How to Get the Most Out of Your Time in Nature
Having a powerful relationship with the natural world doesn’t require living anywhere near it
There’s no doubt that spending time in nature improves both mental and physical health — but what’s less widely understood is how much time, exactly, we need to spend outside to reap those benefits. Even the most recently published study, which recommended at least 120 minutes a week, is subject to so many constraints and qualifiers that the researchers themselves advised readers to take their findings with a grain of salt.
And maybe how much time we spend outside isn’t quite the right question to ask. Those of us with more limited access to the great outdoors will be heartened to hear that researchers think the quality of the experiences we have in nature appears to matter just as much as the quantity. Here’s how to get the most out of your time outside, whether it’s two hours a week, or 20 minutes.
Do you think of yourself as a “nature person”? Researchers who study the relationship between people and their environments have found that the more time we spend in nature, the more we consider our connection to the natural world to be part of our sense of self (they call this “nature relatedness”). In one 2008 study, people who scored highest on a scale measuring…
