Is the path to better mental health a walk in the park?
CU Boulder researchers Colleen Reid, Emma Rieves and their colleagues explored the potential impact of objective and perceived greenspace exposure on mental health
If you or a loved one is struggling with mental health, you’re not alone. Roughly one in every five adults experienced symptoms of anxiety or depression over the past two weeks, according to a 2022 CDC . The good news is a better state of mind could be right in your backyard—literally.
Perceived greenspace exposure—which represents a person’s perception of the amount and quality of access to and time spent in nearby greenspace—may have a significant positive effect on certain aspects of mental health, according to from an interdisciplinary °µÍř˝űÇř team.
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Emma Rieves (left), a PhD candidate in the CU Boulder Department of Geography, and Colleen Reid, an associate professor of geography, along with their research colleagues, found that perceived greenspace exposure may have a significant positive effect on certain aspects of mental health.
With Associate Geography Professor Colleen Reid at the helm, researchers from the Geography, Psychology and Neuroscience departments as well as the Institute for Behavioral Genetics and the Institute of Behavioral Science explored the link between greenspace exposure and stress, anxiety and depression.
Their study revealed a strong association between perceived greenspace exposure and reduced anxiety. Could better mental health be as simple as a walk in the park? Perhaps, says lead study author and geography PhD candidate Emma Rieves.
The relationship between greenspace and mental health “isn’t just about the greenspace that’s empirically there,” which they measured by aggregating the green pixels, representing greenspace, from aerial imagery, also known as objective green space. “The relationship is mainly influenced by aspects of green space that aren’t well captured by objective measures, such as the quality of the green space, how much time someone spends in green space and how accessible it is,” she says.
Research in the time of COVID-19
Reid started the study in late 2019, says Rieves, who arrived on campus to begin her graduate education in the fall of 2020. “It was weird,” she recalls. “But the [geography] department did a lot to facilitate interactions between students despite the restrictions that were in place at the time.”
Even before Rieves dove into the research project, she had personal experience with nature’s capacity to ease her mind, particularly during the early days of lockdown. “Being in nature definitely helped to combat some of the negative emotions you have when you’re stuck sitting in your house, doomscrolling and wiping down all your produce,” she recalls.
To determine the effect of greenspace exposure on the study’s research subjects, the team had to switch gears early in the data-collection process to account for the extra stress associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, says Rieves.
Once COVID-19 public health restrictions were in place, however, they added pandemic-specific questions to their mental health survey so that subjects could share the extent to which they were impacted by stressors such finances, resources and the possibility of infection. Their analysis could then control for pandemic-specific variables to more accurately identify the connection between mental health and greenspace exposure, says Rieves.
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"If you feel like you’re surrounded by greenspace, it’s probably good for you,” says CU Boulder researcher Emma Rieves. (Photo: Josephine Baran/Unsplash)
Is greenspace exposure a key to mental health?
The researchers found that perceived greenspace exposure was directly linked to reduced anxiety metrics and had a borderline statistically significant relationship with lower levels of depression metrics. Meanwhile, objective greenspace exposure bore no statistically significant association with anxiety, depression or stress.
In other words, when it came to mental health, and anxiety in particular, objective greenspace exposure mattered far less than subjects’ perceptions of greenspace exposure.
“ Based on the presence of green pixels, a vacant lot full of weeds would register as having a high green space signal. But if you were there, you might not perceive it as a superabundant green space,” says Rieves. “We found that other factors, like the quality of the environment in this example, is more important to the mental health and greenspace relationship.”
At the same time, the findings revealed a positive association between socioeconomic status and both objective and perceived greenspace, where people with higher socioeconomic status had higher perceived and objective greenspace exposure.
The takeaway
While no one is promising that a walk in the woods is a magic bullet, getting out in nature is never a bad idea, says Rieves. And no matter what the pixels indicate, or how many minutes a day you spend around trees, the data indicate that people’s perceptions of their own greenspace exposure are important to unlocking better mental health, says Rieves.
“This study doesn’t prescribe any specific level of greenspace exposure needed to reap its mental health benefits, but if you feel like you’re surrounded by greenspace, it’s probably good for you.”
CU Boulder researchers Naomi Friedman and Samantha Freis contributed to this research.
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