Nature is good for you

Nature is good for you

How do you feel about nature? After spending hours outdoors, do you often feel like going outside for a walk? Or if you work for hours at your office desk, do you feel better when you take a break and visit your local park? Most people think that nature is good for us; it's good for our bodies and good for our brains. However, humans are spending more time inside and less time outside. For example, the number of visitors to Canada's national parks is getting lower every year. And in countries such as the USA, only 10% of teenagers spend time outside every day. Many doctors feel that this is a problem in the twenty-first century, and that it is making our physical health worse.

As a result, some doctors are studying the connection between nature and health: one example of this is the work of Dr Matilda van den Bosch in Sweden. The doctor gave people a maths test. During the test, their heart rate was faster. After the test, one group of people sat in a 3D-virtual-reality room for fifteen minutes with pictures and sounds of nature. Their heart rates were slower than people's in the other group. The virtual contact with nature helped them feel more relaxed. Another good example of how nature is good for health comes from Canada. In Toronto, researchers studied 31,000 people living in cities. Overall, they found that healthier people lived near parks.

Because of studies like these, some countries and cities want nature to be part of people's everyday life. In Dubai, for example, there are plans for a new shopping mall with a large garden so shoppers can relax outside with trees, plants and water. In some countries such as Switzerland, 'forest schools' are popular; school children study their subjects in the forests and do lots of exercise outside. And South Korea is another good example: it has new forests near its cities and around 13 million people visit these forests every year. So after building cities for so long, perhaps its now time to start rebuilding nature.