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Nature, wellbeing and the environment Dr Mike Rogerson
97 Plays3 years ago
Welcome to episode 054 of the Green & Healthy Places podcast in which we discuss the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and interiors.
I’m your host, Matt Morley, Founder of Biofilico -a healthy buildings consultancy based in Barcelona and London.
In this episode I’m in the east of London talking to Dr. Mike Rogerson of the University of Essex.
Mike has a PhD in Sports and Exercise Science, his research interests include the links between exercise, the environment and wellbeing as well as what is known as ‘green exercise’ that involves an element of nature combined with physical activity.
We collaborated together back in 2017 on a research study into the benefits of biophilic design in a gym environment, exploring the additional mental health benefits of training in that type of nature-inspired indoor environment. The link to that study is in the show notes.
In this discussion though, we’re looking at green care and the benefits of nature exposure for seniors in care homes, different types of natural settings and how they ca impact our mental wellbeing, social exercise vs solo exercise and of course more on the green exercise theme.
Mike has a conspicuously well trained mind, he is able to handle multiple threads in an argument simultaneously, seamlessly nudging various arguments forward, piece by piece, making it I believe a remarkably easy conversation to follow despite the academic depth and obvious rigor that lies behind his thoughts.
If you enjoy the show, hit like or subscribe, my contact details are in the show notes too, now here’s Dr. Mike Rogerson.
- Dr Mike Rogerson: https://www.essex.ac.uk/people/roger41600/mike-rogerson
- University of Essex, Green Exercise Research: https://www.essex.ac.uk/research-projects/green-exercise
- Matt Morley / Wellbeing Champion: https://www.mattmorley.net/
- Biofit research study: https://biofit.io/research
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Transcript
Introduction to Wellbeing and Sustainability
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to episode 54 of the Green and Healthy Places podcast, in which we discuss the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and interiors.
Host and Guest Introductions
00:00:21
Speaker
I'm your host, Matt Morley, founder of Biofilico, a Healthy Billions consultancy based in Barcelona and London. In this episode, I'm in Essex to the east of London, talking to Dr. Mike Rogison of the University of Essex.
00:00:36
Speaker
Mike has a PhD in sports and exercise science.
Research on Green Exercise and Biophilic Design
00:00:39
Speaker
His research interests include the links between exercise, the environment and wellbeing, as well as what is known as green exercise that involves an element of nature combined with physical activity. We collaborated together back in 2017 on a research study into the benefits of biophilic design in a gym environment, exploring the additional mental health benefits of training in that type of nature inspired indoor environment.
00:01:03
Speaker
link to that study will be in the show
Exploring Green Care and Nature's Benefits
00:01:05
Speaker
notes. In this discussion though we're looking at a slightly wider range of topics including green care and the benefits of nature exposure for seniors in care homes, different types of natural settings and how they can impact our mental well-being, social exercise versus solo exercise and of course more on the green exercise theme. Mike has a conspicuously well-trained mind
00:01:27
Speaker
He's able to handle multiple threads in an argument simultaneously, seamlessly nudging various arguments forward piece by piece, making it, I believe, a remarkably easy conversation to follow despite the academic depth and obvious rigour that lies behind his thoughts. If you enjoyed the show, do hit like or subscribe. My contact details are in the show notes too. Now here's
Mike's Journey into Green Exercise Research
00:01:48
Speaker
Dr. Mike Rogerson.
00:01:52
Speaker
Mike, thank you for joining us on the podcast. I'd really like to establish the scene, if you like, with a little bit of background on your connection to nature. How did that become part of your career within the sports and exercise science space? Yeah, good place to start, I guess. So first of all, I've always been, not extremely so, but like an outdoors
00:02:17
Speaker
Appreciate him an outdoors kind of person and spend a lot of outdoor time as a child just with friends at the local park to be honest So I say nothing too extreme. But then in terms of my professional
00:02:29
Speaker
nature connection. My undergraduate dissertation during my first degree in sports and exercise sciences focused on what was at the time very new strand of research called green exercise. So I did the projects. It sounded interesting to me. And then through the process of doing it, I had my own kind of methodological and research related thoughts about it.
