How to Increase Your Productivity, Naturally

Increasing happiness, sleep health and physical health and decreasing stress through taking breaks in nature filled spaces.

Whether you’re one of the 1 in 8 households in the UK with no garden and are wondering if going into an office space might be better for you or whether you have a garden and work from home, this blog aims to help you understand how and why taking breaks in nature, particularly in a garden setting,  will increase your productivity.  

How Nature Impacts Our Psychology and in turn our productivity

Many of you will have heard the tern Biophilia but what does that actually mean? Well, as early as the 1960’s the psychoanalyst and social psychologist Erich Fromm defined Biophilia as the ‘passionate love of life and all that is natural’. He went on to then talk about the idea that it’s our modern disconnection from the natural world that is making us unhealthy and unhappy.

In 1984 the Harvard Biologist E.O. Wilson clarified these ideas further in his Biophilia Hypothesis, which said that our cognitive and emotional functioning are mainly influenced by the natural world, and that we have a latent level of attunement to the natural world within us.

More recently, Mo Gadwat in his ‘Solve for Happy’ looks at Biophilia in a way that’s really easy to understand. His happiness equation is that when experience meets expectation, we are happy. He goes on to say that nature makes us happy exactly because it meets our expectations. We never look at nature, for instance a tree and think ‘Oh that’s lovely, except I wish that trunk was a bit straighter’ – we just accept that trees have lots of wavy bendy trunks and branches, that’s the way it is, the way we expect it to be, and that makes us feel happy and relaxed.  

This is interesting because a Warwick University Study has proved that we are around 12% more productive when we are happier, also mentioning that for Google, when they invested in employee support and satisfaction, productivity rose by a whopping 37%. Incidentally, the new Google HQ in London will feature a huge rooftop garden and I’d say they already know a thing or two about why that’s a great idea.  

Taking Breaks in Nature

To return to the idea of Biophilia and to put matters very simply – we as humans have been taken out of our natural habitat and our habitat now often consists of a desk and a computer screen for hours of our day. In order to improve that situation we can at least take our breaks in a nature filled space.

Most of us can only concentrate for around 2 hours maximum so realistically you should be at least taking a 15 minute break every 75 to 90 minutes.  Experts also recommend taking a 5 minute break every 25 minutes to rest your eyes if you’re sitting looking at a screen.

In the 1990’s Stephen and Rachel Kaplan developed ART theory ‘Attention Restoration Theory’, expanding on the Biophilia Hypothesis. They observed that if you spend too long focusing on a task, then you will become fatigued, irritable, distractable and impulsive.  I’m sure this all sounds familiar, and we can all see that none of these traits are great for productivity.

For breaks to be optimally restorative the Kaplans theorised that they should be in nature because nature provides the following qualities: immersion, a change of scene (away from our desks), a sense of ease (enclosed spaces such as gardens provide this sense of security and ease) and features that hold our attention (those would be the plants!).  

In order to further explore this theory, a student of theirs ran an experiment where groups of people were set difficult desk based tasks then took breaks either listening to music, going for a walk in an urban space and going for a walk in a nature filled space. The upshot was that those that took the breaks in a nature filled space were the most refreshed and productive when they went back to their task.

How Nature Impacts Our Physical Health and in turn our productivity

It’s perhaps common sense that as well as being happier, being healthier and less stressed leads to better productivity. However, it’s sleep health that probably has the greatest single impact on our productivity and in a sense, all roads run back to sleep health. The more active and awake we are during the day, the better we sleep. The less stressed we are, the better we sleep. So let’s look at sleep and productivity first of all and then examine how nature filled breaks can improve our physical health and lower stress levels, which in turn, impacts that sleep health.

Turning up to work after a sleepless night has been said to be equivalent to turning up to work after a couple of drinks. In fact, even having less than 6 hours sleep equates to a 40% drop in productivity.

Natural Daylight

So where does nature come in? Well, in order to sleep well, we need to be fully awake during the day – we need to enhance our circadian rhythm– circadian simply being circa (around) dian (a day). Every cell in our body has it’s own clock and together they form our bodyclock, which is controlled by one area in our brain called the superchiasmatic nucleus, which in turn is connected to our eyes. The trigger that turns on and off each cell in our body’s clock is daylight. So getting outside into natural daylight enhances our awakeness.  Sitting by a window is reasonable but the light levels drop by around 40%, so it’s not as effective as going outside. First light in particular, with its high concentration of blue light, is the most effective. So for instance,  taking your morning coffee outside could be a great way to supercharge your productivity. Incidentally, this blue light effect also works in an adverse way at night, which is why we are told to avoid blue light from screens before bed as the blue light is giving our bodies all the wrong signals to prepare for sleep.

