Frazzled by Covid? Just take a 15-minute stroll in the country

WITH a second wave of the pandemic and a new lockdown threatening to engulf us, it is easy to feel gloomy.

But an antidote to the seemingly neverending 2020 blues may be closer than we think.

Scientists have discovered that taking a 15-minute walk ‘in awe of nature’ each week can help boost happiness and reduce stress.

And, with a wealth of natural beauty on the doorstep, Scots in particular should have no trouble finding some spectacular scenery to give them a lift.

A team from the University of California in San Francisco recruited 52 healthy older adults to take at least one 15-minute walk each week for eight weeks.

Half the participants were asked to try to experience awe during their walk by making an effort to notice and appreciate nature. They all filled out surveys after each stroll, detailing the emotions they had felt and whether they had experienced any awe.

People in the ‘awe’ group reported a growing sense of wonder and appreciation for the details of the world around them. Meanwhile, those in the other group were more inwardly focused, for example worrying about their to-do list.

People were asked to take selfies at the beginning, middle and end of each walk.

The awe group increasingly made themselves smaller in their photos over the course of eight weeks, preferring to feature the landscapes around them. The study results, published in the journal

Emotion, also found the smiles on their faces grew measurably more intense.

Researchers say it is ‘remarkable’ that a simple intervention – asking people to try to practise feeling awe – was able to drive ‘significant shifts’ in their daily emotions.

Virginia Sturm, lead author of the study, said: ‘Negative emotions, particularly loneliness, have well-documented negative effects on the health of older adults, particularly those over age 75.

‘What we show here is a very simple intervention – a reminder to occasionally shift our energy and attention outward instead of inward – can lead to significant improvements in emotional wellbeing.’

Psychologist Dacher Keltner, who worked on the study, said: ‘Awe is a positive emotion triggered by awareness of something vastly larger than the self and not immediately understandable, such as nature.’