6

You May Squat Down and Feel a Plant

The faint whisper of rain and running water was still there and it had the same
tender note of solitude and perfection.
—TOVE JANSSON
Once upon a time in Finland, there were little forest spirits who
could put spells on people who were too noisy or who treated the
forest with disrespect. The victims would experience a condition
called metsänpeitto, which translates as being “covered by the forest.”
In this state they suddenly found themselves unable to get their
bearings. Nothing looked familiar. A kind of intense fascination
would overcome them. They could hallucinate and experience
supernatural phenomena.
Long after the birth of Christ, strong pagan beliefs continued in
the boreal lands between the Baltic and North seas. Metsänpeitto is
well documented into the nineteenth century, and, like other religious
experiences, was more commonly experienced by women and
children. The celebrated Finnish poet V.A. Koskenniemi dedicated a
poem to the condition in 1930. It is a favorite of Marko Leppänen, a
journalist and activist, who read it aloud to me in sonorous,
incomprehensible Finnish on a small island in the Helsinki
archipelago.
“Metsänpeitto is not necessarily negative,” explained Leppänen, a
tall, lean, smooth-skinned man in green woolens standing over a
stunted pine. “Metsänpeitto is about getting lost in beauty. It could
have a taste of freedom, nature-union and joy. The poem is suggesting
that.”
In other words, metsänpeitto is a little like forest-bathing on acid.
It’s very Finnish. It’s also the opposite of the short-term window-
view effect of nature; it represents a deeper surrender to the forces of
the forest. Many health experts here believe modern times call for a
full, if still only occasional, immersion in nature. They’re trying to
figure out how much time outdoors is needed for healthy, ordinary
citizens to stay sane.
Leppänen is fascinated by the mind-altering, health-giving effects
of wildish landscapes, and he wants to share them with others who
visit him on the island of Vartiosaari. One of many small cones of
forested bedrock emerging from the Baltic Sea, the rugged isle lies
within Helsinki’s city limits. In winter, people walk across the sea ice
to get here (and nearly every year someone falls through and drowns).
By the time I arrived on a sunny day in May, the ice had melted and
we took a quick dinghy ride.
Leppänen, who appears ageless but is actually forty-four, is the
island’s unofficial groundskeeper, druid and spokesperson. Amid the
ferns, pines and craggy sea cliffs on the tiny island sit a dozen or so
houses, a grid of garden plots, and, thanks to Leppänen, a nature trail.
Considered a rogue nature preserve, Vartiosaari hosts an unusually
rich collection of woody plant species in a variety of landscapes. “The
whole island is only eighty-three hectares, yet it feels much larger,”
said Leppänen. Many people manage to get lost here, but they seem to
be happy after many hours of being lost. I think it’s a health effect to
get lost.”
In the early twentieth century, a managing director of Nokia (then
a wood pulp and rubber company) liked the island of Vartiosaari so
much that he quit his job to live there, building a house called
Quisisana, from the Latin, meaning “where one heals.” To enhance
the island’s salutary attributes and create more momentum to protect
the place from encroaching development, Leppänen cobbled together
some funding from the Finnish Forest Research Institute and the city
of Helsinki and marked out a “health nature trail,” complete with
signposts, recommended exercises and descriptions.
This isn’t your typical park fitness trail. Our first stop was a big
gray boulder, a glacial erratic that toppled off an iceberg when the
island was once underwater. The far-traveling rock, said Leppänen,
reminds us of the importance of moving, of exercise. It’s a
metaphysical StairMaster. We walked on a few paces and arrived at a
small outdoor chapel featuring a stone altar, a timbered cross and
bark-sided benches to remind us of spirituality in nature. Next we
considered a mutant pine tree, growing outward at waist-height
instead of growing upward. Leppänen called it “the table of Tapio”
after a Finnish forest god. “This can be for our offerings, a symbol of
gratitude,” he said. “To be grateful is good for your health. Today we
can be grateful to ourselves for visiting this forest!” We walked along
to a stone-laid labyrinth the size of a large living room. This was
constructed by locals in 1999, but it’s a nod to an ancient islander
tradition. No one’s really sure what the old labyrinths were for, but to
Leppänen they represent mystery, wandering and play.
