Stressed? Try Staring At The Ocean

Feeling stressed? Well, if you’ve got an ocean handy, you might try staring at it. Researchers at Michigan State University, which has no ocean views but does have some pretty great lakes, so to speak, are convinced that blue vistas have a calming effect, at least when compared to green vistas. An MSU news release reports that the researchers studied the visibility of blue and green spaces from residential locations in Wellington, New Zealand, an urban capital city surrounded by the Tasman Sea on the north and the Pacific Ocean on the south. Green space includes forests and grassy parks. They then correlated mental health with data from the New Zealand Health Survey with blue views and green views. Ready? The envelope please…Even after taking into account residents’ wealth, age, sex and other neighborhood factors, the study found that having a view of the ocean was associated with improved mental health. Yes, green space is lovely, but the researches found that it did not show the same calming effect as blue space.