The Danish love of bicycles comes partly from their effect on our everyday mood. Apart from the exercise that comes from walking or cycling rather than driving, studies show that both cycling and walking put us in a better mood than driving.
A group of scientists at McGill University in Montreal has looked into which sort of transport is best for our mood. The study was conducted among 3,400 people – during summer and winter – and examined six typical means of transport: car, bus, train, metro, bicycle and foot. The researchers looked at the satisfaction gained in several aspects of the journeys and from this calculated one overall satisfaction score for each mode of transport. They found that the greatest satisfaction was experienced by those who could walk to work, while those who had to take the bus were the least satisfied.
Obviously, you might say. If you can walk to work, you can’t have a three-hour commute. That is true: the length of the commute does dictate our transport options somewhat. So, it’s particularly interesting to study commuters over time and observe what happens when they change their form of transport.
Fortunately, that is exactly what scientists from the universities of East Anglia and York have done, by following a group of eighteen thousand Britons over eighteen years in the 2014 study ‘Does Active Commuting Improve Psychological Well-being? Longitudinal Evidence from Eighteen Waves of the British Household Panel Survey’ (the rule of thumb in academic papers being, the longer the title, the better). They found that people who switched from driving to walking or cycling experienced improvements in psychological well-being – even if the trip now took longer.
I cycle to work and pass a large public garden on my way. The garden is one of the ways I can sense that spring is coming: I can smell when the cherry trees are blooming. Part of the reason why we feel in a better mood when cycling rather than driving is that our senses are more engaged. We simply feel more alive – walking is a more sensual experience than driving. Especially if you engage in what the Japanese call shinrin-yoku.
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AS EASY AS A WALK IN THE…FOREST
You take a long, deep breath and your lungs fill up with the moist, fresh air. The leaves are the colour that only the first weeks of spring bring and the sun’s rays dance off them as you slowly make your way through the forest.
As you pause for a moment and close your eyes, the only sounds you can hear are your breath, a distant bird and the wind in the trees. More than 160 years ago, Henry David Thoreau prescribed the tonic of the wilderness for the discontent of men in his Walden: Or, Life in the Woods. Today, the practice of shinrin-yoku might spark a rise in similar prescriptions.
Shinrin-yoku literally translates to ‘forest bathing’, or taking in the atmosphere of the forest, and refers to soaking up the sights, smells and sounds of a natural setting to promote physiological and psychological health. The term was first coined in 1982 but, today, millions of Japanese walk along forty-eight ‘forest therapy’ trails, to get their dose of what I guess could be labelled ‘outdoorphins’.
Fans of shinrin-yoku explain that it differs from hiking because it is about taking everything in and stimulating all our senses, and because it focuses on the therapeutic aspects.
Professor Qing Li at the Health Nippon Medical School in Tokyo has studied the effect of shinrin-yoku and found that the practice reduces the levels of cortisol in the blood and boosts the immune system. But forest bathing may not be good only for our physical health. Researchers from the University of Essex have explored how being active in a natural setting affects our mood. Looking at ten different UK studies involving more than 1,200 people, the researchers found that taking part in activities like country walks, sailing and gardening had a positive effect on the mood and self-esteem of the participants. Overall, evidence is building that time spent in the natural world benefits human health.
Also in the UK, researchers have created the ‘mappiness project’, mapping happiness across the nation and now throughout the world. It’s part of a research project at the London School of Economics and its aim is to understand how people’s happiness is affected by the local environment. As they say, we can all agree that green hillsides are lovely – but we want to know how lovely they are. What is the quantitative evidence that a nice environment makes us feel better? The project uses real-time individual experiences, and I would encourage you to sign up. A researcher will beep you once (or more) a day on your phone to ask how you’re feeling, and a few basic things to control for: who you’re with, where you are, what you’re doing (if you’re outdoors, you can also take and send a photo). The project has already collected more than 3.5 million responses contributed by 65,000 participants.
What the researchers find is that, on average, participants are significantly and substantially happier outdoors in all green or natural habitats than they are in urban environments. This study provides new evidence on links between nature and well-being, strengthening existing evidence of a positive relationship between happiness and exposure to green or natural environments in our lives.
To sum up, there is growing evidence that nature has a positive effect on our health and happiness. In addition, shinrin-yoku may help you get out of your head and experience the data coming through your senses. In fact, I see a lot of parallels between shinrin-yuko and the increasingly popular practice of mindfulness.
HAPPINESS TIP:
INTO THE WILD
Visit the same spot in nature periodically over the course of a year and really be mindful as to how the landscape is changing each time.
Find and explore a forest. Take it slowly and forget about what would make a nice Instagram picture. Instead, listen to the wind in the leaves, watch the sun bounce off the branches, take a deep breath and see what smells you can detect. Try to visit the same spot several times a year, so you can appreciate how it changes over the seasons. Say hi to the first day of spring, summer, autumn and winter. Go alone or invite people to join you.
BRAIN BRUSHING IN BHUTAN
In some Bhutanese schools, the students and teachers start and finish their day with a silent moment of ‘brain brushing’, a short mindfulness exercise.
Mindfulness has its roots in Buddhism, where the belief is that the human pursuit of everlasting happiness leads to suffering. We feel pain because nothing lasts. Mindfulness is about being present. Right here, right now, in this moment, and being loving and kind to yourself. Whereas our thoughts usually revolve around the future or the past, mindfulness is all about the present moment.
Because the Bhutanese focus on Gross National Happiness instead of Gross National Product, the country is almost a laboratory testing out different approaches to improve well-being. One of these efforts is the GNH Curriculum, which targets ten non-academic ‘life skills’ in secondary-school students in a collaboration between the Bhutanese Ministry of Education and a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania. One of these non-academic life skills is mindfulness.
More than eight thousand students participated in the study, in which the researchers randomly assigned the schools taking part either to the treatment group, which received the GNH Curriculum over fifteen months, or to the control group, which received a placebo GNH Curriculum over the same period.
The researchers tested two hypotheses. First, does the GNH Curriculum raise levels of well-being? And second, does increasing well-being improve academic performance? It found that the GNH Curriculum significantly increased student well-being and improved academic performance.
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LET’S TALK ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH