Did You Know That Walking in the Park Has a Positive Impact on Depressed People?

A walk in the park can bring psychological benefits to people suffering from depression, according to the latest studies in the field. Psychologists in Canada and the United States have spent more time examining people diagnosed with severe depression and concluded that the effect of a walk is the equivalent of good news. Marc Berman, a Baycrest researcher at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, led the study with his partners at the University of Michigan and Stanford University.

"Our study showed that patients with clinical depression showed improved memory performance after a walk in the wild compared to a walk in a crowded urban environment," said Dr. Berman.

But he cautioned that such walks are not a substitute for existing treatments for treating clinical depression. "Walks in nature can act in addition to existing treatments for cases of clinical depression.

However, more research is needed to understand how effective nature walks can be and how well they contribute to improving the patient's psychological functioning, "added Dr. Berman.

Dr. Berman's research is part of a field of cognitive science that is based on the theory of concentration in nature. Dr. Berman believes that people who interact with the peaceful nature and are not bombarded with external distractions can concentrate much better, and even more, can greatly improve their mood.

In nature, the brain can relax enough to induce a calming state that helps restore or update these cognitive abilities.

In a 2008 research paper in the journal Psychological Science, Dr. Berman showed that in the case of adults who were not diagnosed with any form of depression but received a mental impulse, a simple one-hour walk in a park was enough to improve memory and attention performance by 20% - compared to a one-hour walk in a noisy urban environment.

In this study, Dr. Berman and his research team tried to find out if a walk in nature can provide cognitive benefits and whether it improves the mood of people diagnosed with clinical depression.

Because the dominant trait of people with depression is negative thinking, the researchers were skeptical at the start of the study, believing that a solitary walk in nature could worsen their patients' moods and memories.

This study required 20 people - 12 women and eight men - all diagnosed with clinical depression. In the experiment, patients once walked in a quiet, natural setting and once in a noisy urban setting. Before being taken for a walk, participants were asked to write down on a piece of paper what their mood was at the time.

They were then randomly assigned: some were taken for an hour's walk to Ann Arbor Arboretum (Woodland Park), while others were taken to the noisy Ann Arbor city center. They followed the path established by psychologists, and on their return, they were given a series of tests in which their concentration level and brain functions were measured.

One week later, the participants repeated the whole procedure, but this time those who were in the park went to the city center and vice versa.

After completing the study, the researchers noticed a 16% improvement in attention and concentration when patients were walking in the wild.

Surprisingly, even for scientists, it seems that the interaction with nature does not alleviate the depressive mood and, in addition, the level of the negative mood decreases while the positive mood is constantly increasing. Dr. Berman believes that this suggests that the brain's mechanisms underlie cognitive changes.

The findings were published online in the Journal of Affective Disorders and reported by the Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and even in the Pulitzer Prize finalist book written by Nicholas Carr, and in The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains.