Whether you grow flowers or vegetables, gardening can improve your health in a variety of ways. Working in the garden has spiritual rewards, eases stress, improves your mood, and provides exercise. In addition, gardening vegetables gives you access to fresh, healthy produce. It’s clear to see that gardening positively affects your life in every aspect.
Mental Benefits
Being able to get your hands dirty while digging and actually creating something can provide some people with a spiritual calmness. According to Rodale’s Organic Life, “mounting evidence shows that a number of health and behavior problems, including anxiety and depression, are directly linked to the amount of time you spend outside.” Gardening is a sensory experience that connects people to nature, which is great for stress relief. In fact, one study suggests that gardening can promote relief from acute stress.
Our lives are constantly in motion, and sometimes we forget to take time to slow down and relax. However, experts say that humans have a limited capacity for the directed attention required by our constant need to be plugged into tablets, computers, and phones. When that capacity gets used up, we become irritable, distracted, and stressed. To combat this attention fatigue, we need to replenish ourselves by engaging in an activity that requires an effortless form of attention. Gardening is considered one such activity, and thus reduces stress.
According to one study, gardening can also improve depression symptoms. Depression brings a whole host of other issues, including changes in sleeping and eating habits that negatively impact overall health. Additionally, around 30 percent of people diagnosed with a mental illness will abuse either alcohol or drugs. Keeping your mental health in check helps to keep your overall health in check too.
Exercise
Gardening gets you out in the fresh air and sunshine and gets your blood flowing. There are a variety of different movements in gardening, so you get some exercise benefits as well. Since people find gardening to be pleasurable and see it as reaching a goal (having food to eat or increasing their home’s curb appeal), they are more likely to stick with it. This is because when exercise has a context, it reinforces you to keep at it. Many duties of yard work fall under gardening, so it can be adapted to fit your individual needs.
Light gardening – such as weeding, digging, and planting – are great for strength or stretching exercises. Since light gardening is a low-impact exercise, people who find more vigorous exercise to be challenging, such as the elderly, disabled, or chronic pain sufferers, may find gardening to be exactly what they need. On the flip side, some gardening can be an intense workout. Cutting down and digging up bushes, hauling wheelbarrows of dirt, and push mowing your lawn are sure to give you a full-body workout and increase your heart rate.
Brain Health & Nutrition
Gardening can be good for your brain. Some research suggests that maintenance of physical activity, especially daily gardening, can help lower the risk of developing dementia by 34 percent when compared to non-gardeners. This held true even when a range of other health factors were taken into account.
Several studies have also shown that gardeners eat more fruits and vegetables than those who don’t grow gardens, and those healthy eating habits are passed on to their children. Not only do the children eat more fruits and vegetables, but they’re also more adventurous about trying new foods. The food you grow yourself is the freshest food you can eat, and because home gardens are typically filled with fruits and vegetables, it’s also full of healthy foods. Also, the fresher the food, the more tasteful the food, so food straight from your garden is packed with intense and enjoyable flavors.
Getting Started
“Most of us can roll up our sleeves with a surprisingly small amount of effort. Remember, you can start small, even with just a single plant or two,” says Good Housekeeping. If you lack space, start a garden in containers. If you lack experience, start with plants that easier to maintain and require little effort, such as lettuce and carrots. The Internet and bookstores are full of resources for gardeners of all levels.
You can also check to see if you have a local garden club or community garden near you, and you can learn straight from experienced gardeners. This spring, start reaping the many benefits of gardening.
Gratitude: A Mindful Solution to Pollution
Positive psychologists are fascinated by what raises our mood, but it was Aristotle who identified two pathways to conscious happiness:
Fulfillment: Using our gifts and talents on behalf of what matters to us
Contentment: Experiencing pleasurable moments and being satisfied with life
This time of year people spend a fair amount of time searching for the perfect gifts to make their loved ones content. Acquiring new toys and gadgets does make us happier—for a while. A new toy, or even car, is exciting as the dopamine kicks in, but eventually the brain gets familiar with the new item and searches for something else new. The “feel-good” just doesn’t last. This phenomenon is known as the “hedonistic treadmill,” or the tendency to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events.
As a capitalistic society, “Got to have it! Got it! Want something else!” is not only the norm, it is the underpinning of American culture. But, not only is this behavior of constant consumption ultimately unfulfilling, it is destructive to our Earth. Right now we inhabit the planet with nearly 7.5 billion other people. In trying to understand this enormous number, consider that more people have been born in the last 50 years, than the previous 4 million years. Logically, more people on the planet means more consumption of finite resources.
In 2009, Swedish and Australian scientists Johan Rockström and Will Steffen led a group of prominent scientists, including Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, that proposed a framework of “planetary boundaries” designed to define a “safe operating space for humanity.” The group identified nine “planetary life support systems” essential for human survival, and attempted to quantify just how far these systems have been pushed already. They then estimated how much further we can go before our own survival is threatened; beyond these boundaries there is a risk of “irreversible and abrupt environmental change” which could make Earth less habitable. Their research indicates that three of these boundaries—climate change, biodiversity loss, and the biogeochemical flow (aka nitrogen cycle) boundaries—have already been crossed.
The possibility that three planetary boundaries have already been crossed is jaw-dropping and daunting. Since most of us aren’t world leaders, it’s hard to know where to start and what could make an impact. What is the remedy to this “never enough” syndrome? Gratitude. As it turns out, dopamine and other uplifting chemicals are released by the acts of gratitude and savoring. This is because our dopamine output increases not only when we experience something pleasurable the first time, but again when we remember it—so we get a double dose, or triple! It encourages our brains to pay attention to what we have and give it a lasting effect and meaning.
So does this mean you should just show your loved ones pictures of what you gave them last year and tell them that you hope they still like it? That might not be popular, but what if gifts weren’t the focus of festivities? What about making a group activity like caroling, volunteering, baking or a sleigh ride the focus? What if families taught their children to have a different relationship with belongings? It’s true that some material goods are essential and life-saving, a lot of stuff is just stuff. It’s not the gifts that make the season great, it’s the gratitude for all of life’s blessings. Happy holidays!