Since its creation in 2016, the subreddit has reached more than 5.7M members, with few thousands browsing the sub at any given moment. As the moderators say, "We are here to appreciate the awesome majesty and incredibly cool aspects of nature." Scrolling through the sub, you can see that the community posts high-energy content paying tribute to wonderful nature.
And there's plenty of things to appreciate. Try to remember those childhood days when you went outside to play with your friends. Finding the most exciting things around you—weird-looking frogs or insanely colorful bugs—every day seemed like an adventure. Unfortunately, today, people in the U.S. seem to spend more and more time indoors.
A study of almost 12,000 children and adults found that people have lost connection with nature. It poses a nationwide problem, "since overwhelming evidence shows the physical, psychological, and social well-being of humans depends on contact with nature." Yet most of the respondents said there were more important issues than concerns for nature and even though they spent relatively little time outdoors, they were satisfied with the amount.
One of the reasons for this would be that people are putting their focus on other things like time, work or money. Let's not forget the new technologies that distract and captivate. Middle- or older-aged people are concerned that younger generations are "overly reliant on electronic media, unaware of how the natural world works, and unacquainted with the simple enjoyment of being outdoors".
Another report by Outdoor Foundation only proves these concerns. It showed that in 2018, a little less than half of the U.S. population did not participate in outdoor recreation at all. And it seems that only 17.9 percent went outside at least once a week.
What's especially worrying is the outdoor activity among youth. "Kids went on 15 percent fewer annual outings in 2018 than they did in 2012," the report states. This decline will affect their physical activity in the future because "adults that were active outside as children were twice as likely to be active when they became adults."
The good news is that reconnecting with nature is not a difficult task. It seems that spending just a few hours a week in nature can impact your wellbeing. In this study, researchers questioned more than 19K people in the UK and examined links between the recreational time they spent in nature in the past week and self-reported health and well-being. The results showed that compared to no nature contact last week, people who go out for at least 120 minutes reported having better health or high well-being.
This pattern was consistent across all age groups, even older adults or people with long-term health issues. According to the researchers, "It did not matter how 120 minutes of contact a week was achieved." Whether it's a long walk in the park or just a short stroll around the neighborhood, the benefits are similar to how people would feel after exercising.
Spending a couple of hours per week to appreciate Mother Nature will not only make you healthier but also more creative. Getting constantly bombarded with massive amounts of information, feeling overwhelmed or overworked can lead to burnout. Being out in the open helps you restore your attention and have more creative and clear thoughts.
Three researchers from the University of Utah showed that hikers saw an increase in performance on creativity and problem-solving by 50% only after spending four days outdoors. "Our results demonstrate that there is a cognitive advantage to be realized if we spend time immersed in a natural setting."
"We anticipate that this advantage comes from an increase in exposure to natural stimuli that are both emotionally positive and low-arousing and a corresponding decrease in exposure to attention-demanding technology, which regularly requires that we attend to sudden events, switch amongst tasks, maintain task goals, and inhibit irrelevant actions or cognitions," they said.