00:02:59
Speaker
So that sparked my interest. And then when I decided after a few years after university, when I've been living in London, a few other places doing various things.
00:03:09
Speaker
came back round to it and decided I wanted to do a Masters in Psychology because I was interested in that kind of stuff but always with an eye on returning at some point to address the issues I thought there were with the green exercise kind of research area.
Universal Benefits of Nature for Vulnerable Groups
00:03:25
Speaker
So that's how my professional nature connection kind of got started. Okay so let's loop back round to the green exercise bit. I wanted to
00:03:34
Speaker
layer baseline in terms of the benefits and the why and I think perhaps the root in for that could be the concept of green care which is arguably perhaps more extreme in a sense but also if you're able to make an impact there how interesting that the idea of a dose of vitamin nature for people for example living with dementia could genuinely improve their quality of life so I'm wondering if you could just talk to us a little bit about that and also considering things like you know whether there are certain ages where
00:04:04
Speaker
nature exposure can be more or less beneficial like is it perhaps you know can you get more from it if you're as a kid or if you're at the later phases of life or do you see it as very much a universal thing? Yeah, the first thing to say is definitely a universal thing in that from what I've seen certainly in the research most people can get some kind of benefit but the benefit
00:04:33
Speaker
each individual gets will be down to things like age or previous experience and also potentially the reason why they are engaging with the nature environment in the first place for that acute experience can all lead into it. So there's research showing that
00:04:51
Speaker
nature, time spent in nature as a child can buffer life stresses both as a child and then into adulthood as well. We have this thing called placemaking where if somebody gets a connection with a particular place whether that's nature or not then that could be a powerful tool that they then use that to almost serve a function of
00:05:13
Speaker
finding like a mental space when they visit there to address problems they might be having and feel restored. And of course then there's theoretical reasons why a nature environment might be additionally useful if you do pick a nature environment as the place to make. Whereas then, yeah, up at the kind of green care end of things, which tends to be older adults, not always, but a lot of it with older adults,
00:05:40
Speaker
then yeah, obviously they've got the, often they've got the aspect of reminiscence. So if they spend time in nature as a child, for example, in the countryside or on a farm, then if a care provider takes them to a farm or other type of outdoor environment, they've got that reminiscence factor and it brings old memories back that otherwise wouldn't have done.
00:06:05
Speaker
and then you sometimes find that they are readily able to talk easily about old old memories because of the environment they're in, whereas otherwise they don't they don't open up at all and their memory is very very bad. So I've seen that for example in adults living with dementia and the environment when they spend time in it, a farm environment for example, it seems a really powerful tool and then
00:06:34
Speaker
momentarily cutting through some of that kind of cloud that dementia has placed on them. So it's a really powerful thing to witness, but yeah, the research has also kind of touched on that and started to bear it out a bit more numerically and with some wonderful qualitative insight
What is Green Exercise?
00:06:55
Speaker
too. So I'd say the
00:06:58
Speaker
Benefits are not universal in the sense that everyone gets the same thing all the time or to the same extent, but universal in the sense that most people most of the time should be able to get some kind of benefit from engaging with nature. So let's use that as a springboard then and really get into your area of expertise around green exercise. So let's establish first of all what it is and from there how it can facilitate wellbeing and perhaps
00:07:26
Speaker
could talk a little bit about the potential that you identify with green exercise in terms of particularly that study you did from 2020 around regular doses of nature. Okay yeah the term green exercise just quite simply is referring to some kind of physical activity whilst experiencing nature in some way. So most regularly you could think of a walk in the park for example
00:07:55
Speaker
However, you don't have to be experiencing nature in terms of being there in the place. It might just be a case of looking at images of nature. So some kind of nature experience and some kind of physical activity. So on the physical activity side of stuff, that could be what you'd consider exercise or even sport, or it could just be more kind of activities based in nature, like horticulture
00:08:25
Speaker
allotment, attending to an allotment, that kind of thing, or doing some kind of task at a farm even.
