted by activities demanding prolonged, effortful attention (Kaplan, 1995). SRT is concerned with the emotional and physiological benefits of exposure to natural spaces and emphasizes the stress reduction associated with them (Ulrich et al., 1991). Referring to Baum et al.'s (1985) definition, Ulrich et al. (1991, p. 202) regard stress as the ‘‘process by which an individual responds psychologically, physiologically, and often with behaviours, to a situation that challenges or threatens well-being”. SRT proposes that being exposed to an unthreatening natural environment or even viewing natural elements like vegetation or water (e.g., on colour slides or on videotape; cf. Ulrich, 1979, Ulrich, 1981; Ulrich et al., 1991) activates a positive affective response, a behavioural approach orientation, and sustained, wakefully relaxed attention. As a consequence, stressed individuals can experience a decrease in stress, which involves reduced levels of negatively toned feelings, and reductions in physiological arousal from high to moderate levels (Ulrich, 1981, Ulrich, 1983). Biological preparedness for such a response pattern is said to be evolutionarily adaptive because natural elements like vegetation and water were critical for early humans’ survival and well-being (Ulrich et al., 1991). To customarily display a stress response involving high levels of physical activation in face of an unthreatening natural setting would be maladaptive, since such “physiological mobilization would have been fatiguing, and over a prolonged period would be linked with chronic cardiovascular and endocrine responses that adversely affected health” (Ulrich et al., 1991, p. 226). On the contrary, an approach orientation and continuous attention towards rich and unthreatening environments seem biologically adaptive (e.g., by encouraging exploration for food or water resources). Since in phylogeny, human beings developed in natural environments and not in urban ones, a similarly innate biological preparedness to respond positively to urban environments could not develop.

According to ART, the restorative qualities of environments are determined by four components that facilitate recovery from mental fatigue: being away, extent, compatibility, and fascination. The last, fascination, is considered essential: a stimulus must have a fascinating quality to attract involuntary attention (which does not demand mental effort, as opposed to directed attention, which demands attention capacity that can be depleted). Nature is assumed to attract involuntary attention because of its fascinating qualities and therefore provides the opportunity for recovering from mental fatigue. Ulrich et al. (1991) see a biologically prepared, positively toned emotional reaction as central for the stress reduction achieved by the exposure to green environments. They argue that fascination in terms of the elicitation of involuntary attention cannot explain the restorative effects of natural environments: involuntary attention is also experienced by persons who are confronted with threatening stimuli and environments that are by no means restorative. Exposure to threatening stimuli (i.e., to stressors), such as spiders or snakes, attracts involuntary attention and at the same time elicits negatively toned emotions and an activation of the autonomic nervous system (Ulrich et al., 1991). Biological preparedness for such a stress response involving physiologic activation and involuntary attention is evolutionary rational: it arms an individual with the resources and information required to cope with dangerous situations. Elicitation of involuntary attention is therefore not considered crucial for stress reduction (Ulrich et al., 1991).

Kaplan (1995) emphasizes that ART regards fascination as a necessary but not sufficient aspect of restorative environments. Different types of fascination exist, such as “the ‘hard’ fascination of watching auto racing and ‘soft’ fascination of walking in a natural setting” (Kaplan, 1995, p. 172), and restorative environments require three further attributes. Being away refers to environmental characteristics that allow an escape from certain ordinary aspects of life, such as distractions, obligations, everyday hassles, and pursuits of purposes and thoughts. Extent means that to be highly restorative, an environment needs to be “rich enough and coherent enough so that it constitutes a whole other world.” Compatibility refers to a fit between the environment and “what one is trying to do and what one would like to do” (Kaplan, 1995, p. 173).

Consistent with Kaplan and Kaplan's (1989) theory, various studies have shown that natural green environments are perceived to possess all four attributes – fascination, being away, extent, and compatibility – to a larger extent than built environments (Laumann et al., 2001; Purcell et al., 2001; Herzog et al., 2002, Herzog et al., 2003; Bodin and Hartig, 2003; Hartig et al., 2003). Moreover, walking in a natural environment has been found to have significantly better restorative effects than walking in urban surroundings (Hartig et al., 1991, Hartig et al., 2003). Harte and Eifert (1995) examined the health benefits of physical activities in outdoor versus indoor settings and found that running on a campus reduced negative emotions but running on a treadmill in a laboratory did not. In a study by Pretty et al. (2005), participants running on an indoor treadmill while viewing a pleasant rural scene were found to have a higher degree of restorative effects than those exposed to unpleasant rural or urban scenes, suggesting that exercising in a pleasant green environment has a positive effect. Bodin and Hartig (2003) found a non-significant tendency for regular runners to have stronger positive emotional effects when running in a park than when running in an urban environment. The authors speculate that the non-significance of this tendency might be due to the small sample size of the study, but nevertheless, they observed that runners significantly preferred a park environment to an urban environment. Several other studies have also found that natural spaces are more attractive to people than built environments (cf. Ulrich, 1986; Hartig, 1993). Moreover, previous studies show that the preference for natural over urban environments is closely related to higher expected benefits in terms of restorative outcomes (Herzog et al., 2003; Staats et al., 2003), which suggests that the restorative value of an environment could be an implicit frame of reference for judgments of general preference (Purcell et al., 2001). In addition, Van den Berg et al. (2003) show that experienced restoration mediates the greater preference for natural over built environments.

A considerable number of studies have shown that visiting green spaces and being exposed to natural elements can reduce psychological strain, increase psychological well-being, and support recovery from illness (Ulrich, 1984, Ulrich, 1986, Ulrich, 1993; Verderber, 1986; Parsons et al., 1998; Frumkin, 2001; Kaplan, 2001; Riediker and Koren, 2004). In the Netherlands for example, epidemiological studies showed that (1) residents of neighbourhoods with extensive green space enjoy, on average, better health than those in neighbourhoods without (De Vries et al., 2003). The mortality of elderly Japanese living in megacities is lower when there are green paths and spaces in the vicinity of their residences (Takano et al., 2002). In Sweden, the more often people use urban public green spaces, the less they suffer from stress (Grahn and Stigsdotter, 2003) Experiencing the restorative effects of nature and pursuing various activities in natural environments – including observing nature, taking a walk in natural surroundings, hiking, gathering berries and mushrooms, gardening, fishing and hunting, as well as working in the forest – correlate positively with the individual well-being of Estonians (Raudsepp, 2005). Other studies have shown that hiking and camping in the wilderness are a source of spiritual inspiration (Fredrickson and Anderson, 1999) and have investigated the mental health benefits of community gardening (Parr, 2005). However, research comparing the restorative benefits of engaging in various outdoor activities in different types of green and natural environments has hitherto been rare. Periurban forests and city parks are two types of urban green spaces that cover large areas and attract numerous visitors. The present study compares the restorative effects of four kinds of activities (doing sports, walking, relaxing, and observing nature) that are frequently undertaken in green spaces and distinguishes between a forest environment and a park setting. Against the background of previous studies showing the positive effects of exercise on well-being (Fox, 1999; Biddle et al., 2000; Bodin and Hartig, 2003) and the WHO (2006) recommendation on performing activities of at least moderate intensity, it was expected that practicing sports (ranging from moderate to vigorous in intensity) in green locations would have stronger restorative effects than taking a walk (light activity, according to Breckenkamp et al., 2004) and relaxing (very light activity). Additional purposes of the study were (1) to find out people's opinions on how best to recover from stress, (2) to identify the health benefits people expect from visiting forests and parks, and (3) to determine whether the positive effects actually experienced in a green space are correlated with people's beliefs in the restorative benefits of green spaces.