Nature goals FIND YOUR GREEN SPACE

From stressed to refreshed! Lifestyle medicine practitioner Dr Jenny Brockis shares the simple steps you should adopt to give your wellbeing a boost

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Statistics show the vast majority of us spend most of our time indoors. However, the current minimum recommendation for time in nature to maintain mental wellbeing is at least 120 minutes a week. More is better.

Setting yourself a healthy target provides direction and a sense of purpose, and achieving your goal is always enormously rewarding. You feel good. Your brain is delighted with your success.

That sense of reward will trigger the release of the neurochemical dopamine, making you feel good and motivating you to want to repeat that rewarding behaviour – meaning you set yourself another goal and go about achieving that.

Your weekly dose

If we are being pedantic, 120 minutes divided across seven days is 17 minutes and a few seconds. Let’s round it up to 20 to 30 minutes. Here are the questions to ask yourself:

Do I have 20 minutes each day to get outside? If your answer is no, then we have a problem that may boil down to priorities.