Deans' stroke musings: Nature can get it out of your mind: The rumination reducing effects of contact with nature and the mediating role of awe and mood

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Friday, March 17, 2023

Nature can get it out of your mind: The rumination reducing effects of contact with nature and the mediating role of awe and mood

It is completely and totally your doctor's responsibility to prevent this negative thinking(rumination, anxiety, depression, worry, brooding). All this is easily addressed by your doctor HAVING EXACT STROKE REHAB PROTOCOLS LEADING TO 100% RECOVERY.

YOUR DOCTOR'S RESPONSIBILITY!

They should have known enough to call this by the correct name; 'forest bathing'. At least the mentors and senior researchers should have been competent enough to know about forest bathing.

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2020.101489 Get rights and content

Abstract

Evidence has been found that contact with nature may reduce rumination in healthy individuals living in urban environments. This paper aims at i) testing whether one may replicate previous findings using a shorter duration of nature exposure, and ii) explore the possibility that a shift in attention away from self (notably induced by the emotion of awe), leading to mood restoration, may mediate such nature-rumination relationship.

We showed that a walk as short as 30-min in an urban park significantly reduced ruminative thinking in healthy participants, whereas a 30-min walk along a city transect devoid from natural elements did not. Also, we showed that the “walk in nature” significantly reduced negative mood and elicited more awe and more externally oriented thoughts than the “walk in city”. Our mediation analysis did not show any direct effect of contact with nature on rumination levels. Instead, it showed that the more awe participants experienced while walking, the more negative affect was reduced, which then lead to reduced rumination. Also, our mediation analysis showed that nature can affect rumination via mood improvement only and irrespective of awe.

This study adds to previous research supporting the so-called “psychological ecosystem services” and calls for additional efforts aimed at exploring the extent to, and mechanism(s), by which contact with nature may affect rumination, notably in clinical populations.

Introduction

Rumination is one of the most maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies and a key vulnerability factor of mental illness (Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco, & Lyubomirsky, 2008). This persistent and repetitive pattern of self-focused thinking, which includes analyzing reasons for negative mood and failure (Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991), is known to impair thinking, problem solving, and instrumental behavior (Watkins & Brown, 2002), while also predicting substance abuse (Skitch & Abela, 2008), eating disorders (Rawal, Park, & Williams, 2010), and self-harm (Borrill, Fox, Flynn, & Roger, 2009). Since negative mood leads to recurrent analysis and self-focus, and ruminative self-focus exacerbates negative mood (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886901000587, Nolen-Hoeksema & Morrow, 1993), high ruminators tend to get trapped in a reciprocal loop with negative mood and rumination sustaining each other (Watkins & Mason, 2002). Research also shows that rumination can sustain stress-induced increases in inflammation and cortisol, which adds to the clinical importance of interventions aimed at reducing rumination (Zoccola, Figueroa, Rabideau, Woody, & Benencia, 2014). In this respect, it was proposed that finding effective ways to reduce rumination might be most urgent in urbanized environments (Bratman et al., 2015, Bratman et al., 2015b). Indeed, when compared to rural areas, social problems and environmental stressors are generally more prevalent in urbanized environments (Peen, Schoevers, Beekmam, & Dekker, 2010).

Urbanization progresses around the globe and its potential to negatively impact on mental health is increasingly acknowledged (see Turner, Nakamura, & Dinetti (2004), Srivastava (2009), and Marques & Lima (2011)). At the same time, data are also accumulating of the beneficial psychological effects that may ensue from contact with nature (Bratman, Hamilton, and Daily (2012), Hartig, Mitchell, De Vries, and Frumkin (2014), and Fong, Hart, and James (2018)). A number of studies have found that spending time in nature, or just passively watch natural scenes, can lead to significant mood improvements (e.g., https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494409000838, van den Van den Berg, Koole, & van der Wulp, 2003; Mayer, Frantz, Bruehlman-Senecal, & Dolliver, 2009) and even to changes in rumination. Bratman et al., 2015, Bratman et al., 2015b randomly assigned healthy participants to a 50-min walk in either a natural or an urban environment and showed that contact with nature lead to significantly greater decreases in rumination. This was confirmed in a follow-up study involving 90-min walks (Bratman, Hamilton, Hahn, Daily, & Gross, 2015). In both studies, it was proposed that nature may affect rumination by eliciting a shift in attention away from self that pulls individuals away from the tendency to engage in negative self-descriptive patterns of thought. This would lead to mood restoration and to subsequent reduced rumination. Accordingly, studies have shown that nature exposure can elicit awe, an emotion defined as a state of wonder and amazement that directs attention away from self and towards the environment (Keltner & Haidt, 2003; Shiota, Keltner, & Mossman, 2007). It's also been found that awe experiences elicited by nature exposure can serve as a pathway though which mood is improved via contact with nature (Bratman et al., 2015, Bratman et al., 2015b). To date, however, and despite the burgeoning in research on awe - showing, notably, an association with more adaptive physiological profiles and increased wellbeing (e.g., Gordon et al., 2017; Stellar et al., 2015) - no attempt has been made to assess the involvement of this emotion (and resulting mood improvements) in the pathway linking contact with nature and rumination.

Following from the above, the aims of this study were two-fold: i) testing whether one could replicate previous findings that contact with nature can reduce rumination using a shorter exposure (30 min); and ii) testing a serial mediation model in which contact with nature elicits awe, which restores mood, eventually reducing rumination levels.