By Jill Suttie | Greater Good Magazine
In recent years, a number of wilderness therapy programs have cropped up to help people who suffer from mental health challenges. These trips often involve physically and emotionally engaging experiencesβlike backpacking or rock-climbing in remote areasβcombined with therapeutic work from caring professionals. Something about being engaged in nature seems to help hard-to-treat patients open up, find new confidence, and focus their lives in more positive directions.
Psychologists who conduct these programs believe there is a healing power in nature, bolstered by research that suggestsΒ green spaces are good for our health, our well-being, and even our relationships. But what is the secret ingredient in nature that brings about these benefits?
AΒ recent study, led by researcher Craig Anderson and his colleagues (including the Greater Good Science Centerβs faculty director, Dacher Keltner), suggests it could be aweβthat sense of being in the presence of something greater than ourselves that fills us with wonder.
Participants in the first phase of the study were military veterans and underserved youth who went on either a one-day or four-day river rafting trip. Rafters traveled through the forested canyons of the American River in California or the dramatic rock formations of Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, encountering up to intermediate-level rapids. While participants sometimes paddled through the rapids themselves, other times they rode while guides paddled. On the longer trips, they camped out in remote, unpopulated areas.
Before and after the trip, the participants reported on their well-being, including their stress levels, mood, and satisfaction with life. During the trip, they kept diaries at the end of each day about their feelings, including whether theyβd felt awe, amusement, peace, gratitude, joy, or pride that day.
At the end of the trip, participantsβ well-being had increased dramatically, with youth particularly helped by the experience. Analyzing the diary entries, the researchers discovered that aweβabove and beyond any of the other positive emotionsβseemed to explain these improvements.
βExperiencing awe in nature is a powerful way to impact peopleβs psychology, even as theyβre doing something they really like to do,β says Anderson.
Next, Anderson and his colleagues decided to study whether awe played a role in more ordinary, everyday nature experiences. After all, rafting experiences have many components that could be beneficial, and the participants had not been randomly assigned to go on the trip; they had volunteered.
In this second study phase, undergraduate students kept daily diaries for two weeks, recounting positive experiences theyβd had during the day (which might or might not include awe or nature), as well as their feelings and overall satisfaction with life. They also filled out well-being surveys before and after the two weeks.
Analyses of the diaries showed that students who spent time in nature on a given day felt more satisfied with their lives that evening than those who didnβt, and that experiences of awe predicted that boost more than any other positive emotion. Thanks to this pattern, students who spent more days in nature over the two weeks saw greater improvements in well-being during that time.
This is good news, says Anderson, because sometimes itβs not that easy for people to invest in long, expensive wilderness trips in order to heal.
βOur findings suggest that you donβt have to do extravagant, extraordinary experiences in nature to feel awe or to get benefits,β says Anderson. βBy taking a few minutes to enjoy flowers that are blooming or a sunset in your day-to-day life, you also improve your well-being.β
Why would experiencing awe have these effects? Anderson doesnβt know for sure, but he speculates that awe may benefit well-being by inducing a βsmall selfββthe sense that you are in the presence of something bigger than yourselfβwhich may make past worries or present cares feel less significant by comparison.
But he also concedes that there could be other ways that nature experiences improve our well-being, besides inducing awe. In the river rafting trip, for example, the physical exercise or camaraderie could have made a difference to participants, since both are tied to well-being. And some students also experienced gratitude on days they were in natureβand this, too, led them to be more satisfied with life.
More research needs to be done to tease out aweβs specific role in natureβs healing power, Anderson says. But, whatever the case, he believes thereβs enough evidence to encourage us to add more nature to our daily life and to protect our national parksβwhich, he says, are an important part of our public health system.
βOur study illustrates the importance of trying to find moments to enjoy nature and feel in awe of it,β Anderson says. βPeople need to learn to slow down and make space for that in their lives.β