Introduction
Modern men and women spend most of their time in front of a desk, staring at a screen for several hours. They are confined in a concrete room and this lifestyle isn’t great for your mental health. That’s why you need to spend more time outdoors, at the park or in your own landscape. If your landscape isn’t in the best condition, you can search for “landscape companies near me” and hire professionals to fix it for you. Let’s check out how your landscape helps you manage fear and anxiety.
The Details
- Keep your stress in check – Spending more time in your landscape stimulates your mind in a great way. If you indulge in gardening, both your mind and body get a lot of stimulation. It can help you stay fit and reduce the stress that builds up over the day. Gardening is an activity that outsiders may look at as something easy to do. However, it’s a tough routine that gives you a full body workout, works your joints, and keeps your heart strong and your muscles healthy.
As you dig, pull, and move soil or plants around, you don’t just make your heart pump more blood, but also make your creative juices flow. You spend a lot of time deciding on the garden beds, flowers that can be planted for beautifying a part of your landscape, and the colors and textures that would suit such a setting. So, you don’t just beat stress, but that extra dose of dopamine also helps to wash away a lot of anxiety and allows you to focus on something different.
- Your landscape can heal and soothe you – Even if you don’t engage in gardening, just spending your time outside within the safe confines of your landscape can help you manage fear and anxiety to a great extent. When you view scenes of nature, you’re full of pleasant feelings and get to reduce negative feelings like fear, anger, and stress.
Moreover, spending time out in the open, just sitting on the grass in your landscape can help you in many other ways. Apart from helping improve your emotional health, just breathing in the fresh air can help improve your heart rate, reduce your blood pressure, and reduce the creation of stress hormones. Research also suggests that spending more time in nature, and in your own landscape can help increase life expectancy.
For millions of years, humanity has spent more time in nature, finding water and food and living among trees. It’s only been a few thousand years since the agricultural revolution that humanity started living in fixed artificial structures. That’s why humans are genetically designed to find comfort in trees and other natural elements.
Research on a group of gallbladder surgery patients shows that those who spent more time viewing trees recovered quicker compared to those who spent more time enclosed in the concrete walls of the hospital. They were able to tolerate pain better, had fewer negative emotional challenges of anxiety and fear to deal with, and spent less time in the hospital. That’s why you should have a change of pace once in a while and bring the work laptop to the patio or the yard.
- Nature restores – A recent study on the impact of nature on people’s general well-being shows that most subjects experienced an improved mood after spending some time outside. They marked themselves as calm and balanced instead of stressed, depressed and anxious after spending some time out in nature. There are other studies that strongly correlate scenes of nature with positive mood, meaningfulness, and vitality.
However, that’s not the end of it. When you spend more time in your landscape, you pay more attention to different things. Inside your home, you are usually staring at some kind of screen. When you’re out in your landscape, you’re naturally curious about the things happening around you since you are looking for a change of pace. That means you pay more attention to the bees pollinating the flowers in your garden, the squirrel searching for nuts near the tree, birds bathing in the pond, and more.
All that acts as a distraction for your overactive mind that is constantly worried about your workload, relationships, and responsibilities. Fear and anxiety are pushed back, and your adventurous spirit takes over. With that out of the way, let’s check out how your landscape may bring other types of benefits.
- Keeps you fit – As mentioned above, maintaining your landscape is hard work. On average gardening helps you burn around 300 to 400 calories every hour and engages numerous muscle groups. You don’t get an easy time while doing other landscaping work either. For instance, just growing new grass in your yard or creating a new xeriscape is a lot of work and would leave you sweating and tired at the end of it. So, looking after your landscape can help you stay fit and active.
- Preserve or increase property value – Your landscape is a part of your property. It influences the final price of your home. If your landscape has too many rough patches, piles of rotten leaves and other organic waste, and broken pathways, you would have a hard time negotiating a high selling price. On the other hand, if you have a well-maintained landscape with healthy trees, shrubs, gardens, and hardscapes, you may be able to reap a huge profit. That’s why you should spend more time on your landscape and try to improve it without breaking the bank.
Conclusion
Your modern lifestyle induces a lot of stress and makes you get anxious about many things in life. Life itself is difficult and your financial situation, relationships or other factors may also put you in a constant state of fear. Fortunately, you can go out to your landscape and keep those things in check. You can also search for “landscape companies near me” and hire pros to design a landscape that will improve your mental health.
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