Spending time in nature & into your everyday life can benefit both your mental and physical wellbeing. For example, exercising outdoors or watching wildlife can have lots of positive effects. It can:
· improve your mood
· reduce feelings of stress or anger
· help you take time out and feel more relaxed
· improve your physical health
· improve your confidence and self-esteem
· help you be more active
· help you make new friends
We all have different experiences of nature, and different reasons for wanting to connect with it more – or feeling unsure about whether to try. Personally, it gives me a healthy routine to get out each morning and make most of every day. You never know what you will see, each day offers something different that keeps you motivated. Recording what you see can contribute to one of the many citizen science programmes in operation. Your sightings might help protect a local species.
Spending time in nature has been found to help with mental health problems including anxiety and depression. For example, research into ecotherapy (a type of formal treatment which involves doing activities outside in nature) has shown it can help with mild to moderate depression. This might be due to combining regular physical activity and social contact with being outside in nature.
Being outside in natural light can also be helpful if you experience seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a type of depression that affects people during particular seasons or times of year. And people tell us that getting into nature has helped them with many other types of mental health problems.
So why not get out this spring……if you would like to join us then please reach out, we would love to get on the rights path to experience more nature sightings.