This week is Mental Health Awareness Week organised by the Mental Health Foundation. Their focus is on anxiety which most of us feel from time to time and for some people much of their time. The Mental Health Foundation has many suggestions about how to cope with anxiety on their website but we also wanted to explain – as much as we can – how plants can help.

According to the Mental Health Foundation, ‘Anxiety is a normal emotion in us all, but sometimes it can get out of control and become a mental health problem.

‘Lots of things can lead to feelings of anxiety, including exam pressures, relationships, starting a new job (or losing one) or other big life events. We can also get anxious when it comes to things to do with money and not being able to meet our basic needs, like heating our home or buying food. But anxiety can be made easier to manage. They feel that ‘…focusing on anxiety for this year's Mental Health Awareness Week will increase people's awareness and understanding of anxiety by providing information on the things that can help prevent it from becoming a problem.’

Plants our favourite medicine
Over the years, much research has looked at how plants can help us deal with anxiety. In fact plants show that they lower the physical symptoms of stress like blood pressure, pulse rates and even skin conductivity.

Two research programmes in the 1990s, one here and one in the States, found this to be true. Both researchers, Russell and Lohr respectively, used tests to increase adrenaline, one mental arithmetic and one a computer test. The results for both were similar: stress levels rose as the delegates took part in these timed activities and in both cases with plants present, the physical signs returned to normal more quickly than without plants present.

Courtesy of Spectrum Architecture

Moving on to 2008, two studies one in Norway and one in The Netherlands, showed that plants helped to keep workers calm and take less time off work.

Tina Bringslimark (Norway), expert in environmental psychology, analyzed 305 office workers in 3 offices, each of which had differing amounts of greenery. "We investigated the amount of self-reported sick leave and compared it with the amount of plants they could see from their desk. The more plants they could see, then the less self-reported sick leave there was," said Ms Bringslimark.

Courtesy of Spectrum Archtecture

The study by John Klein Hesselink for TNO in The Netherlands found that plants primarily have an uplifting effect on stressed and tired individuals. In these groups of people the differences in performance recorded in offices with and without plants, were even greater. The study also confirmed the restorative effect of plants. Subgroups of physically exhausted students and students indicating high levels of work stress benefit from plants in the room where they perform their tasks.

Summed up by Prof Tove Fjeld

“The specialist field covering the influence of the environment on human psyches is called environmental psychology. Studies in this area have shown obvious links between well-being, psychological stability, stress levels, other important aspects of human life and environmental factors. All these studies indicate that nature (such as plants, lakes and woods) can offer an important contribution to the reduction of stress. An urban environment, however, causes psychological stress.”

Just One Plant Will Benefit Your Office and you!
In terms of reducing stress levels we must mention Margaret Burchett’s study published in 2010 which showed that plants reduced stress by as much as 50%. Her study showed that this was one of the negative mood states to be effected by just one plant either on or beside a desk. Using psychological survey questionnaires, Burchett showed a mean average of reductions in negative mood states of between 40 – 60%.

Specifically:
• Depression - 58%
• Overall stress - 50%
• Anxiety - 37%
• Fatigue - 38%
• Confusion - 30%
• Overall negativity - 65%
• Anger - 44%

In the control group with no plants, stress levels rose by 20%

Check out a recent article which explains how plants are good for us wherever we work!

More research about the benefits of plants

Mental Health Awareness Week