If we asked you to think of a pastime you could do in your garden, which one would you choose?
This question may seem strange to you, but it is actually the starting point for the topic we want to talk about today.
The activities we do in the outdoors, in fact, bring several benefits to our physical and mental health.
One of the most classic ones is gardening: choosing the right plants according to the season and climate of our area, creating flowerbeds and lovely flower arrangements, can help us reduce stress and bring us a sense of calm and tranquillity.
Even growing vegetables – planting the ones we like best, watering them, watching them grow, harvesting the fruits – can give us relaxing moments.
The reason is simple. Dedicating ourselves to a specific hobby, in this case in our outdoor space, allows us to focus our attention on an activity that can turn negative thoughts and bad moods into happy and positive feelings.
Even science says so: people who live in contact with nature and the outdoors are 30 % less likely to suffer from depression.
It is a real antidote against the stress of everyday life, also known as garden therapy.
This therapy, especially widespread in the Anglo-Saxon world to treat different types of mental disorders, even serious ones, through specific programmes and rehabilitation paths, can be practised by anyone, albeit in different ways.
Indeed, a slow, relaxed life, in harmony with the world around us, brings many benefits to our health. For example, it can improve breathing, lower blood pressure and heart rate.
But there is more.
While watering our seedlings, perhaps the aromatic ones, we can also practice one of the most popular mental practices of recent times: mindfulness.
A technique that helps us bring our attention to the here and now and, combined with nature, can create an unbreakable bond with our unconscious.
In fact, if you think about it, taking care of a flower or a tree can be compared to taking care of ourselves.
Speaking in terms of sustainability, our daily actions have a great impact on the ecosystem.
Cultivating our own vegetable garden, whether large or small, can make us more aware not only of the changing of the seasons, thus learning to understand and vary our diet by adapting it to the rhythms of nature, but, also, of the respect for the environment that surrounds us.