Gardening can make you feel calmer and happier. Focusing your attention on the immediate tasks and details of gardening can reduce negative thoughts and feelings and can make you feel better in the moment. Just spending time around plants relieves stress for many people. A report published in the Mental Health Journal* cited that gardening was able to reduce stress and improve mood, with a reduction in symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Gardening has been shown to be significantly beneficial to your psychological health, as well as your mental and physical well-being. Working productively in the garden can increase serotonin levels in the brain, making you happier throughout the day. Gardening can also improve your overall mood. Try it and you're sure to be pleasantly surprised.
Gardening can bring out your creativity and generate innovative ideas. Recycling leftover food in your compost is a great way to start. It's something I do now by instinct. The creativity I experience while gardening is the reason I came up with the sustainable idea of reusing plastic in your garden.
In stressful times and environments, gardening provides an outlet to keep your hands and mind busy, Hall said. Moving your body regularly is an effective way to improve mood and reduce anxiety, and gardening offers no shortage of opportunities for physical activity, Lamp'l said. No matter how carefully you plan and execute your garden, there are countless factors that you can't predict: insect invasions, inclement weather, and hungry rodents. In the urban prison of Wandsworth, a collaboration with The Conservation Foundation has seen the introduction of green areas in the prison and the excavation of an exercise yard to make way for an orchard where produce can be grown.
There are also successful plans involving volunteers to help seniors who are unable to manage their gardens, and both the volunteer and the owner benefit from social interaction and products and a shared interest. Neidich says you can reap the benefits of gardening no matter where you live, the size of the garden space you have access to, or even if you don't have access to your own outdoor garden. In addition, producing small quantities of produce from your garden increases the appreciation of locally produced natural foods. Fortunately, I managed to outdo myself and welcome them in the garden even with the possibility that they might break something.
Health professionals should encourage their patients to see no danger when exercising in the garden, green space, parks and field. I learned to practice acceptance in my own garden, as the first baby lettuce was ready to harvest in mid-April. Therapeutic gardens have been used in hospitals for thousands of years and were strongly supported by Florence Nightingale; they improve the environment for patients, visitors and staff. As I sit in my own garden these days, I see chard and rainbow lettuce shaking with the wind, blueberries, blackberries and strawberries ripening, and I feel the breeze as the clouds move across the blue sky.
A group of holistic therapies that aim to treat the whole person and that has been well researched through surveys and randomized trials is the so-called green care, or therapy by exposure to plants and gardening. As I began to recover, I felt compelled to greatly expand my garden beds and the things I planted, even though I was still struggling physically and mentally. Outdoor gardening and plant care expose people to sunlight and high amounts of vitamin D, a serotonin synthesizer. .
