By improving our understanding of how spending time in nature is related to health and well-being, it is hoped that decisions on what to do with open, undeveloped spots will be better informed.
Last year, nearly 73, participants covered more than , miles across the country. Go to stateparks. Or, you can just hit a local trail with friends, family or go solo. Twitter - Facebook.
Click here to cancel reply. All rights reserved. Share on Tumblr. About the author: Candice Gaukel Andrews View all posts by Candice Gaukel Andrews A multiple award-winning author and writer specializing in nature-travel topics and environmental issues, Candice has traveled around the world, from the Arctic Circle to Antarctica, and from New Zealand to Scotland's far northern, remote regions.
In addition to being a five-time book author, Candice's work has also appeared in several national and international publications, such as "The Huffington Post" and "Outside Magazine Online. Yellowstone: Restoring Wolves Revived Willows. Listing, Mapping—and Changing—All Animals.
It doesn't even exist in the dictionary! How Do You Spell Niece? Or Is It Neice? Calender vs. Calendar: What Is the Correct Spelling? Speech Length. Slow wpm. Average wpm. Although: a we tried to control for this by including physical activity over the last 7 days in our models; and b the threshold applied to individuals who did not meet activity guidelines; we were unable to fully untangle these issues. Experimental research, however, indicates that some benefits cannot be due solely to physical activity.
Moreover, physical activity conducted in nature may be more psychologically beneficial than in other locations 36 , suggesting a complex interaction between the two which requires further research to fully understand This may be because individuals selected exposures to fit their personal preferences and circumstances.
For instance, some may prefer long walks on the weekend in locations further from home; while others may prefer regular shorter visits to parks in the local area. To recommend the former type of person stops their long weekly visit in favour of several shorter trips or vice versa may be misguided. Whilst this study deepens our understanding of the potential value of spending time outdoors in nature to health and well-being, it is too early to make specific guidance due to several limitations.
Prospective longitudinal studies of the kind used to help develop physical activity guidelines 29 , and nature-based intervention studies are needed to better understand causality. Although our sample was more heterogeneous, weekly nature exposure may work in a similar fashion by reducing generally high levels of stress Although effects on attentional processes were observed after just 5 weeks in Cimprich and Ronis 37 , health effects may need longer; and it is also important to see whether different types of nature contact might confer different benefits.
We also note that, although significant, time in nature explained relatively little variance in either health or wellbeing in these models based on cross-sectional data approx. Another limitation concerned our estimate of weekly exposure.
As duration was asked about only a single randomly selected visit in the last week, we assumed that at the population level this was representative of all visits. Although rigorous collection protocols meant that the effects of a typical visit selection are likely to cancel out over a sample of nearly 20,, we recognise that accuracy at the individual level would be improved if duration were asked about all visits in the last week. We also acknowledge that our data rely on self-reports and thus results needed to be treated with caution.
For instance, self-reported duration is likely to be less accurate than measures obtained from geo-tracking individuals during specific visits 39 , or over several days 40 , and individuals may have been unsure about, or reluctant to discuss, certain issues which were included as covariates e. Future studies would ideally collate as much data via non self-report measures as possible. Thus, an exposure in this context may be considered as the time in situ plus all subsequent time spent thinking about the experience In part its emergence may be a consequence of the clustering of duration responses around the hour mark and subsequent stratification, rather than anything materially different occurring at this level of exposure.
The spline models, for instance, suggested a more nuanced pattern. However, this smoothing of the data was still reliant on a highly non-normal distribution, suggesting that we need to be cautious about these analyses as well. Contact with nature is more than just a complex multi-sensory experience, to varying degrees personal histories and meanings, longstanding cultural practices, and a sense of place play some role in the benefits realised 44 , 45 , 46 , factors which may account for why we did not find the same pattern for health individuals not identifying as White British.
All of these issues will need greater consideration in future research. In addition to improving the duration-exposure estimates used here, more research is also needed to understand the impact of different activities undertaken, as well as the effect of environmental quality and personal meaning. Nevertheless, we see our findings as an important starting point for discussions around providing simple, evidence-based recommendations about the amount of time spent in natural settings that could result in meaningful promotion of health and well-being.
