How are your stresses healed?

The beautiful green nature and blue ocean surrounding Awaji Island is a cure or heal you over your daily stresses. How these can heal your stresses?

Here we would like to introduce an interesting scientific paper regarding an answer to the question which appeared in a science journal, Scientific Report (2019) 9, p1-11. C. I. Seresinhe et al. mentioned in this paper about two websites, i.e., Mappiness and Scenic-Or-Not. To Mappiness site, people upload “happy” when they feel happiness at a place where they are at that specific moment. From the big data base of this site, people can see where they could be happy. So, in Britain they have a big data base of happy places. Scenic-Or -Not is a game in which people input good or not in terms of a scene where they are at that moment. From this data base, people can recognize where are good scenic places or not. By the combination of these two data bases, the authors discuss where scenically oriented people feel happiness. Needless to say, the result is that people can be happy at scenically appealing places, especially naturally good environments, like beautiful green nature and blue oceans etc. as we could expect. But it is interesting that people can be happy at places where scenic arrangements are artificial like buildings, and streets etc.

   What is a physiological background of this emotional tendency in terms of healing your heart. Dr. Masahiro Toyoda (Awaji Landscape Planning and Horticulture Academy, https://www.awaji.ac.jp/english/) answers this question. He organizes a special program at the school to cure mental retardation of aged people through an original cure program. It includes practice of gardening and learning brain physiological mechanisms of healing. Based on this program, he trains the students to become officially qualified mental cure managers of Hyogo prefecture. He says when we are exposed to extreme levels of daily stress, it leads to excitement of our autonomic nerve system, which causes over excretion of adrenalin and makes us mentally unstable. In order to overcome this situation toward mental calmness, you need to be exposed to a situation of unconsciousness. Under this situation, you can depress your nervous mentality. Dr. Toyoda concludes that mental healing is caused under this unconscious state which is brought about by unusual experiences like seeing beautiful art and listening to good music, etc.  Common views of cities do not necessarily cause healing but beautifully arranged streets, gardens and houses give us emotional impact on our mentality.

    In Awaji Island the nature, including a lot of beautiful sceneries and sites are well known. But Akashi Ohashi bridge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akashi_Kaikyō_Bridge), the world’s longest suspension bridge, located at the northern end of the island, makes us happy, even though it is a man-made structure.