butt into nature as often as you possibly can. If your scores were the
same or lower, you should just go home and turn on some European
football. I scored five points higher, which meant “this kind of
walking suits you and you should try it again sometime,” translated
Korpela. The whole exercise felt a bit like taking a personality quiz in
the back of Mademoiselle. “What Does your Favorite Snack Food Say
About You?” Or from the Internet: “Which Muppet Are You?”
Psychological questionnaires gained popularity in the 1920s, when
Carl Jung was writing about personality types. Not sure Jung had
Kermit in mind, but people love these tests. If they get people out
hiking more, so much the better.
My cognitive test scores and my blood-pressure results were more
inconclusive. My compare-the-illustrations scores were the same. My
systolic pressure dropped quite a bit—six points—but my diastolic
went up nine points. A lot of things affect blood pressure, including
states of hydration, so I’d call it a question mark. My heart rate,
though, dropped a point. I was relaxed before the hike and still
relaxed after it. For now, I was off to sip some calendula tea and
sample Finnish chocolate from a farm café. I was beginning to
wonder if reporting about the pleasures of nature was making me too
mentally stable to be a reliable research subject.
But for stressed-out workers, Korpela sees quick, regular visits to
green space as having enormous potential to relieve the daily grind.
Based on his studies, he said “a thirty-to-forty-minute walk seems to
be enough for physiological changes and mood changes and probably
for attention.”
The five-hours-a-month recommendation stands for those of us in
need of a short tonic and as a way to ward off everyday blahs. But
what if you’re not just a frazzled worker? What if you’ve got bigger
problems? It would be up to the Scots and the Swedes to figure out
how to get already seriously depressed people into the woods and
gardens and make them stay there for a while. Twelve weeks ought to