When your days are filled with nothing but the media’s onslaught of messages, images, and must-see posts, it can feel good to take a breather. Maybe you’ve recently figured out a way to carve some “me-time” in this constant search for your attention from all of these online sources. You close your eyes, think about a recent pleasant encounter with a friend, and for one precious moment are transported away from reality.
Rather than relying on your mind to do the transporting, though, new research by Lewis and Clark College’s Jolina Ruckert and colleagues (2025) suggests you might find reprieve from stress by taking in the beauty of a sunset, the changing leaves of fall foliage, or even just the tiny cactus sitting in your windowsill.
The Joys of Communing with Nature
The authors begin with the poetic assertion that “When we come into presence with the moving–breathing–living–dying world with whom we are enmeshed, [the] simple ordinary act of witnessing gifts the extraordinary” (p. 407). Translating this into empirical terms, this “presence’ becomes “NR,” or nature relatedness. To tap into NR requires, they propose, a good dose of mindfulness.
As generally understood, mindfulness is a cognitive skill that involves turning your attention to the present moment. Breaking it down further, the authors identify five components of mindfulness: observing, describing, acting with awareness, nonjudging, and nonreactivity.
In other words, mindfulness means that you let yourself take in details of outer stimuli, and when attending to your own thoughts, don’t try to push them out of awareness, even if those thoughts are troubling. Sure, you’d rather not feel anxious, but you do, so let those thoughts live inside your mind without criticizing yourself for having them.
The next step in deriving joy from nature is to allow the flow of what the authors call “self-transcendent emotions.” These are defined as “positive emotions that motivate one to transcend personal constructs and desires” (p. 410), and include awe, compassion, love, gratitude, appreciation, and inspiration. The impact of NR, according to the Lewis and Clark U. authors, should come from the impact of mindfulness on awe and compassion in particular.
Does Nature Relatedness Work?
To assess mindfulness as a vehicle for promoting NR, the research team administered a set of questionnaires to an undergraduate sample of 93 students, averaging 20 years old—not the ideal sample in terms of representativeness, so it’s important to keep this in mind. However, as you read the items on the various measures, plug in your own answers just to see whether you think the findings could be helpful in understanding yourself.
The six-item NR scale included items such as “My relationship to nature is an important part of who I am,” and “I feel very connected to all living things and the Earth.” Measures of awe included these items: “I often feel awe,” and “I feel wonder almost every day.” Compassion items included: “It’s important to take care of people who are vulnerable,” and “I am a very compassionate person.”
Turning to the mindfulness measure, the key quality intended to link NR with positive emotions, here are sample items for each of the five facets:
Observing:
- When I’m walking, I deliberately notice the sensations of my body moving.
- I pay attention to how my emotions affect my thoughts and behaviors.
- I notice how foods and drinks affect my thoughts, bodily sensations, and emotions
Describing:
- I’m good at finding words to describe my feelings.
- I have trouble thinking of the right words to express how I feel about things (reversed).
Nonjudging (both reversed):
- I disapprove of myself when I have irrational ideas.
- I think some of my emotions are bad or inappropriate and I shouldn’t feel them.
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Non-reactivity:
- I perceive my feelings and emotions without having to react to them.
- In difficult situations, I can pause without immediately reacting.
Awareness:
- I find myself doing things without paying attention.
- When I do things, my mind wanders off and I’m easily distracted.
Just reading those mindfulness questions alone can serve as a virtual master class. To gauge your own responses, consider that these were on a five-point scale; students scored between two and three on almost all of them, with the highest being awareness.
The findings were analyzed with a simple model in which NR was used to predict awe and compassion via the route of mindfulness. No significant findings were obtained for compassion, but NR did predict awe through the observing scale of mindfulness. The authors believe that if they had measured self-compassion (forgiving yourself), the findings may have supported more generally the idea that communing with nature could promote seeing yourself as having the same “intricate beauty” as does nature.
What You Get out of Communing With Nature Depends on What You Put In
Going for a walk, staring out the window, or admiring that little cactus can all be ways of communing with nature, but as the Ruckert et al. findings suggest, this can only go so far. If your mind drifts to all your problems instead of noticing the tiniest details of what you’re looking at, then you will fail to reap the potential benefits in the form of experiencing awe (or possibly self-compassion).
Although the authors didn’t measure well-being as an outcome, the study was predicated on the idea that self-transcendence is generally beneficial to mental health. Yes, it’s possible that the emotion of awe turns to fear and vulnerability (say, from looking over a waterfall’s edge), but the underlying assumption is that connecting to the beauty in the world can become the pathway to healing.
To sum up, taking those few moments to admire the natural world can help not only appreciate the beauty that’s out there, but also the opportunity to learn how to reap the benefits of an aware and focused mind.
