The Japanese Have an Entire Field of Research Devoted to Chillin' in the Forest

From Ralph Waldo Emerson to John Muir to Jean Craighead George (author of the children's wilderness fantasy My Side of the Mountain), the English language has plenty of people using it to praise the restorative power of nature. All well and good, but it pales in comparison to what's going on in Japanese. In 1982, the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries coined a phrase for "making contact with and taking in the atmosphere of the forest," and literally translates to "forest bathing": Shinrin-yoku.

And should you ever doubt the power of a snappy and concise name, shinrin-yoku is a legitimate field of scientific study, one that's working on preventative medicine as simple as a walk in the woods.

As someone who tried to talk the rest of the company into having Motherboard outside today, the Shinrin-yoku studies mostly just confirm what I and Annie Dillard have long suspected: going into the forest is good for you. In fact, just looking at pictures of the forest can be good for you. But being proper studies by real researchers, they've managed to articulate and quantify the benefits of time spent outside, and have found that they set in much faster than one might imagine.

A 2009 study conducted in 24 forests by Japanese researchers, titled "The physiological effects of Shinrin-yoku," found that the forest environments promoted "lower concentrations of cortisol, lower pulse rate, lower blood pressure, greater parasympathetic nerve activity, and lower sympathetic nerve activity than do city environments." After just 20 minutes in the woods, people were mellowing out.

To unpack that a bit, looking at the amount of cortisol in your saliva is a way of measuring stress, and lower levels of cortisol are found in people's saliva after they dance, or hear music, or laugh, so if you're in the woods having a rollicking good time singing mountain songs, your cortisol levels are gonna be way down there. The parasympathetic nerve is in charge of your "rest and digest" responses, sort of the opposite of your fight and flight ones, lowering your pulse and blood pressure.

But the woods don't hit everyone the same way. What proved beneficial for adolescent girls in a 2013 study actually demonstrated no benefit for one weird group: family dogs.

Apparently, family dogs are too relaxed and happy already, so playing in the woods didn't do anything for their saliva cortisol levels, according to a Saybrook University study from 2014. They may try again with working dogs.

As a dog owner in the city, I find this very reassuring. Driving back after a weekend in a cabin upstate, I remember feeling bad for my dog, who had just had the best weekend ever, running around the mountains, finally free of cats, skateboarders, and other dogs—everything she irrationally detests—and was now returning to a life of the apartment and the leash. But leashed and walking through our neighborhood that night, she was as cheerful as ever, happy to be home.

It's clear now that, like so many pet interactions, I had been projecting. After all, it's not like she was coming back to work in the city the next day. That was me. I was the only one bummed to be back, and could've used some Shinrin-yoku to pep me up.