Do you know that gardening for mental health works wonders? This article on gardening and mental health tackles the subject in the light of recent findings including its spiritual aspects. – Ed.
Any of the plant kingdom made up of multicellular plants, the cluster of small flowers truly inspires. It supplies a majestic, radically transforming appearance, with varied texture, shapes and colors—a vivid phenomenon of the light radiating red, blue, green or yellow, lavender or orange that enables you to differentiate objects and colors in your garden. Plants have a distinctive wonderful character in your garden all throughout the year with help from your own homemade but effective natural fertilizer for your plants.
Gardening and Mental Health
Gardening and planting not only beautify and add a rainbow of colors to your house. These activities have mental benefits, too. These productive cathartic preoccupation bring a soulful personal therapy for your mood’s receptive state of mind.
Hence, let us re-channel these two things to something more constructive, more beneficial and more positive for you and your family and kids. Gardening and planting produces an amazingly triumphant reward with an abundance of flowers, veggies and fruits that will keep you not only healthy physically but also mentally.
Are you in a high pursuit of a natural way to find relief with the pace, new normal and the towering demands in this world of today? Refocus your energies and good vibes.
What to do then? Here’s the mix of activities that you can do, together with gardening and planting, especially during the pandemic. You will reap the both physical and mental benefits.
- Make a garden and plant in a small space.
- Pray and pray. Always cultivate praying virtues for the family.
- Remodel, redecorate. You may opt to remodel a bit of your living room and kitchen area, wherein the family often gather and stay for a get together or want to relax after a hard day’s work on weekdays and also on weekends. Simply give it a makeover, redecorate a teeny weeny here and there. Add some zest and color to your life and to your house. Augment with some of your new indoor plants and some clean pebbles for good vibes which is always good for the physique and mental health, most especially for your kids and teens, specifically with this thing called the “new normal” and beyond.
It both wholly cultivates a calmer mind in you as a parent and your children, and relieves your physique from strain and stress—thru praying, getting in tune with nature, gardening and planting. Besides, it helps you live longer, stay young and healthy the natural way with a boost of the right nutrients.
Nowadays, research-based articles and beneficial studies are all providing people with the science that supports our intuition on the understanding of soil restoration, soul salvation, and planting therapy.
With gardening and planting on the rise—activities that make one calm and enhance capabilities to refocus more and more on the constructive sides of life. To complement this activity, you will also find the following articles useful for your family:
- Activities for Your Kids During the Pandemic
- 20 Tips on How to Raise Happy and Successful Children
- 13 Psychological Elements on Raising Temperamental Kids
- Ways on How to Stay Young, Live Longer and Healthy the Natural Way
Who Will Benefit from Gardening and Planting?
Gardening and planting is therapeutic for those individuals who have minor or major fourteen (14) mental and physical concerns:
- the ones who have been recuperating from a traumatic experience, most especially, as treatment and therapy;
- it does immeasurable wonders as well for the especially gifted children;
- people who have heart ailments and diabetes;
- big bosses at the top management levels;
- the toxic people in the corporate world;
- for the elders in the community;
- those with high blood pressure;
- the young ones or the teens;
- for the adventurous people;
- temperamental kids;
- an asthmatic family;
- introvert individuals;
- sickly children; and
- employees.
5 Helpful Benefits of Gardening for Mental Health
1. Natural Anti-depressant
Indeed, gardening and planting work as an effective natural antidepressant. It relaxes your body or soul and effectively relieves your nervous tension.
To top it all—gardening and planting in a smaller space relieves your stress from overload of work at the office, deadlines to meet, endless business meetings, congested traffic, your family business, overbearing household chores, the kids and a lot more. Planting a very huge quarter acre may absolutely lead to more stress simply because of its gigantic size. Worst of all, the Covid-19 pandemic for two years and a half and the new normal causing a widespread angst and anxiety may somehow drive you nuts.
2. A State of Calm or Peace of Mind
You will eventually get your non-abrasive state of calm, the order, tranquility and peace of mind with the beautiful sceneries, flowers, plants, gardening and planting simply by just getting in tune with our beloved mother earth… It’s all free and economical, plus you get to help balance the recuperating ecosystem.
Hence, using an effective natural fertilizer for your plants is indeed crucial.