This is about the time it struck me that the Finland of grown-ups
is not unlike my daughter’s old Waldorf preschool in Boulder,
complete with paganistic rites, woodcrafts and Middle-earth
symbology (in fact, J. R. R. Tolkein was reportedly influenced by the
Kalevala, a Finnish creation epic in which the world is born from the
cracked egg of a diving duck). The group I was hiking with even
broke for a snack circle. They didn’t start singing or making
headpieces out of twigs, but I could see it coming.
To the Finnish, being outdoors in nature isn’t about paying
homage to nature or to ourselves, the way it tends to be for
Americans. We fetishize our life lists, catalog peaks bagged and
capture the pristine scenes of grand wilderness. It is largely an
individual experience. For the Finnish, though, nature is about
expressing a close-knit collective identity. Nature is where they can
exult in their nationalistic obsessions of berry-picking, mushrooming,
fishing, lake swimming and Nordic skiing. They don’t watch moose;
they eat them the way their ancestors did. And they do these things
often.
According to large surveys, the average Finn engages in nature-
based recreation two to three times per week. Fifty-eight percent of
Finns go berry-picking, 35 percent cross-country ski, often in Arctic
darkness, under lights in large city parks. Seventy percent hike
regularly, compared to the European and American average of about
30 percent. Fifty percent of Finns ride bikes, 20 percent jog and 30
percent walk a dog, and I particularly like this one: 5 percent of the
population, or 250,000 people, partake in long-distance ice-skating.
All told, over 95 percent of Finns regularly spend time recreating in
the outdoors.
It could be that the Finnish exist in something of an arrested state
of development, or perhaps the rest of us somehow got
overdeveloped. We put down our floral wreaths earlier, acting, for
better or worse, like civilized grown-ups. Finland is highly unique
among Western countries for urbanizing very late in the game.
 “It wasn’t until the 1960s and ’70s that masses of people finally
went to cities. Before that we were forest people,” said Leppänen as
we walked the soft forest paths. “We haven’t had opportunity to
escape nature. It’s very thin, this urban layer. You can still today see,
we are walking here in the capital city and it’s seven kilometers to the
heart of the city, yet this could be from hundreds of kilometers away.
This is an intact nature landscape. It could be different, if we were
living many generations in an urban setting.” To him, civilization is
like the spring sea ice, transparent, the wild pulse below still sensate.
Being just two generations removed from the land—and being a
nation with few immigrants—means that nearly everyone still has a
grandparent on a farm or woodlot. Those grandparents still live in
country houses, or they own a modest, seasonal country house even if
they’ve moved to the city. Finland has 5 million people, and 2 million
kesämökki, or “summer cottages,” so almost every family still has a
rural, nature-based anchor. It’s a middle-class real estate paradise.
Finland scores high on global scales of happiness. Many people
assume this is because there isn’t much income disparity here. But
perhaps it’s also because everyone has access to what makes them
happy—a bunch of lakes, forests and coastlines, combined with
ridiculously long, state-sanctioned vacations and a midnight sun. (Of
course, there is a flipside, the grim, dark winters, when Finns drink
too much and act up, unless they’re skiing.)
Like many Finnish Gen-Xers, Marko Leppänen grew up chasing
butterflies. He spent nights in trees by himself as an eleven-year-old
while his American counterparts were playing Pac-Man in suburban
split-levels where the only moss was the color of the shag carpet.
Until recently, Finns have lived off the land, both emotionally and
economically. Sure, Finland came up with the flip phone, Angry Birds
and the wildly popular set of comics by Tove Jansson built around
Moomin the talking snowman. But the nation’s dominant industry is
forest products, in the form of renewable fuel for clean-burning
energy plants and paper pulp. Finland is the most forested country in
Europe, with trees covering 74 percent of the land. As one visiting
British journalist noted, “the view was a bit samey.” The forests are
mostly privately owned in small holdings, but, mirabile dictu, at least
to an American mindset, there is virtually no such thing as
trespassing. Finnish law operates under the concept of
jokamiehenoikeus, or “everyman’s right,” which means anyone can
traipse over anyone else’s land, picking berries, picking mushrooms,
picking their nose, whatever. They can even camp and make
campfires. They only things they can’t do are cut timber or hunt
game. (Right-to-roam laws in a few other aggressively democratic
European countries such as Denmark, Norway and Scotland are
similar but not quite as lenient.)
To many Americans, this sounds like a socialist takeover of
private property (contrast these laws to the “my castle” laws in states
like Montana, where you actually have the protected right to shoot
trespassers dead). To the Finnish, though, jokamiehenoikeus is the
essence of freedom, because it means you can walk forever. In a small
country where everyone is distantly related, the please-share-nicely
concept works.
