The Science Behind Shinrin Yoku/ Forest Bathing

The Science Behind Shinrin Yoku/ Forest Bathing

As part of her Wellbeing At Home talk, Justine Clement explains to us the science around the benefits of Shinrin-Yoku

um and in terms of the science i just move on to the science and we'll do the kind of heady stuff because i think it's really good to understand it and there's tons of stuff online so you can find any of this online if you want to but for their first sort of bit of research or experiment there's a doctor in japan that's quite famous now called miyazaki and he took 12 japanese businessmen for a walk in the forest in the morning and then the afternoon he took them for a walk in the shopping mall and as you can imagine comparing the results i'm sure none of us here needs to need to be persuaded on this but sure enough when they went to the forest they felt much more relaxed than being in the shopping mall i can definitely relate to that and later they started doing real sort of proper clinical research and began to measure blood and saliva samples and they do that before and after the walks and i thought i would just share some of that research with you because it's absolutely fascinating so one of the things they found was a significant elevation in what we call um they're called nk cells in our body which stands for natural killer cells so these cells are naturally produced um by our body anyway and they go around the bloodstream and they scavenge for diseased or damaged cells so it might be cells that are infected by virus or also cancerous cells or there may be cells that have kind of reached the end of their life so these nk cells they discover those those weakened or damaged cells they target them and they eliminate them and what they found that after a day's walk in the forest that these nk cells were elevated significantly but what's really interesting is that elevation lasted for up to a month afterwards after a day's walking in the forest so what we're talking about with this you know with the in relation to our immune system is that if you think about it as a prescription so one day's walking in the forest will give you an immune booster for up to a month afterwards which when i was reminded of that and i keep having to remind myself of that i mean it's really quite incredible stuff um and the second thing they found that was there is a significant elevation um sorry not elevation a reduction in our stress hormones so um adrenaline and cortisol and what they did was they measured the saliva and they did this before and after the walks in the forest and they proved that there was a big reduction in stress hormones and what was also interesting is that was even so for people from suffering from significant trauma in their lives and people with ptsd so even those people had a significant uh reduction in their stress hormone levels um and they also looked at the um psychological benefits of being in the forest so things like anxiety depression anger fatigue i think and confusion and all of those were significantly reduced um and that's even after just a two hour walk in the forest because obviously not all of us have you know all day to spend there but one of the reasons they discovered that the forest environment provides such a relax to the body is it's um it's the way that our eyes focus on the forest environment without having to pay any particular sort of direct focused attention so it's actually the what happens is the brain sort of recalibrates and it's a bit like i think you could say like defragging of a computer so the brain recalibrates itself because it's not required to focus in the same way as if we're looking at a computer or if we're driving or video games or even being in a in a flat you know with kind of square walls watching obviously watching tv but when you're looking at a forest environment it allows um the brain to relax and i'll come on to why that probably is and it's it's a term called soft fascination um and then they also measured looked at blood pressure and a lot a lot of research has gone into looking at blood pressure and heart rate variability um what and what happens to that in the forest and they discovered that a walk in the forest was clinically proven to be more effective on blood pressure than blood pressure medication so something not to me not i mean i'm sure big pharma companies know about that but it's incredibly beautiful and what they found actually is it doesn't just lower blood pressure if somebody's got if they've got high blood pressure but it regulates it so if you've got low blood pressure it will bring it up um and then they also discovered that it assists people with sleep disorders i mean there's so many times i see it with my breath practice as well there's so many different types of insomnia and um they found i think it was about a 15 increase in people's sleeping rates after time spent in the forest i think that was after a day and i just leave the science bit behind but just finally the the last thing that i think is really interesting is the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system so that's our rest relax and heal system and it decreased the activity of the sympathetic nervous system which is our fight or flight response so when we're in a stressed response when we're in maybe an urban environment for example our body we have something called the vagus nerve which runs through the so it runs through a significant part of our body but through the front of our body and it perceives um things like urban environments is slightly stressful and so it triggers off our para sorry our sympathetic nervous system and then we have this sort of chronic fight or flight response which is going on under the surface and actually you'll find a lot of people now because it is quite a stressful modern modern living is quite stressful then a lot of people are in that state a lot of the time and being in the forest which is a little bit like stella talked to us about this allows us to switch over to that parasympathetic nervous system which is our healing system and it particularly affects our digestive symptom system so it allows us to digest assimilate our food extract waste and extract goodness from it because it's healing our whole system so all of those things you can look up i mean it's a very quick sort of um run around some of the the science that that has come out of that research

#Science #Shinrin #Yoku #Forest #Bathing

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