3. Cleaner Air is Good for the Brain
As we universally plant more and more plants and trees in our own little ways so it directly helps in cleansing the air laden with carbon dioxide emissions because of the unsustainable population growth. Carbon dioxide becomes a part of a photosynthesis that benefits plants. Conversely, plants release life-giving oxygen to animals including man. Cleaner air promotes mental health.
Zhang et al. (2017) revealed that air quality affects mental health. Their results support the so-called Easterlin paradox. The paradox builds on the idea that in the long term, economic growth may not bring more happiness to people because of the externalities of such development such as air pollution.
4. Inner Joy
Planting and gardening provides you an ample inner joy beyond compare, for there is an unequivocal beauty in the mere simplicity of an astral blooming dale flower, fruit trees, and plants in the wilderness. The immeasurable happiness found in gardening and planting—You will feel as light as a feather and exude a positive vibe around you thus inspire the people in your inner circle of family and close friends. This gives you a sublime life, existing as an often repressed part of one’s psychological make-up.
Gardening and planting won’t materialize unless you come to God the Father, and God the Son in order for Him to water your soul and spirit and give joy as Jesus fills your hunger and thirst.
Ensure you get the positive effects of how gardening and planting works and give joy, planting and planting in the LORD’s grace and mercy.
5. Therapeutic Effects, Relieves Stress
Recently, we have all seen a very significant upswing in therapeutic gardening. A therapeutic garden is specially designed to facilitate interaction with the healing elements of nature from the entrance, to the design of the colors and sizes of plants and flowers and trees. This promotes well being and takes away stress for people with physical ailments.
In 2018, according to studies mentioned by Amy Chillag on CNN, gardening becomes healing with horticultural therapy. Digging in soil and planting seeds totally helps recovery and further shortens the patient’s hospital stays.
10 Bible Verses Related to Gardening and Mental Health
Please ponder on these selected bible verses on gardening and mental health. Surely, these verses will inspire you to plant and reap not only the mental benefits but also the spiritual benefits that we humans need.
Gardening and Planting Verses
Fruit trees of all kinds will grow on both banks of the river. Their leaves will not wither, nor will their fruit fail. Every month they will bear fruit, because the water from the sanctuary flows to them. Their fruit will serve for food and their leaves for healing.”
Ezekiel 47:12
For the earth brings forth its sprouts. And as a garden causes the things sown in it to spring up. So the LORD God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.
Isaiah 61: 11
Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously.
2 Corinthians 9:6
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
Revelation 22:1-2
Sow your seed in the morning, and at evening let your hands not be idle, for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that, or whether both will do equally well.
Ecclesiastes 11:6
Mental Health Verses
For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.
2 Timothy 1: 7
Be careful for nothing; but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your request be made known to God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds thru Christ Jesus.
Philippians 4: 6-7
Casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.
1 Peter 5:7
So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Matthew 6:34
For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace
Romans 8:6
References
Amy Chillag, C. (2022). Working with plants as therapy. Retrieved 8 May 2022, from https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/03/health/sw-horticultural-therapy/index.html
Lin, Y. J., Lin, C. Y., & Li, Y. C. (2014). Planting hope in loss and grief: self-care applications of horticultural therapy for grief caregivers in Taiwan. Death Studies, 38(9), 603-611.
Söderback, I., Söderström, M., & Schälander, E. (2004). Horticultural therapy: the ‘healing garden’and gardening in rehabilitation measures at Danderyd Hospital Rehabilitation Clinic, Sweden. Pediatric rehabilitation, 7(4), 245-260.
Tseng, W. S. W., Ma, Y. C., Wong, W. K., Yeh, Y. T., Wang, W. I., & Cheng, S. H. (2020). An indoor gardening planting table game design to improve the cognitive performance of the elderly with mild and moderate dementia. International journal of environmental research and public health, 17(5), 1483.
Wiseman, T., & Sadlo, G. (2015). Gardening: An occupation for recovery and wellness. In International handbook of occupational therapy interventions (pp. 797-809). Springer, Cham.
Zhang, X., Zhang, X., & Chen, X. (2017). Happiness in the air: How does a dirty sky affect mental health and subjective well-being?. Journal of environmental economics and management, 85, 81-94.
