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Comment by RIMR | Hacker News Reader

Is there any reason to believe that urban hiking has a similar effect? I don't go on nature walks very often, but learning to walk my way around my city has given me an entirely different outlook on where I live.

Seattle has a lot of greenery, but walking around is a pretty urban experience.

I think that there is also a lot to be said about regularly moving your body (walking 5-10 miles a day), and the effect it has on your mental state. I wouldn't be surprised if your surroundings play a minimal role compared to simply engaging in physical activity and changing your surroundings regularly.

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> We show in healthy participants that a brief nature experience, a 90-min walk in a natural setting, decreases both self-reported rumination and neural activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex (sgPFC), whereas a 90-min walk in an urban setting has no such effects on self-reported rumination or neural activity.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/28/8567.abstract

According to the article, though, the "urban setting" was next to a highway, which isn't typical of any urban setting I've lived in. And the "natural setting" was still in the middle of Stanford, which isn't really what I would call a natural setting. If the parent lives in an urban area similar to the "natural setting" of Stanford's campus' green area(s), then I'd say that yes, the parent would benefit.

The study seems pretty handwavy, though. I'm not sure that a walk by a highway counts as a urban area control group. (Although, it also depends on what "highway" they are referring to. The street in front of the campus is not a highway the same way the freeway/interstate is.)

Walking next to a busy street is unnerving and stressful to me (to me it seems as though the noise is the biggest problem), so I can easily imagine there being no positive effect. However, walking down a quiet alley with no cars (audible or visible) has to me nearly the same meditative effect as walking in nature. Not alle urban settings are the same, so I could imagine there being a positive effect in some. (Structurally some small pedestrian-only alley from Renaissance times in the town I grew up in actually feels very similar to nature.)

Could the noise be the main factor?

My office is directly underneath the flightpath to London Heathrow Airport, and my house is under the secondary approach path. There's a landing about every 90 seconds for most of the day (average 1290 flights per day, maximum 15 between 23:00-0600). Planes tend to be < 2000ft overhead, and Heathrow has lots of big planes.

I don't need to go to the countryside to notice the peace and quiet, and feel much better rested. Hotels in the centres of Sheffield and Birmingham have had the same effect.

http://www.flightradar24.com/51.48,-0.46/12

There was a study showing that crime goes down when the neighborhood executes a simple

    trees++;

and from this we can definitely deduce that the deciduous decidedly discriminates.

Or in other words, urban hiking may have a similar effect, but it is quite likely to be lesser. (And as another poster points out, an urban hike seems to have no effect.)

Well, the linked article does discuss the potential difference between a nature walk, and an urban walk.

> In an earlier study published last month, he and his colleagues found that volunteers who walked briefly through a lush, green portion of the Stanford campus were more attentive and happier afterward than volunteers who strolled for the same amount of time near heavy traffic.

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