In these winter times when staying indoors feels especially magnetic, it’s important to reflect on the myriad of benefits that nature exposure can provide for our physical, mental, and emotional well-being — especially as employees throughout the US and across industries continue to report elevated levels of work stress.
Coming out just in time for indoor hibernation season, researchers from the University of Washington published a new experimental, 2-study report in the December issue of Urban Forestry & Urban Greening on the beneficial effects that day-to-day nature exposure can have on workers in their everyday lives. This was the first known study to longitudinally investigate nature contact at work in connection to employees’ psychological well-being, and also the first known study to control for important contextual (activity type, location) confounders. Results suggest stress-related benefits for spending time in more (versus less) natural outdoor settings.
Authors Sara Perrins (Seattle Children’s Hospital), Edmund Seto (Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences), and Nature & Health Steering Committee Members Greg Bratman (School of Environmental and Forest Sciences) and Usha Varanasi (School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences) forged a new collaboration with Amazon to investigate psychological well-being effects associated with employee use of the Spheres–a 2-acre, multistory conservatory in the heart of downtown Seattle filled with over 40,000 plants that provides Amazon employees a nature-filled place for restoration and work.
Amazon and study authors wanted to know if nature contact at or near the workplace–whether through time spent at the Spheres or other natural environments throughout the day— would influence employee experiences of affect, stress, and symptoms of depression.
In the first of their two studies, 153 participants were recruited via posters from Amazon’s downtown Seattle offices and company e-newsletters. Researchers asked participants how frequently they visited the Spheres and were given an online assortment of psychological well-being questionnaires.
Results showed that more positive emotions were reported along with higher visitation to the Spheres. However, when taking into account participants’ various activities within the Spheres (for example, eating, drinking, socializing, working, etc), this positive association became weaker.
In the second study, researchers followed 60 participants from the first study for two additional weeks with over 400 repeated survey assessments This time, researchers wanted to learn more about how ranges of nature exposure for people with different situations and circumstances (for example, with less/more nature present while out doing chores, exercising, eating, etc) might impact each participants’ overall state emotional health and stress levels.
Researchers found that participants in more natural outdoor environments reported significantly less state anxiety than those in less natural outdoor settings even after taking activity and location into account. This finding is in line with the theory that nature contact reduces overall stress.
More experimental research is needed to understand the contexts and ways in which nature contact can affect workplace mental health and burnout.
