Why time in a forest changes how people work.
Four decades of international research have documented how structured time in natural environments affects attention, perceived stress and mood. Our programs are built on that literature, not on intuition.
The four bodies of evidence we build on.
- 01Shinrin-yoku research
- Japanese forest-medicine studies from the 1980s onward documenting reductions in perceived stress and improvements in mood after structured forest exposure.
- 02Attention Restoration Theory
- Kaplan & Kaplan: natural environments allow directed attention — the resource depleted by knowledge work — to recover.
- 03Stress Recovery Theory
- Ulrich: natural settings elicit faster recovery from stress states than built environments.
- 04Environmental psychology & biophilia
- How contact with living systems influences wellbeing, focus and prosocial behaviour in groups.
How research becomes a session.
Structured exposure
Session length and environment are chosen to match the doses used in the literature, not left to chance.
Guided sequence
Sensory orientation, slow walking, attention practices and reflection — a repeatable structure, not a free walk.
Group facilitation
Facilitation is designed for teams and groups, where the social dimension is part of the outcome.
Pre/post measurement
Perceived stress and wellbeing are captured before and after each session through the Forests4health Analytics scale.
Honest boundaries.
We measure self-reported perceived stress, wellbeing and engagement, before and after each intervention, through the Forests4health Analytics scale. We do not take physiological measurements (cortisol, heart-rate variability) and we do not extrapolate clinical claims from published studies to individual clients. Effect sizes reported in the literature describe the research populations studied, not a guaranteed result for a specific team.