Taking your coffee outside first thing in the morning is a great way to boost productivity

Incidental Movement

Outside spaces are also, generally speaking, significantly larger than our indoor spaces and this provides great opportunities for incidental movement, incidental movement being all those little movements we might make during the day that aren’t just sitting at our desk. The first time I got interested in this idea was through a TV programme called ‘Easy Ways to Live Well’ where Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and Steph McGovern followed a Humberside Police department as they made small changes to their working day to increase their movement. One of these was walking meetings outdoors. After a couple of weeks, the changes to weight and blood pressure were really impressive – but of course that was a tiny study. However, in September 2023, The Oxford Population Health Study carried out some research on incidental movement using UK Biobank information, which was so conclusive that it lead the World Health Organisation to change their exercise recommendations.  The recommendation previously stated that for exercise to count it had to be in bouts of 10 minutes or more of continuous movement, which is why for instance if you have a fitness watch, automatic tracking only kicks in if you’ve been moving for 10 minutes. The recommendation now is that  ‘Every Move Counts Towards Better Health’. So here are some ideas -  try walking meetings outside,  just walking away from your desk to have lunch on a bench outside or having a little walk while taking your coffee break. These incidental movements are genuinely beneficial (as well as fun, who said staying fit had to be difficult, miserable or time consuming?)

Walking meetings are an easy way to increase your Incidental Movement

Lowering Stress Levels

Another way to sleep better and to generally increase our health is to lower our stress levels. On this, the RHS helpfully conducted a study on how plants affect our cortisol levels.  They did this by putting a few plants outside people’s front doors on a previously bare street in Sheffield and measuring the effect on the residents’ cortisol levels over a period of 3 months. They found that just having the plants there was equivalent to 8 mindfulness sessions in terms of the measured cortisol reduction in the residents.

Now for my favourite topic as a garden designer – how beauty increases your happiness and lowers stress levels!  Professor Semir Zuki at UCL conducted a series of experiments where he exposed his subjects to various beautiful things while they were in an MRI scanner. The same areas of their brain consistently lit up and those were the areas of the brain that are to do with serotonin and dopamine production. In turn the production of these dampens down cortisol. So, when we experience beauty, we genuinely feel happier and less stressed. It follows then that if we work or take breaks in a beautiful space we will be happier and this, as we established earlier, makes us more productive.

Tom Stuart Smith’s public garden near St Paul’s provides a beautiful space for office workers to break

Microbiomes

Plants and soil also directly affect our physical health by affecting our Microbiomes.   

Being in the physical presence of plants means that they are taking in our carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen, and so purifying the air for us; this is as true for indoor plants as it is for outdoor ones, hence the recent movement to include lots of indoor planting in office spaces. What is less well known as it’s new science, is that what we think of as our human bodies is actually 50% microorganisms such as bacteria and viruses and similarly plants’ surfaces, their leaves and stems are also made up of many millions of micororganisms. Somehow, we exchange these when we are physically close to our mutual benefit. I’d love to know exactly how that happens when the science progresses but for now it’s just interesting as well as slightly weird to know that it does!

Finally, if we have time at all during the working day to actually garden, to get our hands in soil, then again this will increase our physical and mental health as microbes in soil are associated with increased serotonin production and also with regulating our immune function. Some forward thinking workplaces are already providing places for staff to actually garden. For instance, staff at Milton Park, a science, business and technology park in Oxfordshire, designed by ASA Landscape Architects,  have access to raised planters. Here, teams of staff are incentivised to compete to have the best planter. This type of provision has lots of other benefits in a communal workspace like team building and allowing for healthy daytime socialising. However, obviously if you are working from home, you can now feel virtuous, not guilty, for doing a bit of pottering in your garden before work or at lunchtime!

A staff planter at Milton Park

In Conclusion

Taking breaks in a beautiful natural space, in particular in a garden, a private or semi private, ideally enclosed space, where we can feel secure and therefore relaxed, can increase our productivity, while also increasing our physical, mental and sleep health so I’d highly recommend taking breaks in a garden space if you can. If you don’t have your own garden, then try choosing a workspace that has one or is close to a nice bit of public green space to take your coffee and lunch breaks when you can. For the good of our health and our work, we need to lose the idea that being happier and more rested is somehow selfish or unproductive, that beauty is a ‘nice to have’ luxury and that to be productive we must be chained to our desk for hours on end  - because it turns out, in the end, that the exact opposite is true and that is also now scientifically proven.