Psychological Wellbeing and Nature-Based Activities
00:08:32
Speaker
So there's different types of green exercise. So I don't think to be put off by the term exercise. It's just the umbrella term that's kind of used. So both kind of influences of an environment on an exercise behavior or outcomes of exercise. And things like green care could both be considered under the green exercise
00:08:54
Speaker
umbrella. So that's kind of what it is and what's underneath that umbrella. And in terms of the outcomes that have been reported by the research, in terms of exercise more in terms of walking and cycling and that kind of thing, the classic findings are exercise improves your psychological wellbeing in the short and the longer term.
00:09:23
Speaker
but exercise in nature might offer additional boosts to that. So even bigger improvements in mood or self-esteem or restored levels of attention, that kind of thing. And on the green care side, there's lots of kind of evaluative work being done, which I'll come on to in relation to the 2020 study in a second. And a lot of the time that kind of,
00:09:53
Speaker
mood or other well-being related questionnaires, so the kind of a well-being scale, for example, in the UK, and then some interviews, so qualitative insight into what difference green care experiences seem to be making to people, both in the short term and over things like 12-week programs or longer than that. So yeah, in the 2020 study you mentioned, Matt, the
00:10:20
Speaker
The point is I had lots of data from those kinds of evaluations where it's a wellbeing targeted project for a specific vulnerable group of some kind. So if that's older adults living with dementia or youth at risk or homelessness and lots of different vulnerabilities where they would use the environment in some way as the base or as a really key component of that wellbeing program.
00:10:47
Speaker
So I mentioned already the dementia wellbeing project that was based on a farm. I alluded to that already. There's also another organisation we work with a lot locally called the Wilderness Foundation, which is a youth at risk related project to do with wellbeing and recovery from other serious issues. Essentially, it's a therapy programme, but the environment is key to it. So they take them to wilderness environments, including up to
00:11:15
Speaker
up to the Cairngorns in Scotland and that space they go to becomes a key component of the therapy. So what I did is I pulled the data from lots of different projects like that
00:11:28
Speaker
because on their own, there wasn't enough data to properly analyze it statistically, but together, there is a method where once you pulled that data, you can do a proper statistical analysis of the data. So I did that and unsurprisingly, probably it came out that these projects seem to be benefiting people's mental wellbeing as measured by the Boricadivri Wellbeing Scale, which right now in the UK is the
00:11:55
Speaker
kind of the go-to for overall mental wellbeing. And I split that analysis in one part by how long the project was. So was it 12 weeks or was it, I think 26 weeks was the other group. And both of those groups showed improvements over time in mental wellbeing. The slightly longer projects showed slightly larger improvement, but most of the improvement was gained after only 12 weeks.
00:12:26
Speaker
And then another finding of that particular paper was that for different types of people, there were different extents of the benefit that they seemed to gain from going on these projects. So although everyone showed some kind of, not everyone, but overall, most people showed improvement in their mental wellbeing score. The people who started off with the lowest scores,
00:12:55
Speaker
showed the biggest improvement. So that's a real demonstration of the kind of the leveling up ability of these nature-based wellbeing projects. And it shows that maybe the most vulnerable can get the most benefit. Sorry, go on now, I can see you. So when you say that the lowest scores, so is that in terms of current mood, a current sort of self-esteem, sense of vitality, what were the markers in that? So this particular project I've just been talking about was
00:13:25
Speaker
The only data that I had that was from the same measure across all of the projects was the Warwick Edinburgh mental wellbeing scale. So that's a measure of kind of globe, a superficial but overall measure of somebody's mental wellbeing. So that can be categorised into high, medium and low in relation to the UK national kind of average.
