Bat-watching, beach explorations and ‘sniff’ walks: How nature can provide a tonic for loneliness

There is an ever-growing list of the benefits of natural prescriptions – now researchers say nature could offer a cure for loneliness too.

Kye Aziz didn’t consider himself a big nature lover. As an asylum-seeker originally from Indonesia, now based in Melbourne, he’d spent stints of time in the outback and high country. But it wasn’t until a socially-prescribed picnic and gardening excursion that he began to see nature in a new way.
“You feel like you’re transported somewhere else,” says Aziz. “Living in Australia and in Western culture can be very lonely and individualistic – but when we’re sitting outside and having a laugh and feeling that togetherness, it just feels like home.”
There’s a science to that feeling. In the 1980s, in a public health bid to help stressed urban workers heal through nature, the Japanese government invested in a campaign for “shinrinyoku”, or forest bathing. At first, “it was a feeling, not a science” says Qing Li, a medical doctor and clinical professor at Nippon University in Tokyo. But in recent decades, Li and other researchers have linked forest bathing to lower blood pressure, a stabilised nervous system, fewer stress hormones, boosted immune function, and reduced anxiety, depression, anger and fatigue.
According to the late naturalist, Edward Wilson, these health benefits are a product of “biophilia” – an innate love of nature that underpins our near-universal tendency to interact with plants, animals, and other humans.