These were applied in the current analysis to ensure that results remained generalisable to the entire adult population of England. Ethical approval was not required for this secondary analysis of publically available National Statistics. Responses are robustly associated with use of medical services 50 and mortality 51 ; and crucially, for current purposes, neighbourhood greenspace Histograms of the non-normal distributions for both outcome variables are presented in Appendix A.
Sensitivity analyses conducted on ordinal both health and wellbeing and linear wellbeing only variations of these variables are presented in Appendix E. Recreational nature contact, or time spent in natural environments in the last week, was derived by multiplying the number of reported recreational visits per week by the length of a randomly selected visit in the last week.
By out of doors we mean open spaces in and around towns and cities , including parks , canals and nature areas; the coast and beaches; and the countryside including farmland , woodland , hills and rivers. This could be anything from a few minutes to all day. It may include time spent close to your home or workplace , further afield or while on holiday in England.
However this does not include: routine shopping trips or; time spent in your own garden. Due to random selection, even if the selected visit was not necessarily representative for any given individual, the randomisation procedure should reduce potential bias at the population level at which our analyses were conducted.
Weekly duration estimates were thus derived by multiplying the duration for this randomly selected visit by the number of stated visits in the last seven days capped at 7. Following the approach of earlier exposure-response studies in the field e. Shanahan et al. Health and well-being are associated with socio-demographic and environmental characteristics at both neighbourhood e.
As many of these variables may also be related to nature exposure they were controlled for in the adjusted analyses. There were 32, LSOAs in England, each containing approximately 1, people within a mean physical area of 4km 2. These were summed and divided by the total LSOA area to provide the greenspace density metric.
This metric was allocated to each individual in the sample, based on LSOA of residence. Following previous literature, individuals were assigned to one of five quintiles of greenspace based on this definition ranging from least green to most green Rather than derive quintiles of greenspace from the current sample i.
This produced very similar results, so we focused on the more inclusive definition including both aspects. In further exploratory sensitivity analyses, we assigned individuals to five greenspace categories defined by equal ranges of greenspace coverage e. This also produced very similar results, so again we decided to go with the most common approach. In subsequent analyses the least green quintile acted as the reference category. Each LSOA in England is assessed in terms of several parameters of deprivation, including unemployment and crime, levels of educational, income, health metrics, barriers to housing and services, and the living environment.
Following previous studies 52 , we assigned individuals into deprivation quintiles based on the LSOA in which they lived. Two further control variables were particularly important. Including this variable, at least in part, controls for reverse causality. If similar associations between nature exposure and health and well-being are found for both those with and without restricted functioning, this would support the notion that the associations are not merely due to healthier, more mobile people visiting nature more often.
Some people achieve this guideline though physical activity in natural settings 35 , thus, any association between time spent in nature and health may simply be due to the physical activity engaged in these settings. Nevertheless, by controlling for weekly activity levels, modelled relationships between time in nature and health have less bias from this source, and, therefore, improved estimates of association with nature exposure per se.
Preliminary analysis found no effect of the season in which the data were collected so this was excluded from final analyses. Model fit was provided by pseudo R 2 ; here the more conservative Cox and Snell estimate.
The outcome binary variables were first regressed against the exposure duration categories to test direct relationships; adjusted models were then specified to include the individual and area level control variables. Preliminary analysis found that the weighted descriptive proportions among this reduced estimation sample differed only negligibly from those among all available observations in the wider MENE sample, suggesting our complete case analysis approach did not distort the population representativeness of the estimation sample.
Although our main analyses used duration categories of weekly nature contact, an exploratory analysis used generalized additive models incorporating a penalized cubic regression spline of duration as a continuous variable adjusting for the same set of covariates. Analyses and plotting was done using R version 3. To explore the generalisability of any pattern across different socio-demographic groups, we also a priori stratified the analyses on several area and individual covariates as defined above which have been found to be important in previous studies: a Urbanicity; b Neighbourhood greenspace; c Area deprivation; d Sex; e Age; f Restricted functioning; g Individual socio-economic status SES ; f Ethnicity; and g Physical activity.
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