Natural scenery helps stressed people begin meditation practice

What is it about?

Mindfulness meditation training is known to reduce stress and enhance the ability to focus. At the same time, many people with stress and concentration problems struggle with the meditation exercises and drop out early from mindfulness training programs. It can be quite demanding for them to sit still and focus on their breath (a common mindfulness exercise) for even 15 minutes. Nature experiences are also known to reduce stress and enhance the ability to focus. Unlike meditation training, visits to nature usually require little effort and their benefits can emerge within minutes rather than after weeks or months of training. In safe and scenic nature, people get away from the distractions and demands of everyday life and instead they become positively engaged with pleasantly interesting experiences in the moment. Basically, they are mindful without even trying. Can nature support mindfulness practice? In this early test of the idea, 27 students completed an 8-week mindfulness training course while 14 served as waiting-list controls. Every other week of the study they all completed attention tests before and after 15-minute sessions. During sessions, some mindfulness training participants did conventional mindfulness training and others did mindfulness training while they viewed nature images. Controls just rested and viewed nature images. On average, resting with nature images improved attention test performance and meditation did not. Mindfulness training participants with poor concentration to begin with also had substantially elevated risk of drop out from the course. These results indicate that beginning with conventional mindfulness training can be too demanding for those who need it most. However, meditation with nature images was increasingly beneficial for attention test performance across the eight weeks. Nature apparently helped them practice with less effort!

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Why is it important?

Getting more people, specifically those with stress and attention problems, to begin and continue with mindfulness training may benefit their personal well-being and cognitive performance. It may even have some positive consequences on a larger scale as the personal benefits accumulate in communities, organizations, and society as a whole. However, what I find really interesting about this is how contacts with nature can help people shift to a more effortless, more curious and creative, and less reactive way of being. Natural mindfulness, if you will. And efforts to bring more contact with nature to people in their everyday lives - to their neighborhoods, offices, and cities and to their workdays, weekends, and holidays - can easily reach and benefit whole populations. Restorative environments researchers have studied nature experience for decades, however, the connections we make to concepts and practices derived from meditation research link that research in new ways to current trends in cognitive and clinical psychology.

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