“Hoes Against Anxiolytics”: Discovering the Benefits of Nature and its Effect on the Human Body through Three Life Experiences

It’s quite intuitive: hoeing, planting, harvesting vegetables in your vegetable garden or smelling your flowers in your garden provides satisfaction; strolling in the calm forest and contemplating a beautiful landscape soothes. Clearly, nature does us good. From childhood to the fourth age, through three experiences (in school, in business and in hospital) discover how nature manages to relieve us.

Everyone knows it empirically: a walk in the forest is well worth a few psychotherapy sessions. Pulling out the famous weeds (weeds) prevents the mind from running around in circles with dark thoughts. Or simply contemplate a beautiful landscape, helps to breathe and slow down stress.

And when in addition science, more precisely neurosciences, psychology and sociology, come to prove these effects and dissect them, doubt is no longer allowed. Nature wants us well. The documentary “Hoes against anxiolytics” lists the benefits that nature offers to human beings through physiological mechanisms. During three experiments at major moments in a man’s life: childhood, adulthood and old age, the director Cécile Favier talks about the scientists who put the studies carried out and their conclusions within our reach.

Here are three good reasons to watch this documentary in replay above.

Where it is a question of memory and heritage. An American researcher from Harvard University, Edward O. Wilson suggested in one of his works that the human brain has developed in synchrony, even in symbiosis with the natural world for millions of years (note: about 2.5 million years). And as explained Michel le Van Quyen, neuroscientist at INSERM, “we love nature because we have learned to appreciate the elements that have long served our survival“.

However, since the industrial revolution, man has cut himself off from his natural environment. However, even if man’s habitat has been concentrated in urban areas, cutting him off from his primary natural space, his brain retains the memory of all the benefits provided by nature: shelter and food.

On the other hand, the modern way of life leads us to dwell on past actions or project ourselves into a stressful future. And nature offers itself as an escape from this whirlwind of incessant thoughts. The spectacle of a magnificent or a surprising landscape offers parentheses of respite. What Michel le Van Quyen translates as follows: “it is a spontaneous attraction to the environment that allows the brain to take breaks and regenerate.” In addition to food and lodging, rest. A real godsend.

This is how Professor Thérèse Rivasseau-Jonveaux, neurologist at the CHU Saint-Julien in Nancy, came up with the idea of ​​creating a garden in the very heart of the hospital, the memory garden. A kind of bridge for patients with degenerative brain diseases to reconnect with their environment. The great sensory richness of the place is primarily beneficial for elderly patients. But it is just as important for the nursing staff. “The objective of this garden is that we no longer feel in the hospital and that we rediscover contact with nature. We leave the artificial environment of the hospital world, sensorially poor, and we offer something of great sensory richness“. she explains.

Beneficial breaks for some, energizing stimuli for others. As proof, the neurologist evokes an anecdote with one of her patients: “the discovery of a rose in the garden will allow the pleasant surprise of hearing: “Oh a rose”, whereas the work of a speech therapist on an image will not allow the rose to be brought out“. The memory of nature through the senses : sight, smell, touch and hearing and taste.

Without going into too much scientific detail, Michel le Van Quyen describes the functioning of the nervous system and the brain. “On one side you have the sympathetic system which is a physiological accelerator. It regulates stress, it prepares the body for action and it secretes a number of hormones and neurotransmitters associated with stress. Conversely, when you rest, the other system is put in place, called the parasympathetic system. It is he who allows the whole body to regenerate – the heart, breathing, digestion – and to find a basic level.” He continues his explanation with an image: “these two systems operate alternately, like an accelerator and a brake in a car; it is a very important balance to find between the two systems“.

Nature presents itself as an antidote to the stress of everyday life. And that’s exactly what he found Jean-Guy Henckel, founder of the Gardens of Cocagne. Former educator in Besançon, he created a first associative organic market gardening operation, integration through work. Today, its network of gardens includes around a hundred farms.

In Thaon-lès-Vosges, for example, the Cocagne gardens have 60 employees, around forty of whom are on integration contracts. Beyond the physical work of market gardening and the good fatigue it generates, the benefits of working the land are multiple: “oWe are not locked in, we have the landscape, we feel the wind, the sound of trees and birds”, says Élodie, a cultural supervisor. “Weed! If you’re pissed off, you run the whole line; you vent your anger on something, without getting upset on people” exclaims an employee on a reintegration contract. Nature as a call for calm and guardian of peace, you had to think about it.

On the science side, it is a kind of re-phasing with the circadian clock, set on the cycle of the sun. A reconnection to the elements, to the light and then to the seasons. The light which passes through the retina to the brain to help it resynchronize with the sun. Finally always this sun, which through the skin, distills vitamin D. A great energy booster.

Thérèse Toussaint, who left her old job which she no longer found meaning in, is happy to share her new rhythm: “my work before, I no longer found meaning in it; there, it’s just normal to crash, that’s life. Respect the growth time of the plant, follow the weather. It feels good to follow nature and say to yourself “it’s not me who’s in charge” I feel softer with myself as a result.“

And finally Earth itself, which contains micro bacteria that reinforce our microbiota, and secrete serotonin, which has an anti-depressant effect. Nature wins by knockout on stress.

The proofs of the benefits of nature on the human body are provided. All that remains is to immerse toddlers from an early age in a permanent bath of nature. Richard Louv, child specialist, who defined the nature deprivation syndrome, explains that the risk of developing a mental illness in adolescence or adulthood decreases in proportion to the time spent in a green environment in childhood.

Armed with this theory, Marie-Estelle Rouby, a school teacher at the Jean Mermoz school, developed a project with the students in her class. “I wanted to introduce children to the marvelous side of nature so that they could talk about it better”, she says. First there is the garden, as a support for transversal experiences: observation, experience; maths, deduction… Then, in a second step, the forest as a place of experimentation, discovery and taking –limited- risks, within the framework of free play. With the key, a gain of self-confidence with the discovery of its limits and also of its capacities, and the direction of the other.

The neuroscientist once again provides the explanations by recounting an experiment conducted with two groups of children. The first group exposed to nature, the other not. “The children most exposed to nature had the largest working memory, very important for learning“, he observes.

The nature anchored in our memory allows our memory to activate. The cycle of life can continue. The circle is complete,