Nature and stress

Nature is beautiful in the same way art is beautiful – it is pleasing to the eye. However, like art, it is has high utilitarian value. Walks in nature help us to cope with depression and stress and they also help us to escape problems.

There is mounting scientific evidence that nature does do these things. The reason for this is that urban environments are crammed with excessive information. People come to contact with constant stimulation, which is termed ‘hard fascination’ and this leads to cognitive fatigue. Meanwhile, in natural environments we deal with less information, which leads to ‘soft fascination.’ The environment that we process is also aesthetically pleasing, which leads to feelings of pleasure. There is also, of course, a sense of escape from the problems that we encounter in urban environs. Nature often makes us feel better, which is why they are called ‘restorative environments.’
Many scientists believe that our minds are not equipped to deal with so much information. The internet inundates us with multiples sources of information and we often access such information compulsively. Hence, these ‘restorative environments’ lead to a healthier state of mind, which help us to be more creative and also enhance our problem solving skills.

We lived in green, natural environments for thousands of years. Another interesting theory is that we feel less stressed in natural environments because our minds adapted to live in such environments. This theory holds that urban environments are unnatural and cause us to experience stress, depression and anxiety. Additionally, nature was crucial in helping us to survive. Plants helped us to find shelter and water and thus helped us to evolve our brains, which is an unnatural ‘mismatch’. Some of these mismatches were beneficial, such as sleeping on mattresses instead of the ground. Others may have contributed to disease and reduced our quality of life and these negative mismatches are termed ‘discords.’ Our brains are vulnerable to discords because they are complex organs that mature after birth and respond to external stimulation. Exposure to plants might have been what our minds were naturally predisposed to processing and the absence of this might have predisposed us to develop mental illnesses. 

There have been political movements that have revolted against technological progress and sought to return to a more natural mode of experience. The most notorious movement were the ‘Luddites’ during the Industrial Revolution. The Unabomber – otherwise known as Ted Kaczynski - was an anarchist neo-luddite who launched a crusade against technology from the 1970s to the 1990s. He was a formidable mathematician who left a comfortable job as a university lecturer and fled to the woods to lead a hermetic existence. He wrote works of political philosophy and, most disturbingly, sent bombs out to airports and universities. He believed that technology was unnatural and that a human society built upon technological progress regulates and stifles human freedom. Wild nature – that is, nature that is not regulated by technology – allows individual freedom to flourish. Unabomber said that ‘it is only necessary to get rid of industrial society.’ He did not think that it was necessary to create a new social order, as the French and Russian revolutions did. He wanted to eliminate ordered society and technological progress so that individuals could be completely free in natural environments.
Of course, this was psychotic behaviour. It is still vital for us to engage with nature, however, and it should, ultimately, be a vital aspect in our lives.