Visualizing Natural Scenes Reduces Stress

It hardly counts as breaking news that spending time in nature reduces stress levels. But according to a new study, merely imagining natural scenes has stress-reducing effects.

The study used a variety of measures to come to this conclusion. Researchers asked half of their participants to visualize a natural scene and the other half to visualize an urban scene. They then compared their subjective introspective reports about how stressed they were, as well as their skin conductance and heart rate. All three of these metrics showed a higher degree of stress reduction when visualizing a natural scene.

These findings could have important implications for the practices of stress reduction. After all, imagining a natural scene is quicker, easier and less expensive than taking a trip to the nearest forest. But given what we know about mental imagery in general, there is also a possibility of making this stress-reduction technique even more efficient and widely applicable.

First, what about aphantasics? Most people can just close their eyes and visualize a pine forest with a creek, but some can’t. These people are called aphantasics and, according to some estimates, they comprise 5-8 percent of the population. But that is not the whole story: While aphantasics can’t conjure up any mental imagery whatsoever, there is a huge variability among non-aphantasics regarding the vividness of the imagery they can produce. Some have extremely vivid mental imagery – sometimes called hyperphantasia. Some others have only very pale mental imagery. Most of us are somewhere in between.

Second, one way of delivering mental imagery of natural scenes is to close one’s eyes, count to three, and try to visualize the scene — which is what the researchers asked the subjects to do in the recent experiment. This is voluntary mental imagery. But mental imagery can also be involuntary, when, for example, we have flashbacks to an unpleasant episode we experienced earlier. In the case of voluntary imagery, the effect is somewhat dampened by our own expectations of what mental imagery we’re about to conjure up. In this sense, involuntary mental imagery is a more efficient way of reducing stress than voluntary mental imagery. One example would be listening to the sounds of nature, which triggers involuntary visual imagery.

Let’s put together these two considerations — one about aphantasia and one about the voluntary nature of imagery. One crucial finding about aphantasia is that many aphantasics do have involuntary mental imagery: They dream and have flashbacks, for example. What they lack is the voluntary triggering of mental imagery. So even aphantasics, or people with not-so-vivid voluntary mental imagery, could benefit from involuntary mental imagery of natural scenes.