00:13:52
Speaker
So so when I'm talking about people with low mental well-being made the greatest improvements More more definitely speaking. I mean people that were in the low category of mental well-being at the start of a project Made the bigger improvements compared to people who started an average to high category So they really caught up got it, which is amazing to see it's it's it's interesting, you know, I'm thinking back to our 2017 study, you know at that point
00:14:19
Speaker
The concept was effectively a gym, and I was assuming it was going to be a pretty standard fitness studio gym for your average gym goer. But since then, so much interest has come from perhaps slightly more peripheral areas of the market. I mean, you've mentioned disadvantaged kids, kids recovering from trauma. I've had requests come in, look, could you create a green jungle gym type space for us within this NGO office for kids to be able to play in? And you think, oh, yeah, what a wonderful idea.
00:14:45
Speaker
Or in an old people's home, in a care home, could you create a space for training mobility and balance, but that it's all biophilic and green? Increasingly, I see the benefits there for perhaps groups that need it even just a little bit more. And they might be, as you say, in that lower segment, right?
Impact of Different Natural Settings
00:15:04
Speaker
Because you could just make that such a big leap from one mental state to another. Yeah, absolutely. And then unfortunately,
00:15:15
Speaker
Rightly or wrongly, we're working kind of like pharmaceutical terms, if you like, with wellbeing. And often it's treated with pharmaceutical medications. And in that kind of language, if we're talking about where's the biggest bang for our buck,
00:15:32
Speaker
it's weird the people who will make the greatest improvements and have the most catching up to do, if you like, in that sense. So yeah, I think in terms of the research pointing towards that, which previous research of other types has done, so there was a
00:15:50
Speaker
study by research by the surname Mitchell up in Scotland who showed a number of years ago that some access to green space can essentially lessen the socio-economic disadvantage on people's mental health. So
00:16:16
Speaker
there's that discrepancy between socioeconomic groups, but the access to green space that somebody has can then minimize that discrepancy. So that kind of leveling up is a real thing. The other area where I'm now seeing some interest is
00:16:32
Speaker
arguably in the very highest upper percentile where they're just trying to, like in a wellness center in a fairly prestigious corner of London, for example, where they're just trying to squeeze every last drop of wellness and well-being and happiness and mood-enhancing benefits from a space. So you're already going in having a spa treatment and they're like, okay, but if we layer in
00:16:55
Speaker
biophilic design and we bring the outside world in and we bring in some nature to this space. Can we get a little bit more bang for our buck? So it's interesting. In a sense, the market bifurcates and sort of splits in two. I think perhaps arguably the area in the middle is perhaps the area where you don't want to be. I think it's
00:17:13
Speaker
whether in the slightly disadvantaged area or in the area where there's more budget and there's more interest in just getting every last drop of wellness. But it does raise the question then of what type of nature or natural settings we're talking about. In my mind, we often did things along the green lines. It was forest scenes and what have you. But I know that in 2015, you looked at some different versions of that, of the types of natural settings. So what were the outcomes from that piece of work?
