Why nature works better than any pill to improve emotional well-being

"My husband dying during the Covid pandemic was a hard blow. I was locked up at home, completely alone, grieving. I only interacted with my mother, who has Alzheimer's." Maria Ángeles Fajardo, 64, still has a broken voice when she remembers it. She pauses briefly and adds: "It was truly horrible. I felt very bad, very depressed and very, very alone."

During one of her visits to her family doctor at the CAP, in Trinitat Nova, in Barcelona, ​​​​she was sent to the health school that was held in the neighborhood center. And that was when Maria Ángeles heard for the first time about a project "for people who were alone" called RECIPESWithout thinking twice, she signed up and it turned out to be "a lifesaver." During the 10 weeks that the program lasted, she went from not even having the desire to leave the house to meeting weekly with a group of people between 18 and 80 years old to go "for a walk in nature, meditate in a park, enjoy myself again, smile," she says. "I have reconnected with life," she concludes.

With a budget of five million euros financed by the European Union within the Horizon 2020 programme, RECIPES (the acronym in English for Reimagining environments to connect and participate: actions for the social prescription of natural spaces) is a pioneering project in the world that aims to demonstrate that nature can be a true balm against loneliness. It is coordinated by the public health researcher Jill Litt, from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), and nine countries and 13 institutions from Europe, Latin America and Australia are participating.

"Feeling lonely for a long time and excessively has an effect on the body as dangerous as smoking or being overweight. It is a major public health problem all over the planet," explains Laura Coll, doctor, professor and researcher at the University of Vic-Central University of Catalonia, one of the co-leaders, along with Litt, of RECETAS.

Only in Europe, before the pandemic Some 75 million adults said they met with family or friends at most once a month and some 30 million felt lonely frequently, which is not the same as living alone, the researchers say. Loneliness is a subjective perception, "which shortens life, is related to premature mortality and is one of the greatest challenges we face as a society," says Coll, who points out that the Covid pandemic has made it worse.

And it is, paradoxically, in the southern Mediterranean regions where this epidemic of malaise is spreading most. The point is that "loneliness has to do with expectations: a person would like to have more social relationships, but they don't have them and they feel disappointed," explains Litt. That is why, in countries like ours, where traditionally there had been a family structure in which several generations lived together, now that "there are more people living alone who do not want to live alone and perhaps did not expect to end up doing so," The figures for loneliness and social isolation are higher.

From urban gardens to parks

Before RECIPES, Litt had spent 15 years studying the impact of community gardens and urban orchards on the health of city residents, as well as their emotional well-being and nutrition. In a clinical trial that he conducted in different urban environments around the world, he concluded that these spaces were a place of socialization and that nature "opens up the possibility of having genuine feelings." "The contemplation of spaces and natural elements, the aesthetic and also tactile experience, of touching the ground, of getting dirty, activated crucial emotional processes in people. "It is as if nature els cridés and motivates positive records of those who are infants," says Litt. It is going to be in contact to propose to jointly evaluate the potential of nature to combat, precisely, this emotional discomfort. 2021, which faces tea More to come. With the help of neighbourhood organisations, they will recruit hundreds of vulnerable adults aged between 18 and 80 who live in disadvantaged urban areas in Marseille, Prague, Helsinki, Cuenca (Ecuador) and Melbourne. Also in Barcelona and other municipalities in the province, such as Sabadell, Barcelona, ​​​​Santa Coloma, Vic or Castellar del Vallès; in total, 321 people have participated in Catalonia, 80% of whom are women with an average age of 60 years. When the project was conceived, priority was given to accessing nearby natural spaces, places and resources available to the general population. The idea was to discover spaces in their own cities so that, later, once the intervention was over, the participants could return alone or with the people they had met in the project, or with their family. "It didn't make much sense to take a bus and take them to a natural park one or two hours from home, because they wouldn't come back. They had to be places that they could integrate into their lives," says Montse Masó, a nurse and environmentalist, in charge of coordinating groups of participants. That's why they chose environments such as Park Güell, the beaches of Barcelona or the Horta Labyrinth. "The important thing was to instill in them the value of nearby green spaces," adds this researcher, who is doing a doctoral thesis on the social prescription of nature.

In RECETAS, the researchers have worked closely with entities from the different neighbourhoods and with the participants to jointly create the activities that they carried out in each space based on the interests of the group. Thus, sometimes, nature played a more passive role, such as being the setting for a shared meal or a guided meditation; other times, it played a more active role, such as bird watching or plant species.

During the sessions, led by two facilitators, "we worked on trust, empowerment, the ability to seek resources, to meet new people, to generate new bonds in the context of nature, which increases face-to-face connection, the desire to be with others and our own ability to interact," says Masó.

The power of nature

That nature has a beneficial impact on physical and mental health is well supported by science. Numerous studies have shown that forest bathing, for example, is capable of lowering blood pressure and cortisol levels, which is the stress hormone; balancing the central nervous system, improving the immune system and combating depression; and, in addition, it reduces anxiety, fatigue, and feelings of anger.

What's more, it has been seen that patients who are in hospitals surrounded by greenery recover faster than those who are in centers with only gray cement around them. And that children who go to schools with more trees have better attention spans and problem solving skills. And growing up in contact with nature is associated with better mental health in adulthood: children raised in green environments have a lower risk of developing anxiety or depression later in life.

It surely makes sense that this is the case, that nature is closely related to mental health, since humans have evolved for hundreds of thousands of years in natural environments. We have a brain wired for green and not for the grey of urban concrete. That is why, surely, "when we go to a natural space, the brain relaxes, we feel calm, we anchor ourselves in the present and we move away from thought patterns that can be very toxic for people and increase the feeling of loneliness, which in the end is totally subjective," says Montse Masó, a nurse and environmentalist.

"Contact with nature even changes activity in some brain areas, such as the subgenual prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain linked to negative thoughts, or rumination, associated with loneliness," Masó continues, adding that we have been concerned about this.

In addition to the fact that green areas encourage people to move, they increase the amount of physical activity they do, which in turn improves physical health and reduces and combats exposure to pollution, both environmental and noise. "Nature works much better than any pill," concludes Litt, convinced.

Now the interventions with the groups have finished and the researchers are analyzing the data collected. "We are trying to establish which improvements can be attributed to nature, which to physical exercise, which have been the elements that have most influenced achieving the changes," says Masó. The first results could arrive before the summer.

"If RECETAS is successful, it can change the care model to focus more on the person and depend less on drug interventions," says Litt, convinced. "We will be able to empower communities to manage their health and thus also relieve pressure on the public health system," she adds.

For the moment, the project's urge seems to have taken hold, which, in part, denotes the success of the project in achieving what it sought: combating loneliness and establishing support networks. An example is Maria Ángeles, the participant with whom we began this report, who continues to meet up with some of the people she met. "Sometimes we meet at one of our houses and other times we go together to one of the places we visited then," she explains, excitedly. She also confesses that she goes out for walks alone a lot more, she likes to walk along the seashore, on the beach of Badalona. "I feel that I am connected with nature. It makes me feel good," she says and adds that since she feels better she has also joined a choir, she goes once a week. Because singing reminds her of her childhood and she has a great time and is in contact with people. "I have come out of the hole I was in."