Jan. 23. 2025 – It’s easy to lose sight of nature in winter, amid the rush to escape cold, wet, and gray weather. But there’s another way to approach the season, one expert says: notice nature.
Tuning into the natural world during the darkest, coldest months can give you a mental health boost, according to research by Holli-Anne Passmore, PhD, a nature and well-being expert at the University of Edmonton. You can reap the benefits without changing your behavior or routine – no ice skating or snowshoeing required.
“This isn’t people going out and looking at the Grand Canyon,” Passmore said. “People are looking at a chickadee sitting on a branch eating frozen mountain berries. How pretty the snow looks. How the moon looks at night.”
Passmore previously found that noticing nature improves well-being. But she wondered if people could feel the same positive effects in the winter, a season that can deplete mental health. About 5% of people in the U.S. go through a type of depression typically triggered by the loss of daylight hours.
To find out, Passmore separated people she studied into groups. For two weeks, one group followed their normal routine but also noticed how nature made them feel and took photos of scenes that sparked emotions. The other group did the same thing but noticed man-made objects instead.
Afterward, she asked the people in the study questions to understand their experiences. Those who noticed nature had a bigger boost in life satisfaction, connectedness to nature, and "elevation" – a composite feeling of being elevated, vital, grateful, moved, and a sense of wonder.
“Those are powerful effects, but especially in the winter when most people just lose half their life,” Passmore said. “Our life becomes inside, and we forget about outside.”
Hard-Wired for Nature’s Benefits
Science backs up the notion that nature makes us feel good. According to one theory, spending time in nature activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the network of neurons and nerves that helps your body relax.
Case in point: forest bathing. The Japanese practice of being mindful in nature can “calm you down,” said Rusly Harsono, MD, a lifestyle medicine expert at Stanford University. By seeing light filtering through leaves, “you actually stimulate the parasympathetic response,” he said.
You may not need to enter the woods at all. Researchers at the University of British Columbia found that creating an indoor forest bathing experience – with forest sounds, scents, and virtual reality images – can make you feel more relaxed and happy.
Our affinity with nature may have something to do with how humans evolved, according to the biophilia hypothesis.
“The idea is that we're kind of hard-wired to connect with nature based on our evolution, and that we lean towards environments that facilitate our survival,” said Jenny Roe, PhD, an environmental psychologist at the University of Virginia and the author of Restorative Cities.
Furthermore, our reliance on nature may have evolved our brains to process it more easily, which biases us in favor of it – a psychological concept called processing fluency.
Take water, for instance.
“It’s one of the most psychologically restorative attributes in our environment,” Roe said. “Be it urban water, rural water bodies, coast, lakes, fountains. We are able to process the visual, auditory, [and] tactile stimuli from water, effortlessly. It doesn't demand our attention in a very dramatic way.”
The ability of nature to “harness our attention effortlessly” is a quality known as “soft fascination,” she said. “When that happens, that then allows scope for reflection. And those reflective processes then support our mental health.”
As for which types or combinations of natural features benefit us most, that’s still up for debate.
“It’s really hard to compare,” said Roy Remme, PhD, an environmental scientist and urban nature expert at Leiden University.
His lab is using a massive Dutch dataset – including data on people's health, where they live, and what their surroundings are like – to understand how different nature types “respond or correlate to health metrics.” Those findings could make it easier for cities to use nature in ways that encourage well-being, he said.
How to Rewire Your Winter Mindset
The simplicity of noticing nature, without having to change your routine or exert physical effort, could be what makes it “so effective,” according to Kari Leibowitz, PhD, a health psychologist and writer.
“It changes the mindset that people have about how accessible nature is. It shows them that, actually, nature is all around us,” she said. “The sky is nature, and the grass growing between the cracks in the sidewalk is nature, and the plants in your house are nature."
Leibowitz should know. She spent a year living north of the Arctic Circle in Tromso, Norway, where the sun doesn’t rise for several months of the year. Many of the city’s year-round residents thrive despite these conditions. Their “winter mindset” became the focus of Leibowitz’s book, How to Winter.
Not everyone in Tromso loves winter, she acknowledged. But residents do understand how to dress for the weather – and have access to affordable woolen layers. Cafes have outdoor seating with heat lamps, and lighted ski trails make exercise more inviting. Being immersed in a culture “optimized for winter” changed her outlook on the season.
If changing your winter mindset sounds daunting, remember that it should get easier over time. Noticing nature is a “wise intervention,” an approach developed by Gregory Walton, PhD, a social psychologist at Stanford University, according to Leibowitz.
“You plant a seed, and then it grows on its own,” she said. The more you notice nature, the more you might also notice that it makes you feel good. “Soon, it's like an automatic process.”
On clear winter nights, you might be able to glimpse the moon and cultivate awe, the feeling that something is vast beyond your immediate understanding. Awe does two things, according to Leibowitz: challenges our experience of reality and makes us feel small.
“Both of these things help put our problems into perspective,” she said.
Researchers at the University of California San Francisco found that older people who tried to be awed during daily walks succeeded. They also felt more joyful and socially connected compared to peers who took walks without orienting themselves toward awe.
But if all else fails, allow yourself to gaze out the window. Leibowitz has come to appreciate the Icelandic word “gluggaveður," meaning weather that’s good for looking at from inside.
“A sunny day feels good, but is it interesting? I don't think so,” she said. “But the wind and the rain and the hail and the snow and the clouds and all of those things, I think are fascinating and can be really engaging.”