00:17:42
Speaker
Yeah, so we did that study because of the point you've just raised, what kind of nature and just to backtrack very slightly, when we took about green exercise, we've chosen that colour. I mean, you could argue it's because we coined the term in the UK, University of Essex, and nature to us looks largely green in colour. However, when we're talking about green exercise,
00:18:11
Speaker
that really, the word green pertains to nature. We could have chosen another color, you know, and there is indeed a blue exercise group that has a very similar idea but focuses more predominantly on water. You go to Australia and there's much more orange in the nature environment. So yeah, green is really pertaining to that. So we looked at just looking at real green exercise happening in the real world,
00:18:40
Speaker
a popular example of that is now park run events. So a 5k run or walk out, have you want to do it in a local park. So I selected four different park run events, which varied in terms of the amount of water they had and indeed varied predominantly the kind of environment it was. So whether it's grasslands or heritage site, park built around culture to castle or along a beach, just to see do we get different findings from different
00:19:09
Speaker
green exercise environments. And I guess positively, the answer was no, not really. So that was the kind of the short answer. And then to go beyond that, we measured a bunch of factors about individuals, age, gender, about their
00:19:36
Speaker
about the exercise they did. So how fast did they run the 5K parkrun event and things like that. And then stuff about the environment as well. So was it cloudy? Was it raining? And obviously, in fact, there were four very different types of environments. So to see how much of the psychological benefits of exercise that we measured, which was self-esteem, mood, and perceived stress, could be explained by those factors we measured. And what we found, again, I think positively,
00:20:06
Speaker
is that we couldn't explain more than 10% of the improvement people showed in those psychological outcomes. Which tells me that the vast majority, somewhere around 90% or more, was due to stuff we didn't measure. So it doesn't matter who you are or how fast you run parkrun or whether it's raining that day or which type of green environment you go for, you should be able to get most of the benefits of a green exercise experience.
00:20:34
Speaker
So I actually see that as a really, really positive result in terms of that universality of attaining psychological benefits of green exercise. And just to round that off, I think it's important to say we didn't include an alternative type of environment, like an urban environment or a non-green environment. And that was because most other green exercise research does make that comparison is green versus non-green. So that's outdoors versus in a gym or in a green environment
00:21:04
Speaker
like a park versus in a city centre.
00:21:08
Speaker
And predominantly those studies are showing that green can give you those boosts. So we didn't include that comparison in our study I've just talked about. We just compared within our kind of spectrum of popular green exercise environments. Okay. So that study then was looking at what we might classify as a social exercise setting.
Social vs Solo Green Exercise
00:21:29
Speaker
So it was, to some extent, I mean, obviously you're running alone or you may be running with a friend or your husband or wife or your kids in the park running.
00:21:39
Speaker
you look at a gym the majority of people are training in the gym or if you look at trail running for example that can be pretty solitary and there can be beauty in that too I find certainly that something about that connection with nature and having the time to think and reflect and or listen to audiobooks whatever it is that you do is part of the experience but I know that you've also looked at this in a much more rigorous
00:22:04
Speaker
I wondered what the outcomes were from that process of looking at group versus lone green exercise participation. So yeah, we got people to do a typical green exercise experience, so a jog around the kind of green space on our university campus, actually, in this case. And they did that either on their own or as part of a group. And what we found, again, at kind of like the most superficial level was
00:22:33
Speaker
that the exercise experience listed improvements in the psychological variables that we measured, which was self-esteem and mood, and also seemed to increase people's reported level of connection to nature in both conditions, which sounds surprising because it was in the same green space each time. But we didn't find a difference in those psychological outcomes between our two groups or two conditions. So doing it on your own versus doing it with other people.
00:23:03
Speaker
So, although superficially that suggests it doesn't make any difference, whether you do it on your own or with others, just from that study alone, it doesn't really tell us about the potential nuances. So, for example, when you're doing green exercise on your own, you might be more
00:23:27
Speaker
more frequently attending to the environment, so focusing on a tree blowing in the wind, for example, that kind of thing. Whereas when you're doing a social experience, you might not notice that as much, but you might get alternative benefits to those psychological outcomes from having a conversation and enjoying the social interaction. So we don't really know whether
00:23:47
Speaker
that the social setting makes no difference to the influence of green on you, the influence of the environment, or whether it just kind of diminishes that and gives you a different benefit instead, which is more of a, comes from that social experience. So it kind of raises more questions than it answers, but that was certainly a first step in trying to get at one of those nuances of the green exercise experience and the outcomes.
