Yesterday was Stress Awareness Day, a day to spotlight the resources available to help you through stressful times in your life. There’s various techniques out there to help manage your stress levels and to improve your mental health, our favourite is connecting with nature! The mental health charity, Mind, explain how nature can help you reduce feelings of stress and share their top tips and ideas.
‘Spending time in nature has been found to help with mental health problems such as anxiety and depression. For example, research into ecotherapy (a type of formal treatment which involves doing activities outside in nature) has shown it can help with mild to moderate depression. This might be due to combining regular physical activity and social contact with being outside in nature.
Being outside in natural light can be helpful if you experience seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a type of depression that affects people during particular seasons or times of year. And people tell us that getting into nature has helped them with many other types of mental health problems.’
Click here, to find out Mind’s top tips on dealing with stress.