Take It Outside

Being in nature can slash stress, rev energy, and strengthen your health in ways doctors never imagined. Here’s how to score all the perks that going alfresco has to offer.

- Carly Graf

You know from experience that spending time outdoors makes you feel great. In fact, communing with nature has been proved to lower stress, rally your energy, upgrade your mood, and improve your blood pressure and heart rate. Now researchers are discovering that nature accomplishes all this good work in a surprising way: by making your immune system healthier. When you’re indoors, they explain, you have to tune out a dozen distractions (other people talking, your phone, the TV) to focus on what you’re doing, and that mental discipline requires a huge amount of effort. When you’re around greenery, your mind is free to drift at will. That means your body has more power to invest in important functions like strengthening your immunity, according to a review in Frontiers in Psychology. “Nature flips your system’s switch from fight-or-flight mode to rest-and-digest mode,” says Ming Kuo, Ph.D., director of the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “When you’re relaxed, the body has an opportunity to recover.” Mentally, you have a chance to let go of the tension that’s been building, boosting your mood and energy.

The effects of nature are so powerful that some doctors, such as Nooshin Razani, M.D., a doctor at UCSF BenioffChildren’s Hospital Oakland, are prescribing time outdoors for patients. “We’re developing protocols that blend nature interventions with medical practice,” she says.