A Little Green Help for Your Mental Health
- Aug 28
- 4 min read
Originally published in Ukrainian in February 2025. This English version was translated and adapted by the author.
If you’ve ever had surgery—any surgery, even a relatively minor one—you know that the period afterward is rarely pleasant. A lot depends, of course, on what exactly was removed, repaired, or stitched back together, but recovery is usually painful, uncomfortable, or both.
So you can imagine how people might feel after a thyroidectomy, the surgical removal of the thyroid gland.
Researchers Park and Mattson had an opportunity to observe postoperative recovery in 80 patients undergoing this procedure. After surgery, the patients were assigned to one of two types of hospital rooms. The luckier group recovered in rooms containing 12 leafy and flowering plants; the rest stayed in standard hospital rooms of the bed-and-walls variety.
Then came the data collection, naturally: length of hospital stay, use of pain medication, vital signs, ratings of pain intensity, pain-related distress, anxiety, fatigue, and so on.
The results were striking. Patients recovering in rooms with plants and flowers had shorter hospital stays, required less pain medication, and reported lower levels of pain, anxiety, and fatigue. They also—perhaps less surprisingly—reported more positive feelings and greater satisfaction with their rooms than patients in the control group [1]. And this is not the only study of its kind.
Back in 1984, Science—still one of the world’s leading scientific journals—published a paper under the wonderfully direct title, “View Through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery.” Its abstract begins:
“To determine whether assigning a hospital room with a window overlooking a natural setting might have restorative effects, researchers examined the recovery records of patients who underwent cholecystectomy [gallbladder removal] at a suburban Pennsylvania hospital between 1972 and 1981. Twenty-three surgical patients assigned to rooms with windows overlooking nature had shorter postoperative hospital stays, received fewer negative evaluative comments in nurses’ notes, and required fewer doses of potent pain medication than 23 matched patients in otherwise similar rooms whose windows faced a brick building wall.” [2]
Well, there you have it. In this light, the old habit of bringing flowers when we visit someone in the hospital suddenly takes on a whole new bloom—and gives us something to think about.
You don’t actually have to go under the knife, or even end up in a hospital, to potentially benefit from having living plants in your environment. Of course, not all of us have the luxury of looking out onto a forest, or even a backyard. But many of us can see at least some greenery from our windows. And if we can’t, we can always bring some of that greenery indoors:
We spend a lot of time—probably more than is good for us—implicitly treating ourselves as somehow separate from our surroundings. I’m not saying this to blame or lecture anyone. Sociologists were sounding the alarm about this as far back as the last century: increasingly atomized societies, the erosion (or, fine, transformation) of traditional institutions and small communities, and our growing alienation from nature. Progress has given us some wonderful things, but not for free. Sometimes it is useful simply to notice the price.
One thing that noticing can do is gently nudge us—gently, as we like it—toward understanding, not just intellectually but perceptually and almost physically, that we are not separate from our environment.
It may feel as though our skin is where “we” end and the outside world begins. But even in a strictly biological sense, the boundary is much fuzzier than that: we are constantly exchanging microorganisms with the world around us. We rarely include those organisms when we think about our identity, yet without them we would not quite be us.
What we see, hear, touch—and especially what we are exposed to repeatedly—affects how we feel. Or, in the language of Dr.Lisa Feldman Barrett, information from the environment helps shape the predictions our brains make about reality, including the emotions they construct (more here on the difference between classical theories of emotion and the theory of constructed emotion) [3].
Of course, most of us cannot spend the majority of our waking hours in a forest or by the sea. But almost all of us can give our brains a little more material from which to construct something pleasant—simply by putting living flowers or plants somewhere we will see them often:
If you were already firmly in the houseplant-and-fresh-flowers camp before reading this, you can now enjoy a little scientific reinforcement for your habit.
And if you’ve never paid much attention to the plants around you, I hope this gives you a reason to reconsider. There might be way more in it that simply meets the eye.
Sources:
1 — Seong-Hyun Park. Richard H Mattson. Therapeutic Influences of Plants in Hospital Rooms on Surgical Recovery. HortScience 44(1). February 2009. DOI:10.21273/HORTSCI.44.1.102. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277867591_Therapeutic_Influences_of_Plants_in_Hospital_Rooms_on_Surgical_Recovery
2 — Ulrich RS. View through a window may influence recovery from surgery. Science. 1984 Apr 27;224(4647):420-1. doi: 10.1126/science.6143402. PMID: 6143402.
3 — Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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