It makes sense, then, that the Finnish are uniquely devoted to their
forests, and are coughing up cash to study them if for no other reason
than to justify their constitutionally protected frolicking. Although
they do have other motivations, and some of them we can relate to:
the Finns report increasing levels of stress, depression and obesity as
they move into urban environments. That national recreation survey
that mentioned long-distance ice-skating also noted that, in almost all
categories, frequency of outdoor activities has dropped in the last ten
years, no doubt replaced by staring at brightly lit devices inside their
houses. Even the Finns can’t resist them.
The country has some choices to make. If time in forests can be
shown to reduce health-care costs, improve mental health and
promote fitness, planners can use that information to argue against
paving places like Vartiosaari as Helsinki grows. Even if we think the
Finns are gnomish outliers, we can likely learn a few things from
what researchers here have discovered.

LIISA TYRVÄINEN FREQUENTS a Helsinki restaurant called Kaarna,

which means “Bark,” as in tree, not dog. She used to be an ecologist,
but she got tired of feeling that her research didn’t really matter to
planners and policy-makers, so she got a Ph.D. in economics. She
studied how things like forest and park views dramatically increase
housing values. “The phenomenon of what nature means to Finnish
politicians is all about how to valuate it,” she said while giving me a
tour of Helsinki’s parks. She became intrigued by the research out of
Japan indicating that forests had concrete physiological effects on
human health. In a country like Finland, which is trying to figure out
how to manage its vast forests for the benefit of people and industry,
the health piece, if real, seemed like it could be another useful column
in the national spreadsheets. Is it worth saving natural areas or not?
“I’m wanting more data. I don’t want to be part of rubbish research,
hugging trees,” she said.
Now Tyrväinen runs a research division at the National Resources
Institute of Finland, a government-funded agency. She visited Japan
and then invited some of the shinrin yoku researchers over to Finland
to advise her on setting up similar experiments. She had some issues
with the Japanese protocols and wanted to tweak the experimental
design. Miyazaki and his colleagues were mostly studying young
Japanese men in small groups. Tryväinen wanted bigger studies and
better controls. In the Japanese experiment I observed, for instance,
one group was loaded into a van and driven a couple of hours to a
park, while the other group went straight to downtown. It’s possible
that some of the lower blood pressure and cortisol levels attributed to
“nature” could just be the result of more time to space out on the
drive.
Tyrväinen secured close to $16 million for a series of studies
known as the Green Health and Research Project. In Tyrväinen’s
Japan-inspired studies, all participants sat in a van for the same
amount of time and they included more women, more adults, and
more office workers. Also, the Japan team studied hard-core urban vs.
hard-core nature. Tyrväinen wanted to look at environments available
to everyone in the city: a busy street, a managed city park, and a more
wild forest park. The managed park resembles parts of New York’s
Central Park that are manicured and landscaped, such as the boat pond
and surrounding meadows. The forest park, Helsinki’s beloved
Central Park, reminds me of the deep parts of the Ramble but with
bigger, taller pines and some straight avenues.
Tyrväinen also wanted to measure blood pressure because of its
known links to stress and disease. “It’s the long-term physiological
benefits we’re interested in. We’d like to follow these people.” And
she was hunting for more granular information: “What is an optimal
amount, location, type and size of nature spaces for health in
everyday living environments?”
Tyrväinen’s team is interested in what ails normal working people
and what helps them. Their aim is not to improve productivity per se
but to lower national health-care costs and to provide city planners
with data for managing green space. If she can help make people feel
better, that’s fine too, but she’s an economist, not a social worker. In
Europe, 60 percent of job-related health problems are, like bad backs,
musculoskeletal. But the next-highest category (14 percent) is
psychological: stress, depression and anxiety. The Finnish call it
“burnout syndrome,” and it significantly taxes both employers and
government health agencies.
I had to guffaw a bit when I heard about Finnish worker stress.
The Finns typically work eight-hour days. About 80 percent of
workers are unionized. They get five-week vacations, pensions and
health care, as well as one-year paid parental leave (men as well as
women are encouraged to take time off). When I was sending scores
of emails overseas for this book, I would frequently receive messages
that the recipient was on parental leave for the next several seasons
and not checking email. If these workers are stressed out, what did
this bode for Americans, 25 percent of whom get no paid vacation at
all?
