Parks and Greened Lots Lower Your Stress Levels if You Live in a City

It turns out that being near "green" areas may lower stress. Scientists have found that residents who walked near newly greened vacant lots had significantly lower heart rates compared to walking near a blighted, neglected or vacant lot.

"Our goal was to scientifically explore the connection between city environments and stress," said Eugenia South, one of the researchers, in a news release. "We used heart rates as a physiologic marker of acute stress, and the reduction we found suggests a biological link between urban blight reduction strategies like vacant lot greening and reduction in stress."

In order to measure stress, the researchers used a heart rate monitor with GPS on study participants in two randomly selected Philadelphia neighborhoods. Vacant lots in one neighborhood randomly received a greening treatment while the other neighborhood served as a control and received no treatment. Volunteers walked past vacant lots before and then three months after the greening treatment occurred.

So what did they find? It turns out that the average heart rate reduction attributable to being in view of the greened lots was over five beats per minute (bpm) lower than when near non-greened lots. In contrast, at the control site there was minimal change in heart rate. In a second analysis, the scientists found that the total net reduction of heart rate when near and in view of greened vacant lots was over 15 bpm.

"This research on greening urban lots provides and important scientific impetus for urban planners and city officials to take relatively low-cost steps toward improving health for their residents," said Charles Branas, director of the Urban Health Lab at Penn. "Future trials that dynamically measure additional biological information, such as cortisol levels (another marker of stress) and blood pressure, are now warranted to further advance our understanding of the relationship between stress and blighted urban environments."

The findings are published in the American Journal of Public Health.

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