“How Nature Nurtures,” a story appearing in the Summer 2026 issue of National Wildlife magazine, sets forth a whole lot of research studies, both old and new, that confirm what we’ve always known: Exposure to nature makes people feel better.
This story, written by Katarina Zimmer, highlights one of the most recent studies, conducted by neuroscientist Sonja Sudimac and her colleagues in Berlin’s Grunewald Forest. After spending an hour strolling through the trees, 32 participants were rushed to the researchers’ nearby lab at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. They lay down in a functional MRI machine that analyzed their brain activity. The question: Had the nature walk affected their brains?
The scientists were most interested in the amygdala, the part of the brain that processes fear or stress and can trigger the body’s fight-or-flight response. Inside the scanner, participants were shown images of scared human faces. Those images would normally provoke activity in the amygdala. The result? Participants’ amygdalae were much less reactive after the forest walk than during tests conducted beforehand. Even more significantly, another group of 31 who had walked along a busy street showed no difference in their brain activity before and after their walk.
The researchers concluded that walking in the forest made people feel less prone to stress. (2022 report in Molecular Psychiatry)
Author Zimmer goes on to note other studies, including the 2025 study by Mathew White of the University of Vienna where, much like the one in Berlin, participants lay in an MRI scanner. But here they watched imagery of a greenery-surrounded lake, a city, or an office while they received mild electric shocks. People reported that the pain was less severe when they watched the natural scene. White concluded that, because of the scenes of greenery, people “weren’t aware of the pain…to the same level.”
Many scientists look to the “stress reduction theory” proposed by Roger Ulrich in 1991 to explain some of nature’s health-boosting effects. Non-threatening natural environments, like forests, please and relax us, lowering our heart rate and blood pressure, making us better at handling stress-provoking situations. Reduced stress, in turn, lowers the risk of stress-triggered diseases and mental health problems.
Another theory goes back to the 1980s, when Rachel and Stephen Kaplan conceived the “attention restoration theory,” the idea that nature gives our overloaded brains a break. Other researchers have linked nature exposure to greater satisfaction with our social lives, not only because we may spend time outdoors with other people but also because it puts us in a better mood when we later spend time with family and friends. A 2025 study of Canadian university students reported that when they felt connected to the natural world, they felt less lonely in nature even when they were outdoors by themselves. Terry Hartig of Sweden’s Uppsala University thinks the natural world, or features of it like animal life or certain trees or plants, almost take on the quality of a “social partner.” (Health and Place)
Even our immune systems may get a boost. In a 2024 study of over 1,000 U.S. adults, those who spent more time in nature had lower blood concentrations of C-reactive protein, a sign of inflammation that can give rise to chronic diseases and other health issues. (Brain, Behavior, and Immunity) A possible reason: Kendra Wilson, a social psychologist at Ohio State speculates that natural environments expose us to beneficial bacteria that contribute to healthy microbe communities in our guts and on our skin, thereby reducing inflammation.
Research also shows that feeling safe in the natural world is important. Because it’s one of the strongest predictors of health benefits, people may get bigger health boosts from landscaped environments like parks than they do from wilder areas that they view as dangerous.
The focus today is on bringing more nature into cities in the form of parks, community gardens, and other greenery. People in many city neighborhoods, especially marginalized communities, don’t have access to green spaces. Nooshin Razani, a pediatrician and researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, analyzed nearly 50,000 children and teenagers across the U.S. and found that nearly a quarter lived in neighborhoods that lacked parks. Published in 2020 in Preventive Medicine, her study found this was especially true in nonwhite and low-income families. Razani hopes that, to address this gap, physicians will increasingly connect their patients to nature through partnerships with parks. She has already put this goal into action in Oakland, California, where she and her colleagues organize monthly bus outings for families who might otherwise have limited access to parks.
As researcher Sudimac concludes, these research findings are more important today than ever, when more than half the world’s population lives in cities and 70 percent is predicted to live in cities by 2050. Along with our indoor, on-screen lifestyles, this unequal access to nature may be contributing to the rise of mental health problems like anxiety and depression.
All of this research confirms what we already knew: Protecting and expanding the nature around us is a priority. Protecting the environment has always been a priority for some of us. It now appears to be even more of a priority for human health for every one of us.
As author Zimmer concludes, “If we nurture nature, nature can help us heal, too.”
susanjustwrites
