Port Moody, B.C., resident Katie Yu says that spending time in her garden helps ground her before, or in the middle of, a busy day of work.Shawn Rousseau/Supplied
In spring of 2020, amid COVID-19 lockdowns, Vancouver-based financial professional Katie Yu began dabbling in home gardening. She planted a handful of seedlings indoors: lettuce, sugar snap peas, spinach and cilantro, eventually moving the plants outside to her apartment patio as they got bigger.
“Frankly, I thought, ‘I’m probably going to kill these plants,’” Ms. Yu recalls.
But she didn’t. Her small vegetable garden flourished over the growing season. “You get this sense of fulfilment and point of pride to see something in your care,” says Ms. Yu. She’s since relocated from an apartment to a house in Port Moody, B.C., with her husband and young daughter. The family now tends to a larger outdoor garden with space for more vegetables, like kale, zucchini and tomatoes, along with flowers like dahlias and hydrangeas.
During the growing season, when she’s working from home, Ms. Yu typically spends 20 to 30 minutes in the morning or during her lunch break in the garden. She says it helps ground her before, or in the middle of, a busy day of work. Her work is rewarding, but demanding – she’s responsible for 350 employees, including a dozen VPs who report directly to her, which is what makes her time outside even more important.
“I’ll put on a podcast and work on the garden,” she says. “I’ll check my hydrangea or raspberry bushes to see how much they’ve grown. It helps to regulate and ground me, and to reset. It helps me clear my head.”
‘We want to make outdoor time non-negotiable’
There is strong evidence for the positive effects of nature on our health. A 2018 review paper published in Environmental Research found 143 studies that reinforce this link. Exposure to green spaces resulted in health benefits like reductions in diastolic blood pressure, heart rate and salivary cortisol, the latter of which is a physiological marker of stress.
The benefits are so well-proven that health-care professionals across Canada can now prescribe time in nature to their patients under a program called PaRx. Dr. Melissa Lem is the director of PaRx and a family physician in Vancouver.
Ms. Yu's first foray into gardening involved planting seedlings inside her Vancouver apartment then moving them to her patio as they grew.Katie Yu/Supplied
“We want to make outdoor time non-negotiable,” Dr. Lem explains. “It should be like brushing your teeth in the morning. You want to make it part of your everyday routine.” Based on evidence around dosing that emerged from a 2021 study in SSM – Population Health, Dr. Lem suggests spending at least two hours in nature each week, at least 20 minutes each time. Since the program launched in 2020, 17,000 prescribers have registered for PaRx, doling out more than a million nature prescriptions in total.
Dr. Lem says that it’s especially important for working women to prioritize time outside.
“We are holding so many things together, whether it’s our workplace, our families or our own health,” she says. “[Being outside] restores powers of attention and reduces fatigue and irritability. It allows us to work better and to be more connected and functional humans, for the people we interact with and for ourselves too.”
In addition to restoring attention and reducing fatigue, time outside can boost your work performance in other ways. A 2012 study published in the Public Library of Science found that exposure to natural settings increases performance on creativity and problem-solving tasks, and a 2012 study in the Journal of Affective Disorders found that individuals suffering from depression experienced improvements in cognition after interacting with nature.
Any time spent in nature is better than none
Torontonian Safiah Chowdhury works a desk job in social policy. She takes every opportunity she can get to be outdoors, going on walks and regular hikes in the summer, skiing in the winter, biking and playing soccer. Last summer, she even learned to wind-surf on Lake Ontario through a program with Brown Girl Outdoor World, an organization that helps encourage BIPOC women to participate in outdoor activities.
“Being in nature is also tied to physical movement, which helps balance my mental and physical energy,” Ms. Chowdhury says. “It’s grounding me, physically, in the larger context of the world.” As the manager of a team that ranges in size from six to eight people, Ms. Chowdhury is responsible for organizing team activities. For the past two years, she’s hosted hikes along Toronto’s Humber River and in the Rouge National Urban Park. “That, to me, is a good way to bond in an environment that’s neutral and a space that I personally find very relaxing.”
Dr. Lem understands that finding time to spend outside can be challenging. But even if your health-care provider hasn’t given you a written prescription to spend time in nature, she has some suggestions to help.
“Take a walking meeting with a colleague,” she says. “Eat lunch outdoors.”
Any time spent in nature is better than none, she adds, and you don’t need to be totally isolated in a forest to benefit. Simply getting outside or walking through your local park can help, so long as you feel like you’re having a meaningful time in nature.
“If you go to your neighbourhood park and spend time slowing down and noticing the nature around you, you can have those health benefits,” she says. “It’s similar to if you took a several-hour drive and went to a national park. It’s accessible to us, even when we’re in cities.”
Stacie Campbell/The Globe and Mail
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