Forest bathing and the surprisingly tangible benefits of slowing down in nature
Consuming so much media gets to a point where our friends begin to tell us to touch some grass. Our references and jokes become way too niche, and sometimes people simply don’t understand our humour anymore.
“Touch some grass” sounds like a mean comeback, but it turns out there is something surprisingly restorative about it.
Forest bathing sounds like it should involve water. It doesn’t. It’s closer to touching actual grass.
It doesn’t require a stream. The “bathing” refers to immersion, not getting wet. The idea is to soak in the atmosphere of a forest much as you might soak in a warm bath: slowing down, standing among the trees, and allowing yourself to become aware of what is around you.
This distinction matters, especially because forest bathing is often confused with hiking. The two aren’t really the same activity with different names.
Hiking has a destination, a pace, a point A and point B, sometimes a summit. Forest bathing has none of these. It is slower, shorter and far less concerned with covering ground than with noticing the ground you’re walking on.
Over time, it has become a practice with real physiological research behind it—not just a pleasant-sounding wellness trend.
What Forest Bathing Actually Is
The practice traces back to Japan in the early 1980s, where it was named shinrin-yoku, literally “forest bathing.” It emerged partly as a public-health response: a way to counter the stresses of rapid urbanization by formally reconnecting people with the country’s extensive forests.
Over the following decades, it grew from a wellness recommendation into a subject of scientific study, eventually contributing to the field known as forest medicine.
In practice, forest bathing looks almost anticlimactic.
You walk slowly, often at a fraction of your normal walking pace, through a wooded area. There is no fitness goal and no distance target. Instead, the practice asks you to engage your senses deliberately: the texture of bark, the smell of damp soil, the particular quality of light falling through a canopy, the layered sounds of wind and birds, and even your own footsteps.
Sessions can last anywhere from around 20 minutes to several hours, depending on the setting and the purpose of the session. The point is not how far you go.
It is how much you notice.
READ: Can Nature Reset the Filipino Mind?
Effects on the Nervous System: Stress, Cortisol and Blood Pressure
Here’s where the practice moves from folk wisdom into measurable biology.
A systematic review and meta-analysis covering 21 studies and more than 2,200 participants found that systolic and diastolic blood pressure were significantly lower in forest environments compared with non-forest settings. Other studies have reported reductions in cortisol after relatively short periods of forest exposure, along with changes in heart-rate variability and other measures associated with a calmer physiological state.
Stress reduction, more than any other single outcome, is one of the benefits most consistently reported across the literature.
The findings are not perfectly uniform. Human physiology rarely cooperates with tidy narratives, and individual studies have produced mixed results for some measures. But taken together, the evidence points toward forest environments having a genuine short-term calming effect on the body, rather than relaxation being purely subjective.
That distinction is important.
Feeling better matters. But when researchers can also measure changes in blood pressure, cortisol and nervous-system activity, there is something more happening than simply enjoying a pleasant walk.
How Does It Connect to the Immune System?
Some of the most interesting research in this field comes from Dr. Qing Li, an immunologist at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, who has spent decades studying the relationship between forests and human physiology.
His research has focused partly on phytoncides—volatile compounds released by trees and other plants as part of their natural defense mechanisms.
In several studies, people who spent extended periods in forest environments showed increases in natural killer (NK) cell activity and changes in certain intracellular proteins involved in immune function. Some of these changes persisted for days after the forest exposure.
This is genuinely interesting science.
It is also where a little caution is important.
An increase in NK-cell activity is a biological signal. It is not proof that a weekend in the woods prevents infections or cancer.
Researchers reviewing this body of work have pointed to the need for larger, more rigorous and longer-term studies before firm conclusions can be drawn about clinical outcomes. There is also continuing research into how much of the effect comes from the forest environment itself, including phytoncides, and how much comes from being outdoors, moving gently, disconnecting from technology and experiencing a quieter environment.
The same caution applies to cardiovascular findings. Many studies involve generally healthy participants and measure short-term changes. How long those effects last, and how well they translate to people with chronic conditions, remains an area of study.
None of this undermines the core finding.
It simply means the honest way to describe forest bathing is well-supported as a short-term stress-reduction practice, with promising but still developing evidence for other physiological effects—rather than as a cure-all.
How Does One Actually Forest Bathe?
The practice is refreshingly low-effort to start, which is part of its appeal.
You don’t need a guide, a certification or a plane ticket to Japan.
You need a patch of trees and permission to walk more slowly than you think you should.
- Choose a wooded area. It doesn’t have to be wilderness. A dense park, botanical garden or tree-lined trail can work. You don’t need old-growth forest for the practice to count.
- Slow down. Walk considerably more slowly than you normally would. There is no prize for getting somewhere quickly.
- Put the phone away. The practice depends on sensory attention. Notifications rather defeat the point.
- Engage your senses. Notice what you can see, hear, smell and touch. Pay attention to anything that draws your curiosity.
- Give it some time. You don’t need an entire day in the forest. Even a short, unhurried period of nature exposure is a reasonable place to begin.
- Repeat it. Like many wellness practices, regularity may matter more than one extraordinary outing.
Forest bathing is one of those wellness practices where something wonderfully simple turns out to have some very interesting science behind it.
Lower cortisol. Lower blood pressure in many studies. Physiological signs of a calmer nervous system. Early research into immune effects that continues to evolve.
And you don’t need unrealistic lifestyle change to try it.
You need one unhurried walk through the nearest trees, with your senses turned all the way up and your phone turned all the way off.
Maybe “touch some grass” isn’t such a bad suggestion after all.
You don’t have to reach a summit.
You don’t have to count your steps.
And you don’t even have to accomplish anything.
For once, the point is simply to be there.
*Photo by Sara Oliveira for Unsplash+
References
- Ideno Y, Hayashi K, Abe Y, et al. Blood pressure-lowering effect of Shinrin-yoku (Forest bathing): a systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies. 2017;17:409. doi:10.1186/s12906-017-1912-z.
- Queirolo L, Fazia T, Roccon A, et al. Effects of forest bathing (Shinrin-yoku) in stressed people. Frontiers in Psychology. 2024;15:1458418. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1458418.
- Li Q, Kobayashi M, Wakayama Y, et al. Effect of phytoncide from trees on human natural killer cell function. International Journal of Immunopathology and Pharmacology. 2009;22(4):951–959. doi:10.1177/039463200902200410.
- Li Q, et al. A forest bathing trip increases human natural killer activity and expression of anti-cancer proteins.
- Li Q. Review of forest medicine research. Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine.
- Phytoncides and immunity from forest to facility: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Pharmacological Research – Natural Products. 2024;4:100061. doi:10.1016/j.prenap.2024.100061.