00:24:14
Speaker
I think it's a positive thing, certainly from my perspective, because it means I think it leaves the door open to use a term I know that you coined, but the idea of exercise squared, so like doubling up with extra benefits from indoor or outdoor green exercise in a collective group. So whether it's CrossFit or HIIT training or whatever it might be. But equally, if it's a one on one session and you're in a green exercise environment, you can still
00:24:41
Speaker
get similar type benefits. So I think it's not closing anything. It's allowing opportunities for all kinds of goodness, maybe with some distinctions between the type of hormone releases that we're getting and the ones that we're getting from into connection with other people and that social engagement versus, as you say, just breathing in all those fights and sides in the forest and breathing fresh air and sort of connecting with nature.
00:25:06
Speaker
But I think I often come to this philosophical point when it comes to research findings and the point is sometimes does it matter how it works or does it matter that it works?
00:25:20
Speaker
And for most people, most of the time, I think it's the latter. For me as an academic, I'm very interested, so I want to know how it works, and many other people do too. Indeed, that is key in terms of that pharmaceutical language and bang for your buck. Well, if we can make tweaks to the experience,
00:25:40
Speaker
like they make tweaks to a medication to try to make it work better and give you more benefit from it, that's when we need to know how it works. So I do think it's important, but in the acute experience of doing it and getting the benefits on that occasion, it's probably the latter, it's just that it works. I think there's another angle to it as well, which is about
00:26:01
Speaker
automaticity and finding ways that people can actually start enjoying it for themselves on some inner level and therefore keep going and repeat it and make it a habit. And for some people that solitary exercise thing is just not happening. It's just not in their psyche to get out of bed at six in the morning and hit the workout and reach those peaks. But if there's a group of people or your best buddy around the corner waiting for you on the corner of the park, then you're good. And you know, it has to adapt. I think that's the positive message.
00:26:40
Speaker
you knock it out and you get the workout done. And other people, they need that interaction and they need accountability and so on and so forth. What you're saying is green exercise works in both cases.
Future of Green Exercise Research
00:26:51
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. And yeah, I agree with everything you said there. And it's, it's why a lot of health interventions now they, they, they're interested in the amount of kind of social support around the person who's going to be doing it. And we often hear about somebody's doing a particular
00:27:07
Speaker
whether it's a diet or a physical activity intervention. And a family member says, yeah, I'll do it with you. I'll do it with you. And that makes a huge difference to many, many people. So yeah, I totally agree. I wonder if you're looking ahead, and we were talking before we started recording, but around where this can all go. If you look three, four, five years into the future in terms of what you're doing around the green exercise space, what's left to be done? Or what would you like to see in terms of further evidence-based research coming through that you think can make a real impact
00:27:39
Speaker
He has a lot lots of things to be totally honest with you from across the research field, excuse the pun, trying to make everyone's research more rigorous, also starting to
00:27:54
Speaker
more so use the same measures as each other across different institutions, different countries, so that we got more comparable results, and then we can pull the results easier like I did in the doses of nature paper we talked about earlier. So there's that. To be honest, the research area in the modern
00:28:13
Speaker
modern day started in 2002, 2003. I feel like there's a lot of very, very interesting early findings, but now we need to increase that rigor wherever we can and start getting at the mechanisms more so we can say more fine-tune the experience for certain people.
00:28:35
Speaker
And in terms of my particular kind of next steps, I think exciting is the use of virtual reality. So yeah, that's what I mentioned earlier, isn't it? I think that we need to use virtual reality not instead of every other type of
00:28:56
Speaker
research but where we do lab-based research. Previously we've shown people big screens with images of different environments and the benefit of doing it in labs, you can control the exercise and understand the exercise rigorously. But now we've got this wonderful virtual reality technology, we can make that exercise experience more immersive and hopefully slightly more like the real thing.
00:29:21
Speaker
so that then when we compare our lab-based results to our more ecologically valid comparisons of indoor versus outdoor exercise and things like that, then it will marry up easier and we can understand these mechanisms better through the control and rigor it offers. Nice. I look forward to following along for another five years or so to see what you're up to. Absolutely. Thanks for your time, Mike. I appreciate it. Thanks, Matt.