Why time outdoors, and time with other people, belongs in the conversation about mental health
Somewhere underneath a lot of modern wellbeing advice sits an awkward question. What if some of what we need isn't found in a clinic at all?
That question has a name now. It's called social prescribing, and it works roughly like this. A GP or another health professional refers someone not to a medication or a course of treatment, but to something happening in their community. A walking group. A community garden. A choir, a men's shed, a conservation project, a cooking class. The referral is deliberate and written down, not a passing suggestion to get outside more.
It sounds almost too simple to take seriously. Then you look at the research on one branch of it in particular, the nature based kind, sometimes called green social prescribing, and it gets harder to dismiss.
What the research actually shows
In 2023 a team of researchers published a review in The Lancet Planetary Health that pulled together more than ninety studies of nature prescriptions. The results were modest in size and consistent in direction. People who received a nature prescription had lower blood pressure than those who didn't. Their depression and anxiety scores improved. They walked noticeably more each day, roughly nine hundred extra steps.
That is not a cure for anything, and the authors were careful not to pretend otherwise. What it does establish is that time outdoors is more than pleasant. It shows up in the numbers.
Australia has been paying attention. Nature prescribing has been appearing in general practice literature here for years. South Australia ran a trial. In Victoria, a program called Nature Scripts has been testing nature referrals with young people experiencing mild mental illness. And in 2025 researchers published a consensus framework for nature prescribing in Australian healthcare, which is the unglamorous but necessary work of turning a good idea into something a busy clinician can actually use on a Tuesday afternoon.
One finding in that Lancet review is easy to skim past and shouldn't be. The improvements in anxiety and depression came mostly from programs that involved social professionals, people whose job was to turn up alongside participants and facilitate rather than simply advise. The prescription worked better when somebody came with you.
Hold onto that, because the research on nature can't quite explain it on its own.
Nature and the quieter self
In Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder, the psychologist Dacher Keltner describes what he calls the eight wonders of life, the things that reliably produce awe in people across very different cultures. Nature is one of them. So are moral beauty, music, moving together in groups, visual design, big ideas, spiritual experience, and the beginning and end of life.
His definition of awe is worth reading slowly. It is the feeling of encountering something vast that goes beyond your current understanding of the world. Vast doesn't have to mean grand. It can be a tree that was already old when your grandparents were children. It can be the light doing something unusual in the late afternoon. It can be the ocean, on the rare occasion you stop and properly look at it.
What awe seems to do is turn the volume down on the self. That running commentary about our own problems and standing and performance loosens its grip for a moment. Keltner and his colleagues call this the small self, and feeling small in this particular way turns out to be nothing like feeling insignificant. People come away from it more connected to others, more generous, less alone.
This is where it starts to matter clinically. A great deal of psychological distress involves a self that has become unbearably loud. Rumination. Self criticism. Anxious rehearsal of conversations that haven't happened yet. The sense of being locked inside your own head with no way out. Awe interrupts all of that without asking anyone to argue with their own thoughts, which is hard work and often unsuccessful. And one of its most reliable sources is free, outdoors, and probably within walking distance of wherever you happen to be sitting.
The other thing Keltner found is how ordinary awe is. Most of it doesn't happen on holidays or mountaintops. It happens on the way to the shops. Which suggests the obstacle usually isn't access. It's attention.
What we get wrong about other people
There is a second reason green social prescribing works, and it has less to do with trees than with the people standing near them.
In A Little More Social, the University of Chicago psychologist Nicholas Epley sets out a pattern he has been documenting for decades. We are consistently, almost comically wrong about connection. We underestimate how much we will enjoy talking to a stranger. We assume the other person would rather be left alone. We brace for an awkwardness that mostly never arrives. And then, on the strength of these bad predictions, we choose solitude, or the thin version of company that comes from scrolling and texting, over the thing that would actually have helped.
His conclusion is that connection isn't repaired by one big gesture. It accumulates through small choices, made over and over, that we are forever talking ourselves out of.
Put Keltner and Epley beside each other and social prescribing stops looking like a pleasant extra. It starts looking like good design.
A nature prescription doesn't just put someone in a park. It puts them in a park with other people, doing something with a point to it, at the same time every week, where turning up is the only social courage required. The awkwardness Epley writes about gets designed out of the situation. Conversation happens sideways, while hands are in the soil or feet are moving along a track, which is how most people find it easiest to talk anyway. Nobody has to be brave enough to start anything.
For someone who is lonely, and loneliness has been rising in Australia, particularly among younger people, that structure isn't a detail. It is the whole intervention.
What this looks like in practice
A few things seem to matter more than the specifics of the activity.
Small and close by beats ambitious and far away. A weekly walk in the park down the road that actually happens is worth more than a wilderness retreat that stays on a list. Large studies have linked around two hours a week in nature to better self reported health and wellbeing, and two hours is findable for most people.
Doing it with someone beats doing it alone. The evidence points that way, and Epley's work explains why.
Noticing beats scenery. Awe is available on a suburban street with decent trees. The practice is paying attention, not travelling somewhere.
And a plan beats an intention. There is a real difference between deciding you should spend more time outside and knowing that on Thursday at nine you will be at the community garden. Only one of those tends to happen.
A wider idea of care
None of this replaces therapy, or medication, or clinical support for people who need it. The point is smaller and more hopeful than that. Mental health isn't built only in consulting rooms. It is also built in parks and gardens and walking tracks and shared projects, in the ordinary places where people run into something bigger than themselves while other people are standing nearby.
Sometimes the most useful thing anyone can offer isn't an insight. It is a door, and a reason to walk through it.
At Mend and Grow, we work with people to understand what is making change difficult, and to build steps toward wellbeing that fit the life you actually have. Get in touch to find out more.