The Finnish government is funding Tyrväinen because it knows it
has a limited pool of workers in a small country. As her colleague
Jessica de Bloom told me, “In other countries, you select the right
person for the job and if that person gets burned out, then you find
another person. Here, you keep that individual as long as possible,
you keep them happy.”
So while the Japanese researchers had given their subjects
questionnaires about mood, Tyrväinen’s team decided to add other
quantifiable measures of restoration, vitality and creativity, all related
to happiness on the job. If the Kaplans’ Attention Restoration Theory
is correct, the Finns would expect to see higher scores after time in
nature. Sample questions for restoration (participants are supposed to
rate the statements on a scale): “I feel calm.” “I have enthusiasm and
energy for everyday routines.” “I feel focused and alert.” Sample
question for vitality: “I feel alive and vital.” And for creativity: “I got
several new ideas.” While self-answered questionnaires aren’t as sexy
or reliable as objective measures of brain waves and hormone levels
(sometimes the participants can guess what the researchers are after,
potentially biasing results), in larger studies they tend to be pretty
accurate, especially in conjunction with other types of physiological
or cognitive tests.
In one study, Tyrväinen and her colleagues asked 3,000 city
dwellers about their emotional and restorative experiences in nature.
They found the biggest boosts occurred after five hours a month in
natural settings. Tyrväinen wanted to drill deeper into the data, so for
another study, her team took 82 office workers, mostly women, to
each of the three different sites: city center, manicured park and
forest park. At each place, before and after sitting for fifteen minutes
and then after walking leisurely for thirty minutes, the researchers
collected questionnaires, saliva samples, blood-pressure and heart-
rate data. Throughout, the volunteers were instructed not to speak to
each other (to eliminate the positive psychological benefits of
socializing). If people felt happy, it would not be from making
friends.
The results turned out to be what scientists call beautiful. There
were significant effects and linear dose responses that followed
predictions. Compared to sitting in the van, the volunteers did not feel
psychologically “restored” in the city, but they did in the park and
forest. They experienced these changes relatively quickly, after just
fifteen minutes of sitting outside. After the short walk, these
restorative feelings continued to increase. The more time people spent
in the green areas, the better they reported feeling, and the effects
were slightly stronger for those in the wilder forest. But the benefits
weren’t just about relaxation; on measures of vitality, which you’d
think might rise in the city, only nature did the trick, although it took
the full forty-five minutes. Both the vitality and restoration scores
dropped in the city, to the point where participants in the park or
forest felt 20 percent better than their urban peers. The greenies also
felt stronger positive emotions and lower negative emotions, and the
respondents reported feeling more creative. On the objective
measures, cortisol levels dropped in all three settings, perhaps a result
of being away from work demands, speculated Tyrväinen.
The good news for city dwellers is that just fifteen to forty-five
minutes in a city park, even one with pavement, crowds and some
street noise, were enough to improve mood, vitality and feelings of
restoration.
 “The results of our experiment suggest that the large urban parks
(more than 5 hectares) and large urban woodlands have positive well-
being effects on urban inhabitants, and in particular for healthy
middle-aged women,” the study concluded, as published in the
Journal of Environmental Psychology. The results supported the
earlier five-hours-a-month recommendation. But the researchers also
noted the dose-response relationship: the more nature, the better you
feel. To elevate mood and stave off depression most reliably,
Tyrväinen told me, “five hours per month is the lowest amount of
time to get the effect, then after, if you can go for ten hours, you will
reach a new level of feeling better and better.”
I did some quick calculations. Five hours per month means getting
out there in the verdure a couple of times a week for about thirty
minutes. To achieve ten hours a month requires spending about thirty
minutes in nature five days per week. Or, as one of Tryväinen’s
colleagues told me, “two to three days per month outside the city
would bring the same effect.” No wonder country houses are so
popular; the Finnish nervous system needs them. The Finnish-
approved nature cure won’t work for everyone, because these results
reflect averages. But in a country with a high proportion of mildly
depressed people, if it works for even a small percentage it will
translate into huge savings for the national health-care system.
And in Finland, parks and woodlands are an easy solution. “Nature
here is cheap and free for everyone,” said Tryväinen.

IF TYRVÄINEN IS interested in valuing forests for the sake of the Finnish

economy, one of her collaborators, Kalevi Korpela, is motivated by a
desire to boost the dark Nordic psyche. The Finnish word for healthy,
terve, derives from the word for “hardy pine,” able to withstand
storms. Finns withstand a lot: long, dark winters, freezing
temperatures, a collective historic memory of being regularly invaded
and colonized by Swedes and Russians. From the Swedes, they
learned brooding. From the Russians, they learned drinking. The
Finns themselves are notoriously taciturn, introverted and a bit shy.
