How Gardening Helps Mental Health

Research has shown that spending time in nature is good for mental health and body. After feeling stressed or bored indoors, you go outside and your mood lifts.

A great way to spend time outdoors is a garden. The garden provides a person with a connection with nature, and observing the green landscape does help to recover from surgery, reduces anxiety and depression.

Development of flexible thinking

Psychologist Carol Dweck has developed a distinction between “fixed” and “flexible” mindsets, and gardening is a great opportunity to develop the latter and improve mental health. With flexible thinking, we proceed from the fact that we are constantly learning. When something doesn’t work out the way we hoped, we see it as a learning opportunity, not a “failure”

Connection with nature

Gardening helps to get a connection not only with other people, but also with nature. Having a garden really means having a relationship with the piece of land that you tend to. You need to understand the details much better: the first and last frosts of the season, how much it rained, the temperature where the sunlight hits during the day. Gardening also ties us closely to the cycle of the seasons.

Reducing stress

Not surprisingly, time in your garden can be a great way to de-stress and get benefits from nature. There is something about the feeling of life around you, the warmth of the sun, the soil in your hands. Sitting in your own garden these days, you see rainbow-colored Swiss chard and lettuce shake in the breeze, ripening blueberries, blackberries and strawberries, and feel the breeze as the clouds move across the blue sky. In addition, classes in the garden are accompanied by sounds that also affect our nervous system: birds singing, rustling leaves.