Read more about The Biophilia Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophilia_hypothesis
How Trees Calm Us Down
11–20 of 97 posts
Re: How Trees Calm Us Down
#12An office enriched with plants makes staff happier and boosts productivity by 15 per cent....... https://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2014/09/leafy-green-bette...
This study was limited to "employees from two large commercial offices", and probably suffers deeply from a Hawthorne Effect[0]. As usual, the rigor is doubtful.
Re: How Trees Calm Us Down
#13I opted for a lower quality apartment this year because all it's windows face vast green fields or trees. The effects are undeniable - some of my favourite times this year have been spent just sitting on my balcony admiring the greenery.
Went on my first cruise this year. I'm so glad we got a balcony -- I think I spent most of the trip just sitting on the balcony enjoying the sound of the ocean, or watching people at port. The balcony was my favorite part of the whole vacation...
Re: How Trees Calm Us Down
#14One hypothesis is that we've also evolved to associate greenery with healthy land and lifestyle. I can see why these signals from millions of years can have the 1% quoted effect.
The interesting question to me is: is that hard-coded or learned?
Re: How Trees Calm Us Down
#15Having trees in the city is nice, and Berlin has an ok level (at least where I live). But I recently started to do long weekend day hikes in the area around the city, and the effect is even better. The constant change of natural forms while moving really frees up my mind and floods it with new impressions that I don't have on my work days. I used to have a meditative effect from running, but it has become a bit too much routine in that regard.
There must be something about "natural forms" (as in varying, not changing, non-rectangular) that creates that feeling.
Re: How Trees Calm Us Down
#16Correlation is not causation.
Houses on streets with trees are more expensive. People that can afford to live there are healthier for obvious reasons.
Likewise, people that are put into better hospital rooms are probably just patients the hospital is willing to expend more energy on, because they have deeper pockets/are the right ethnicity/are "respectable people" etc..
Is there any non-depressing source of science journalism left in the world?
Re: How Trees Calm Us Down
#17From what I've seen living in Toronto, NYC and Montreal, streets with nicer houses/apartments tend to have more trees. Those neighborhoods also tend to be quieter.
Take the example of NYC. The Upper East Side and Clinton Hill are two neighborhoods with a relatively large number of trees. Both of those neighborhoods are two of the most expensive and quiet neighborhoods in Manhattan/Brooklyn.
So it could just be that quiet streets and nice houses calm us down. But then again, maybe having more trees is what causes neighborhoods to be nice and quiet. As far as I can tell, it could go either way.
Re: How Trees Calm Us Down
#18I was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, but moved out to rural NJ in my thirties. I bought a house on a lake with no motorboats, plenty of black bears and raccoons and lots of trees. I now live in the rice fields of East Java, Indonesia, so I guess you can say I love the outdoors. I do question the science or numbers in the study as much as I believe the basic premise to be true, however, correlation does not automati…
Agree, wildlife & wilderness is great, but my guess is that there's a confounding factor such as wealth, population density, etc. that has more of an impact on health than trees. Personally, tree are exciting to me, not calming.
What about the evidence of earlier discharge at the same hospital? It wasn't clear how carefully that was evaluated, but surely that would nullify wealth, population density etc since the only difference was the room that people were put in.
Re: How Trees Calm Us Down
#19I was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, but moved out to rural NJ in my thirties. I bought a house on a lake with no motorboats, plenty of black bears and raccoons and lots of trees. I now live in the rice fields of East Java, Indonesia, so I guess you can say I love the outdoors. I do question the science or numbers in the study as much as I believe the basic premise to be true, however, correlation does not automati…
As someone who suffers from hay fever being around trees can be weeks of pain for me every year
There is a massive, recent hayfever problem in Japan because cedar trees planted to be used for timber after WWII weren't as construction methods changed.
Re: How Trees Calm Us Down
#20> twenty per cent better ... on tests of memory and attention
> five times bigger in people who have been diagnosed with clinical depression