is brilliant at instilling biophilic longing and affiliation at the very
same time it lures us inside.
It should come as no surprise that crosstalk operates between the
brain and nature, but we’re less aware of the ever-widening gulf
between the world our nervous systems evolved in and the world they
live in now. We celebrate our brains’ plasticity, but plasticity goes
only so far. As Miyazaki explained it, “throughout our evolution,
we’ve spent 99.9 percent of our time in nature. Our physiology is still
adapted to it. During everyday life, a feeling of comfort can be
achieved if our rhythms are synchronized with those of the
environment.” Of course, he’s talking about the nice parts of nature
found in the hillsides of Japan, not the pestilential scum ponds or
barren terrains of the globe that also constitute nature. Stick an office
worker there, and relaxation will likely not be happening. But
Miyazaki points out that naturalistic outdoor environments in general
remain some of the only places where we engage all five senses, and
thus, by definition, are fully, physically alive. It is where our savanna-
bred brains are, to borrow from John Muir, “home,” whether we
consciously know it or not. By contrast, Muir wrote of time not in the
wilderness: “I am degenerating into a machine for making money.”
Make that a machine with clogging pipes.
To prove that our physiology responds to different habitats,
Miyazaki’s taken hundreds of research subjects into the woods since
- He and his colleague Juyoung Lee, then also of Chiba
University, found that leisurely forest walks, compared to urban
walks, deliver a 12 percent decrease in cortisol levels. But that wasn’t
all; they recorded a 7 percent decrease in sympathetic nerve activity,
a 1.4 percent decrease in blood pressure, and a 6 percent decrease in
heart rate. On psychology questionnaires, they also report better
moods and lowered anxiety.
As Miyazaki concluded in a 2011 paper, “this shows that stressful
states can be relieved by shinrin therapy.” And the Japanese eat it up,