Your Garden Does More Than Just Grow Food - It Boosts Your Mental Health
Your garden oasis awaits
We all know that growing food in our own gardens creates the freshest food available for our plates. Since many vitamins, antioxidants, and phytochemicals degrade during storage and processing, it’s no wonder that fresh food from the garden gives us the best physical boost possible for our bodies.
But gardening does more than provide us with food and an opportunity for some real-world (functional) fitness.
Gardens also feeds our mental health in some surprising ways, blurring the artificial boundaries we have created between our minds and bodies. Here’s how to tap into the rich mental health boosts waiting for you in the garden.
Let’s dive in.
Connecting to your senses
Our modern lives are dominated by human-made sights, sounds and smells. We spend a lot of time indoors, and away from nature. And whether we recognize it directly or not, in many ways we are starved for a good dose of sun, soil and plants.
Our eyes crave “fractal patterns”
Fractal patterns are those endless repeating patterns that abound in nature. These patterns make us happy because they are deeply familiar to us. As we gaze at flowers and plants, their colors, shapes and patterns, we experience a sense of calm. Natural patterns are visually soothing. They let us relax into something familiar and good.
Our noses drink in the garden goodness too
You are probably much more attuned to bad smells (oops something’s rotten here), than to the omnipresent good-smells of a healthy garden. That’s our systems keeping us safe.
But if you close your eyes, and take a long deep breath of garden air, you start to focus on the rich good smells that are all around you. Healthy gardens and healthy soils abound in the good kinds of volatile (air-borne) chemicals that contribute to our health and wellness.
Each trip to the garden can be an opportunity to deeply inhale these natural compounds, which can help to reset your mind to calm, joy, and peace.
In fact, you are probably much more aware of the scent of your favorite get-away (the mountains, the desert, the ocean), than you are of the garden. This is because we deeply associate time away in our favorite place with enhanced pleasure. [For more the science of scent and our mental health - revisit The Scent of Soil (or the lack thereof) Affects Your Mental Health]
But with just a little mindfulness, your next trip to the garden can have similar mental health effects as a vacation. Take just a moment to pause and identify the smells of the garden. As you practice this more and more, the garden scents become deeply connected to the healthy food and sense of wellbeing the garden brings. And soon, just a whiff of healthy soil, or your favorite garden plant helps release those feel-good brain chemicals we all want more of.
I like to take the scent-boosting power of my garden one step further by purposely planting dill, mint or arugula where I will for-sure-by-accident brush them along a pathway and release those dazzling scents. I am especially fond of dill because it reminds me of being a child and making dill pickles with my mother in the heart of summer. Garden scents have the ability to transport us to different times. Harness those powers to boost your mental health.
Our ears hear the sounds of life
The garden is rarely fully silent. Beyond the buzzing of pollinators or the stir of plant leaves in a breeze, there is a whole world of life and death playing out within our hearing range.
The flutter of a butterfly’s wings. The sound of a stout ground beetle bulldozing its way through the terrain. The chirp of a cricket. The click of our spade on the soil. The haze of a spray nozzle watering plants.
I used to play music in the garden. Now I use the time as an active meditation. I pause to listen to the world around me. It’s the time I unplug from the world, if only for a few moments, and just listen to the natural world.
We touch the world differently
In the garden, we tap into ancient human rituals that are thousands of years old. We feel the sunshine on our skin. We feel the cold water. We know the difference in texture and firmness of a ripe or unripe tomato.
And if you drop your gloves (or your shoes) for a few minutes, then we connect our bodies directly to the thriving soil community of mother earth.
These things are irreplaceable for our mental health. The are as important to our well being as breathing, because they are tied to our very survival - to the creation of food that let’s live another season.
The Oasis Effect
It doesn’t take much of a mind-shift to create your garden as an oasis specifically for your mental health.
An oasis is a stable pool of water in the desert that creates a cooling effect, and offers relief and a drink to desert dwellers. They can mean life or death in the desert.
In that same way, your garden can be an oasis, a safe place to cool off the fire in your brain, if you pause and let nature work its magic on you.
The well-known 5-4-3-2-1 grounding method can work wonders in the garden:
5 things you see
4 things you touch
3 things you hear
2 things you smell
1 thing you taste
There was a time in our collective human history when this wasn’t a lesson to learn, it was just the way we lived. Now we need to pause, and rediscover the mental health benefits growing in our gardens. We need to connect our mind and body to where our food comes from as the source of our ability to live on this planet.
So the next time you head to the garden, check in to see what kind of mental health opportunities you are growing there:
Do the patterns and colors and combinations please you? What can you change for this to improve? (and FYI - my garden is going through a full-on renovation this year to do just this).
Can you smell the goodness in your garden? What can you do to enhance that even more?
What do you hear in your garden? If you live in a place where other sounds overwhelm your garden, a small fountain might do the trick to draw your ears into the space you are standing in.
What do you touch in the garden? How can you enhance that experience?
These are the mental health opportunities of growing your own food. Cultivate them with as much rigor as you do the plants you grow. Your mind and body will thank you.
Happy growing!
The Naturalized Human brings together the science and human experience of the mind-body-food connection. I write about growing food, and how this affects every aspect of our mental and physical health and wellness. If you enjoy and benefit from this work, then consider becoming a paid subscriber. For just $5 US/month (a cup of coffee), you can show your support and access all the features of this newsletter.