One study found that of many nationalities in the world, the Finns are
the most comfortable with long silences. They are not chatty. There’s
been much discussion of the Scandinavian paradox: countries like
Sweden, Denmark and Finland rank very high on happiness indexes,
but they also suffer high rates of suicide.
Korpela’s grandfather fought the brutal winter battles of World
War II and, like so many survivors of his generation, ended up
suffering silently. Nobody knew how to talk to these broken men
about their pain, which was immortalized in classics like Väinö
Linna’s The Unknown Soldier, Finland’s all-time best-selling novel.
Korpela, an experimental psychologist at the University of Tampere,
has spent most of the last twenty years studying how different
environments make us feel. Unusual for psychologists two decades
ago, he was most drawn to positive psychology, or what made us feel
good. From his experiences during childhood, when he and his older
brother had the run of the town while their parents worked long hours,
he knew that place mattered to his own psyche and might for others as
well.
Tampere itself is not terribly impressive geographically. A city of
about 250,000 people ninety minutes north of Helsinki by train, it was
founded by Swedish King Gustav III at the relatively late date of
1779. The city sits along a set of rapids—now corralled into a hydro
dam—on the Tammerkoski River. Overlooking the city is the highest
esker in the world. (I didn’t know what an esker is either—it’s
basically a glacial moraine.) This feature is more like a geological
speed bump than a mountain, rising only 85 meters. The fact that the
Finns are so proud of it tells you what you need to know about the
country’s topography. You won’t find majestic peaks or canyons.
Marshes are so predominant here that the country gets 9 percent of its
electricity from peat gas. Finland is the Saudi Arabia of peat. Still, the
close connection between people and the land is evident from
Korpela’s own life and work.
“As a teenager, I used to sometimes go run in the woods and stop
at a big rock where you could see the lake,” he said. “I noticed it was
a way of calming myself and regulating my emotions so I had this
habit of going and stopping there.” Now a trim professor sporting
facial hair reminiscent of Freud’s goatee period, Korpela has become
known for studies about “favorite places” and their positive influence
on mental health. In his studies, when he asks respondents to name
their favorite places, over 60 percent describe a natural area such as
lake, beach, park, garden or woods.
If there was something special about nature, Korpela wanted to
find out how quickly it worked on our emotional brains. If the
psychoevolutionary theory of Roger Ulrich (hospital window guy) is
correct, then our responses to pleasant nature spots should be
automatic, and perhaps immediate. One classic way to measure
positive and negative emotions is to show people pictures of faces and
have them rate them for moods like fear, anger, happiness and
surprise, while timing the exercise. Happier people will recognize
happiness in others more quickly, and take longer to recognize fear or
disgust.
Korpela primed a group of volunteers by quickly showing them
photographs of various scenes that had been manipulated along a
spectrum from urban to buildings-with-trees to just trees or parkland
without structures. After each photo, the volunteers were asked to
identify the emotions in pictures of the faces he showed them.
Interestingly, after looking at scenes with more nature, the subjects
were quicker to recognize happiness and slower to recognize negative
emotions like anger and fear. The inverse was true after the more
urban shots. In other words, looking at nature photos made them
behave (instantly) in happier ways. To Korpela, the study confirmed
Ulrich’s hypothesis of nature causing a rapid emotional response at a
subconscious level.
As we’ve seen in Part One, nature appears to have some
immediate effects: a lower pulse rate and the beginnings of a
parasympathetic nervous system response leading to feelings of peace
and well-being. Korpela scoured the literature and came up with a sort
of time-response matrix. Thanks to his faces study, he knew the
quickest responses: “Within 200 milliseconds, people react positively
when they see images of nature,” he explained. “The picture you’ve
seen affects how you respond, because the picture evokes your
emotions.” Moving up the matrix, Ulrich’s experiments with the
bloody woodshop videos followed by nature videos showed a decrease
in subjects’ heart rates, in facial muscle tension, and changes in skin
conductance typically occurring within 4 to 7 minutes. The Japanese
and Finnish studies found lower blood pressure, lower circulating
cortisol and improved mood after 15 to 20 minutes. At around 45 or
50 minutes of being in nature, many subjects show stronger cognitive
performance as well as feelings of vitality and psychological
reflection. What if Korpela could thread all these observations
together in a way that enhanced the effects in a real-world
application?
