3 Unique Ways You Can Enjoy Nature at Home
Nature’s good for you; that’s a fact. It’s healthy for the body, boosts mood, and spending time in its midst improves your overall quality of life. Unfortunately, given modern humans’ busy lives in the digital era, people don’t get enough Mother Nature these days.
Although urban living, work, and family responsibilities pile up and ruin relationships with nature, there are ways to bring it back into the daily grind – and the following represent several unique, easy-to-accomplish methods of enjoying nature’s delights at home.
Bring the Outdoors Indoors – Literally
Notice how many healthcare facilities, hospitals, clinics, and care homes have indoor plants decorating their interiors? Moreover, many clinical settings also have their own primped and primed gardens for patients and visitors to relax in. There’s a good reason for these kinds of places incorporating nature into their settings: they promote healing and mental calm and offer an array of therapeutic benefits – and you can enjoy the same effects at home.
If you’re a newbie gardener (or someone without much spare time to devote to caring for vegetation), choose low-maintenance indoor plants and consider where you’ll put them in your home. Also, think about placing them in areas with decent sunlight so that they continue to flourish inside (near windows is a safe bet!)
Then, as your greenery grows, you’ll notice its calming effect on your household, not to mention they look beautiful. What’s more, you can even make indoor gardening a family hobby; have your kids pick plants for their bedrooms and let them be responsible for watering them.
Plus, plants help reduce airborne pollutants indoors, quietly improving your home’s air quality in the background. The cherry effect on top? Plant life smells divine! Instead of using air fresheners, artificial sprays, and perfumes to bring nature’s serene scents inside your home, your indoor plants and flowers naturally aromatise your abode.
Grow an Indoor Herb Garden
Bring nature into your life by growing a garden indoors! In fact, it’s easy to cultivate edible plants and flowers in the home year-round, whether it’s for cooking, making salads, salsa, cocktails, or making rosin.
Basic clay pots of herbs next to a window are ideal for beginners, with basil being an easy choice that offers tasty leaves for flavourful salads, pasta, pesto, and more. You can even turn your countertop or windowsill into a miniature garden plush with pots of your favourite herbs like rosemary, mint, and thyme. Once you get the hang of it, you could try regrowing vegetables from your kitchen scraps; take celery stalks, potato buds, and green onions from your leftovers and plant them to grow fresh ones.
As mentioned, another unique way of enjoying herbs and certain flowers is to press them using a pollen press machine (also called a wax press or rosin press). This device uses two heated metal plates to press flowers and herbs with enough force to cause goodness to ooze out in an oily, solventless, and potent, resinous form – called rosin. This method of consuming herbs is growing in popularity; you can even get a Rosin Press Starter Kit at Amazon these days.
However you choose to enjoy herbs and floral delights at home, adding them into your daily regime is fun, can please your palate, and offer you a juicy dose of vitamins and antioxidants.
Prioritise Natural Light Inside
The diurnal light cycle is directly linked to the biological processes that people and animals experience. However, modern technology, such as phones, computers, and artificial light, has wreaked havoc on said biological processes.
Artificial light – especially blue light emitted by modern screens – disrupts sleep patterns and negatively impacts moods. Interestingly, one study revealed that a lack of exposure to natural light was connected to depressive symptoms and poor sleep quality.
What does this mean? Simple; too much artificial light isn’t great for physical and mental health. As such, where possible, reduce screen time and spend time in areas of your home with more natural daylight. The south side of buildings sees the most sunlight, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere. Therefore, try to prioritise having your seating and working areas on this side of your house to enjoy the physical and mood-boosting benefits of sunlight at home.
Final Thoughts
The prognosis is clear; you don’t always have to retreat to the forest to reap the benefits of nature. Bringing nature to you can provide many advantages – from physical and mental health boosts and culinary enjoyment to decorative aesthetics and improved air at home. However you choose to incorporate nature into your place, it’s safe to say that doing so only has pros – no cons.
