A phrase people often say when someone else is feeling down or overwhelmed is “go outside”. A more malicious version of this is an online saying, “touch grass”, which is used when a person has a particularly controversial opinion that others deem out of touch with reality. What these people may not know is that spending time in nature actually does have both physical and mental benefits.
According to the authors of a 2025 meta-analysis on the effect of nature exposure on adults with mental illnesses, the time needed for exposure to nature is at least ten minutes in a natural setting. In this meta-analysis, there were some studies that researched the effects of single experiences of exposure to nature, whereas others studied the effects of multiple exposures. The data from the two types of studies were separated in order to determine the differences. The researchers discovered that multiple exposure to nature in intervals, for a short amount of time, showed more positive significant effects regarding adults diagnosed with and experiencing symptoms of mental illness than the effects for one-time exposure. This is not the first encounter of actual psychological evidence of the positive mental health effects of nature exposure, which is why most rehabilitation centers are located in remote places, typically in some kind of natural setting.
The attention restoration theory (ART) contributes to this finding as well. ART states that people’s attention spans elongate after being exposed to nature, whether it’s physically being in nature or looking at scenes of nature. This theory was created by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, the authors of The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective. The characteristics of the environment that contribute to its restorative nature are split into four main characteristics: fascination, being away, extension, and compatibility. Fascination is defined as the awe that the environment invokes in people, which gives their directed attention a rest and the involuntary attention the opportunity to replace it. According to the Kaplans, involuntary attention is when one’s “attention is captured by inherently intriguing or important stimuli”, and direct attention happens when “attention is directed by cognitive-control processes.” Being away can give a person relief from their everyday life and worries, whether the person is physically remote or not; their mind is on a vacation from their stress. The component of extension, or extent, is the idea that one feels comfortable and at ease in the environment because there are no unusual or unexpected features, giving people the ability to be totally immersed and engaged. Compatibility happens when the properties of natural settings meet the preferences and goals of whoever is engaging with them.
To return to the idea of directed and involuntary attention, the act of diminishing direct attention, which prioritizes stimuli from the environment and ignores irrelevant information, is known today as mental fatigue. As people constantly use their attention on particularly arduous tasks, the effectiveness of that attention will deteriorate, which makes it harder to distinguish relevant information and easier to become distracted. Mental fatigue, however, affects different types of attention differently, with goal-directed attention being the most affected, and stimulus-driven attention being the least. When goal-directed attention decreases, humans tend to develop occupational burnout: the act of distancing ourselves from work. Interestingly, aesthetics can contribute to remedying mental fatigue; ART asserts that even by looking at natural landscapes, one’s mind sits in the default mode network: being able to relax the mind and allowing it to wander freely.
I find that I have had a very fitting experience of the attention restoration theory, which I touched upon in my article about my time in the Canadian wilderness this past summer. While I was in the woods, after about a week, I found that I was not wishing for my phone to text my friends or scroll on TikTok. Although on my trip, I did not have much time to just sit down and relax, as we were participating in physically challenging tasks such as portaging and canoeing constantly, I still discovered that my mind rarely wandered from what I was doing. When I got back to my normal life, I realized that I didn’t want to go on my phone as much, and realized that there was not much of a purpose to it. I now can read a book easily without wanting to take a break on my phone every ten pages, which, unfortunately, was not a feat I could have accomplished merely last year. Looking back on my experience, I believe that my attention span was, in fact, restored, as the theory suggests.
Sources:
https://positivepsychology.com/attention-restoration-theory/
