![]() Overwhelmingly, interactions with natural items were associated with positive feelings, about nature itself and about other human beings. The team had participants write about the interactions they had either with nature or man-made items over a two-week period, and the feelings those interactions inspired. Interestingly, a new study reported that just a momentary interaction with an item of nature had a big influence on mental health. ![]() But not everyone can jaunt out to the forest when they’re feeling overwhelmed. There’s lots of evidence that spending time out in nature helps mood, well being, and stress levels. Again, this is one method that works even if your “higher” areas of the brain don’t believe it. So next time you’re feeling like your mind is flailing about, try some slow breathing, yogic breathing, or other breath-based relaxation technique (there are many exercises online to help). The study may sound funny, but it’s one of the best illustrations to date of why a physiological thing would affect a mental thing so strongly. ![]() When the cells were knocked out in mice, the mice just chilled out even in a novel environment, they weren’t anxious or exploratory-they just sat around and licked themselves. ![]() A slow breathing subgroup was identified earlier this year, by researchers who also noted its projections to higher areas of the brain, involved in arousal and wakefulness. There’s a cluster of cells in the brainstem that controls different types of breathing-sighing, laughing, gasping, and others. People have used breathing to calm their nervous systems over millennia, and science has just recently shown why it works, neurologically. This is a great method because it’s one that works even if you don’t believe it will. ![]() If you feel like your mind is everywhere but in the present (because of rumination, anxiety, low-grade panic, and so on), here are some of the methods that both history and science have proved actually work to pull yourself back into the present. But it’s not very pleasant, as most of us know and studies have found, and it’s definitely not great for mental health over the long term. It’s easy to get swept up in our thoughts, and sometimes it’s kind of addictive. This is probably because most of the time, the mind is just generating noise and gibberish-worries, memories, reenactments of the way things should have been, projections of the future. ![]()
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