He came up with the idea of a “Power Trail,” a well-signed, self-
guided nature walk that maximizes nature’s beneficial effects. Hikers
wouldn’t need a specially certified ranger or a class or a big healing
forest, just some views, ideally including water, and strategic
instructions. In 2010, the Ikaalinen Spa in central Finland let Korpela
construct a trail network around its property with government funding
(and about the word “spa”: lest you think it connotes an exclusive
enclave for ladies in lululemon, you should know that, in Finland, spa
visits are a federal benefit for workers in need. Yet another reason to
brave the sea ice and move to Finland).
The trail was an immediate success, according to Korpela and
Tyrväinen, and now there are half a dozen similar ones throughout
northern Europe. They surveyed the hikers who use them, and found
that 79 percent said their moods had improved, with greater boosts in
those who walked the longer loop (6.6 kilometers) than the shorter
loop (4.4 km). Gender, age and, interestingly, weather had no effect
on the results. But they also found that about 15 to 20 percent of
people just don’t dig it. These people may hate bugs, or the sky, or
whatever, and no matter how biophilic their brains are supposed to be,
they simply can’t relax in nature.
To test it out for myself, I headed out to spa-ville with Korpela in
his silver Peugeot. To be honest, it was sort of relaxing from the get-
go. I was also experiencing what social scientists call the novelty
effect, in which things that are new and fresh can make us feel good.
This is why we like to travel, peruse the photos in National
Geographic and even fall in love serially. I was in love with the lack
of midweek traffic in rural Finland. It was May, and so we passed
rolling fields of canola flowers, young corn and wheat. We stopped
for lunch at a café in a log house that was painted baby blue. We
grazed from a buffet featuring slabs of moose with lingonberries. The
novelty effect was in full swing.
Once settled into the spa’s parking lot, Korpela pulled out a
blood-pressure machine. I sat silently for two minutes and then
measured my levels, which were already in the mellow zone. Leaving
Korpela to his own personal Power Trail moment, I set out on the
path, which meandered past the spa’s wood-burning saunas, around a
lake, and literally over hill and dale. It was a walk in the country,
pleasant but not spectacular. There were birds and blossoms and trees
along with a few houses and tractors and woodpiles. Being alone, said
Korpela, is a good way to maximize certain benefits, especially the
ones having to do with self-reflection. Of course, the Finns would say
being alone in nature is best; they are notoriously introverted. But
thirty years ago, the psychologist Joachim Wohlwill agreed, writing
that natural environments experienced in solitude seemed especially
restorative to people who are mentally fatigued or socially stressed. I
get it. I love being alone in nature when it feels safe. (Women, not
surprisingly, tend to rate being alone in nature as more stressful than
men do, because of concerns for safety.)
Right after setting out, I came to a sign on the trail, marking the
first of nine stations. I pulled out a piece of paper with Korpela’s
English translations. Station one was a cognitive task: it showed two
line drawings of a busy picnic scene around a lake. I was to find and
count all the differences between the two images. For example, one
included a woodpecker on a tree limb while the other showed no
woodpecker. There was also a brief questionnaire asking me to rank
how I felt on a scale of 1 to 5. This is called the Restorative Outcome
Scale, frequently carted out for psych studies. The statements include
“I am feeling calm and relaxed,” “I am alert and focused,” “I’m
enthusiastic and energetic” and “All my everyday worries are away.”
I’d repeat both tasks at the end of the hike and compare my scores.
Farther along, station two sported a sign instructing me to look at
the ground and the sky, breathe deeply and relax my shoulders. “Feel
your mind and body becoming calm,” it said. When I looked up, I saw
power lines, which deflated me, until I remembered that this trail is
lit for winter skiing. That made me happy again.
Station three asked walkers to listen to the sounds of nature and
“let your thoughts run free.” Also, “you may squat down and feel a
plant.” Station four asked me to walk to a spot nearby where I feel
peaceful. Station five: identify your mood and state of mind. And so
on, through to finding an element of nature from the view in front of
you that could be a metaphor for yourself. I chose a tall tree
sheltering smaller trees. I missed my kids and was getting sentimental
now.
At the end of the walk, I retook the cognitive test and
questionnaire. If you score more than ten points higher on the scale,
the interpretive sign essentially tells you that you need to get your
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
do it.