Exeter, UK: It is commonly recognized that spending time in nature has a positive impact on one’s mental health and sense of wellbeing. The benefits of parks, green spaces, and woodlands on adult mental health have been examined in the majority of earlier investigations on this subject.
A study has found that spending time near rivers or on the beach as a child can have a positive impact on our mental health and welfare as adults. It was discovered that growing up near blue areas like coasts, rivers, and lakes increased the chance that those people would return to those places as adults since they were more used to and valued nature.
The study which was conducted on 15,000 people in 18 different nations by the researchers from the University of Exeter in UK has been published on Journal of Environmental Psychology.
If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older
Tom Stoppard
Dr. Mathew White, a senior scientist at the University of Vienna and co-author of the study, observed that “Learning to swim and appreciate the dangers in terms of rip currents, cold temperatures etc. is of course primary, but the message we are trying to get across is that to only teach children about the dangers of water settings may make them overly afraid of, and ill-equipped to benefit from, places that can also be hugely beneficial to their health and wellbeing as they grow up.”
The co-author of the study added that, “The vast majority of blue space visits both for adults and children do not involve getting wet – so there are also many advantages from spending time near water, not just in it.”
One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is, I think, to have a happy childhood
Agatha Christie
Over the past ten years, a growing corpus of research has examined the precise positive impacts of blue space on mental health. According to a 2011 review that appeared in International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health, going to blue spaces could enhance people’s levels of physical activity, reduce stress and anxiety, and improve mood and psychological wellbeing.
An additional study conducted by the Environmental Agency in 2020 indicated that blue spaces were more strongly correlated with mood elevation and feelings of restoration than were green spaces.