Koselka et al.studied the effects of walking either in a forested area or in an area with a lot of traffic. They compared both of these walks to days on which the participants went about their normal activities. The authors mention that the Forest Preserve District of Cook County has attempted to establish forest preserves to be accessible to residents throughout the county. The 38 participants in the study were between the ages of 18 and 35. They walked for 50 minutes in either the forested area or the area with traffic on three separate days, and then nine days later they walked in the other area on three more occasions. Before and after each walk, and also on two days in which they went about their normal activities, the participants were given a survey. The results of the survey were that after walking in the forested area, participants scored lower in perceived stress. After going about their normal activities, perceived stress increased, and it also increased after the walk in traffic, but not as much. The other things the survey measured followed a similar pattern, where walking in traffic was better than normal activities, but walking in the forest was even better. These included positive affect, negative affect, and state anxiety. They did not find an effect on working memory. (Koselka et al., 2019)
There are probably more objective ways to measure stress than using a survey, especially since the participants were not blind to which intervention they had received on the day they took the survey. The study took place in Cook County, IL, near where I grew up, and I would often ride my bike to a forest preserve. I instinctively knew that if I rode my bike to the forest and then went for a walk there, it would be so much better than just walking through the streets of town. When I got home I would feel more like helping my mom with chores than I did before I went out. Walking is something that everyone knows how to do, as long as they are physically able, so it doesn’t take any special training, but it could be helpful for a client to realize that it’s worth it to drive 20 minutes in order to walk in a forest.
Goldstein et al. studied the effect of mindfulness from meditation or exercise on perceived stress in 390 people who had experienced an acute respiratory infection. This was a randomized controlled trial, where people were randomly assigned to eight weeks of training in either meditation or exercise, or to the control group that did not receive an intervention. For the meditation training, they used Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, which is a well-known program developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn. They describe several studies showing that mindfulness is a mechanism behind the positive effects of meditation and exercise, but note that they may be the first to do a RCT of this size. The exercise training was mostly walking or jogging so it would be easy for the participants to do at home, but they spent the same amount of time each week in formal group training (2 ½ hours a week) and at home practice (45 minutes a day) as the meditators. Although the intervention only lasted for eight weeks, they used surveys to assess whether aspects of mindfulness had increased at four and six months after the intervention, and then another survey at eight months to measure perceived stress as well as mental and physical health. They propose that their results show that meditation and exercise both increased mindfulness, which in turn lowered perceived stress. Similar benefits were seen on the mental and physical health measures. The authors note that their group of participants lacked diversity, and that they all volunteered to participate in the study, thus showing an interest in the interventions that not everyone might have. (Goldstein et al., 2020)
Committing to 45 minutes a day of either exercise or meditation might seem like a lot to some people, especially those who are feeling stressed, but there could be other activities they enjoy that also increase mindfulness. The authors suggest that social activities could be another way to increase mindfulness.
I was interested in the way this study proposed that it is actually by increasing mindfulness that both exercise and meditation are able to reduce stress. (Goldstein et al., 2020) So I wonder if you could get the same benefits from meditating on some days, exercising on others, and participating in social activities on the rest of the days.
References
Goldstein, E., Topitzes, J., Brown, R. L., & Barrett, B. (2020). Mediational pathways of meditation and exercise on mental health and perceived stress: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of health psychology, 25(12), 1816–1830.
Koselka, E. P. D., Weidner, L. C., Minasov, A., Berman, M. G., Leonard, W. R., Santoso, M. V., de Brito, J. N., Pope, Z. C., Pereira, M. A., & Horton, T. H. (2019). Walking Green: Developing an Evidence Base for Nature Prescriptions. International journal of environmental research and public health, 16(22), 4338.
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