The Mental Benefits of Gardening
Having a garden and plants around your home adds decor to your surroundings. Plants purify the air and keep us in touch with nature. Having plants around your home gives it a sense of tranquility and can make it look cozier with beautiful flowers or even more festive with garlands and wreaths.
Aside from the physical exercise that you can get from gardening are mental benefits of gardening such as being able to harvest fresh vegetables and herbs. Growing your own herbs and vegetables is a fulfilling and rewarding task. Having a kitchen garden in your yard or growing herbs in pots on your terrace or windowsill will give you fresh herbs and vegetables at a fraction of the cost of buying it from the market.
A good gardener is patient, caring and nurturing. The responsibility of caring for plants is not a very arduous chore, but it entails devotion as plants do suffer, wilt and die when sadly neglected. Herb and vegetable gardening can give you something to look forward to, with the knowledge that someday soon you can harvest the rewards of your labor.
There are also mental benefits that you can derive from growing your very own garden, be it in containers or in the yard. Since gardening, according to psychological research, is an activity that mainly uses the right side of the brain, which is the side that handles our creativity, our senses and even is the part that does the worrying.
That means that when you garden, the constant worrying will stop as the right side of your brain will be preoccupied by another activity. Along side the physical exercise that a person will get, breathing in the fresh air and the different aromatic smells of the plants, seeing all the different colors and textures, enjoying the peace and quite in a garden, observing the plant as it grows, gives a person a sense of being calm, soothed, and being away from it all. Inhale deeply and smell the aromatic plants like mint for a subtle yet overwhelming experience. It is like having an aromatherapy session, as the essential oils that are used in aromatherapy are derived mainly from plant flowers and leaves.
Another one of the mental benefits of gardening is stress relief and stress reduction. Doing the simple chores that taking care of a garden necessitates like watering and weeding helps you to get your mind of things for a little while. The light task of tending to your garden integrates a constant routine and pattern into your life that makes it more stable and normal. On top of all that, it will give you a sense of happiness, fulfillment, and accomplishment as your garden grows.
The gardening works effectively an anti-depressant, hence the term “Smell the roses”. Being in the midst of a beautiful garden gives you a sense of peace and quiet. Tension and anxiety is relieved by doing the slightly more rigorous tasks that gardening entails such as cutting, digging, mulching and pruning. Taking good care of your garden will reward you in more ways than the obvious ones like the harvest. Gardening will allow you to enjoy your garden and will give you more peace of mind.
