Can Nature Tame the Burnout Pandemic?

The science says yes.

24 November 2023 - Johanna Sorrentino

Virginie Wagnon describes her burnout as “a descent into hell.” A successful Head of Unit for a European institution in Luxembourg, she was often sought out as a solutions person, and had gained the trust of her reports and superiors.

A sharp increase in workload combined with a sudden lack of support on the job left her working 55 to 60 hours a week. “I had no time for anything else but work… I isolated myself from the world. A void was building around me and especially inside me. I ate anything and everything: I had to fill that void,” Wagnon recalls. “I slept less and less—I was turning into a zombie.”

Despite this, Wagnon said her perfectionist personality, and her brain, continued to push her to excel at work.

But her body was sending her big warnings. She experienced two blackouts where she “fell asleep” in one place and woke up in another, not remembering what happened in between. Eventually, she couldn’t connect ideas anymore, and she stopped responding to emails or phone calls. “I cried in shame,” she says. “I have to admit that, until then, I thought it was just lazy people who suffered from burnout… I couldn't imagine that I could be affected by it. Yet I was!”

Wagnon’s experience is not singular. When she was pushed into a state of chronic stress, former Human Resources Manager Anaïs Bouillet thought it was just a seasonal virus. “After a few weeks of leave, I had to face the truth,” Bouillet says. “My body and mind had pushed me to a breaking point. It was time to stop before the damage became more serious, or irreparable.”

The World Health Organization lists burnout in its International Classification of Diseases, and defines it as a syndrome “resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”

A less clinical description comes from social psychologist Christina Maslach, who defines burnout as “psychological and physical exhaustion” that is the result of “a fundamental mismatch between the nature of a person and the nature of the circumstances.”

This mismatch is becoming more and more prevalent in our modern culture. As organizational psychologist Marcus Muller describes in his book The ABC of Life, “Due to the increasing numbers and extent of stress triggers in modern life, we see substantial increases in rates of people who continuously burn more psychosomatic energy than they generate, ultimately leading to burnout.”

The statistics on the prevalence of burnout back this up. According to a 2020 Gallup report, a staggering 76% of employees have experienced burnout on the job, and the report shows that these individuals are 63% more likely to take a sick day and 2.6 times more likely to look for new work. And even those who stay may see impairments in their ability to contribute to their teams.

According to Muller, who has studied the impact of burnout on organizations, “Productivity losses for U.S. companies due to workers and employees underperforming as a result of switching to survival mode at work are in the hundreds of billions of dollars each year.”

Rising out of survival mode required a total reset for Wagnon and Bouillet, which meant time off from work, and more time in nature.

“Living near a forest, I visited it every day without fail. Over time, I spent more time in the forest, covering greater distances,” Bouillet says. “I experienced the benefits of this immersion in the forest on the physical, psychological, and physiological spheres of my organism. The intense headaches I had before my first nature retreat disappeared quickly. I felt more relaxed, and my energy levels increased.”

Wagnon sought out nature as a way to get back to basics, and back to herself. “The doctor wanted to prescribe antidepressants, but I didn't want that—I wasn't depressed,” she says. “I wanted to find natural solutions, so I started by walking in the forest nearby and enjoying these moments for myself and with myself.”

In the last decade, the research community has unearthed scientific evidence of what these two women experienced in the forest. It turns out contact with nature engages all five senses in the healing process. This includes visually calming scenery and the beneficial scent of phytoncides—tree essential oils with medicinal properties.

An international study with contributing research from Korea, Japan and Finland showed that, among the 48 participants, negative mood states and anxiety levels decreased significantly by forest walking compared with urban walking.

For the study participants on the forest walk, these natural elements had an overall positive effect on cardiovascular relaxation, resulting in an activation of the parasympathetic nervous system—the network of nerves that relaxes your body—and a suppression of the “fight-or-flight” response of the sympathetic nervous system.

The forest environment was also shown to relax the central nervous system, suppressing the release of stress hormones such as cortisol, adrenaline, and noradrenaline. A questionnaire completed by participants showed that those who walked in the forest experienced fewer negative mood states such as tension-anxiety, anger-hostility, fatigue, and confusion, compared with those who walked in an urban environment.

Bouillet says walking in nature allowed her brain to make the space necessary for long-term problem-solving. She later learned this had a name, Attention Restoration Theory, posited by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan in The Experience of Nature.

In front of a natural landscape, the brain can relax and wander without a specific goal. This allows it to enter a state of undirected attention or “gentle fascination”, which helps to fight against mental fatigue.

This mental restoration is found to be effective even in professions with a high rate of chronic stress and burnout, such as the medical field. A 2018 study of nurses on their daily work breaks found that those who took a 20-minute break in the hospital garden saw significant psychological benefits compared to nurses taking indoor breaks, and concluded that this may be a simple way to mitigate burnout within the medical profession.

By aligning these two bodies of research, nature emerges as an effective and accessible tool for reducing the negative psychological symptoms of burnout. It doesn’t make work-related stress disappear, but the data indicates that nature can slow down the negative spiraling that comes from burnout by both limiting the energy outflow and increasing the energy inflow.

L’Université dans la Nature (UdN) works at the centerpoint of this data, educating practitioners to apply the research towards preventing and addressing the growing burnout pandemic.

Should it have to take a complete burnout like the ones experienced by Wagnon and Bouillet before individuals are supported to seek the health benefits of nature?

For Wagnon and Bouillet, the answer is no. That’s why they decided to turn their own experience with burnout into an opportunity to help others by becoming certified guides through UdN’s Nature (Re)Connection program.

Bouillet uses her UdN training to offer forest therapy to others in Lorraine and Luxembourg, helping them understand “why nature has benefits for us and why it is necessary to (re)create this connection with it as quickly as possible.”

Also looking to transition her career, Luxembourg-based nature coach Isabel Van de Voorde enrolled in the Ecoleader program at UdN as a way to combine her passion for the outdoors with her goal of enhancing mental well-being at work. “The program of Université dans la Nature helped me to truly understand the evolution of the relationship between humans and nature and how nature re-connection impacts our wellbeing,” she says.

Van de Voorde says her new profession faces some challenges, particularly in corporate environments where the stigma of nature re-connection as unconventional is greatest.

That’s why she says standardizing the practice is so crucial. Guides certified by UdN have the knowledge and skills to create transformative experiences in the forest for a wide range of groups, teaching them what the science shows about nature’s impact on mental and physical health.

Accessibility to natural spaces in which to have these experiences is another key challenge UdN aims to address.

More of the world’s population lives in urban areas than ever before, a trend that is projected to accelerate, but our human evolution has not adapted to need nature less—the science, and Wagnon and Bouillet’s stories, prove this. But for Bouillet, the solution is simple: “Place nature at the heart of everyone's life.”

To this end, UdN also offers nature-based activities and programs to disadvantaged people, and works to put the scientific evidence into the hands of decision-makers.

Nature calls out to us as a relatively easy, scientifically proven way to diminish and prevent mentral stress and attentional fatigue—and even help employees recover from burnout. All we have to do is sit still long enough to hear it.

Sources:

Burnout an "occupational phenomenon": International Classification of Diseases. (2019). https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burnout-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases

Cordoza, M. et al. (2018). Impact of Nurses Taking Daily Work Breaks in a Hospital Garden on burnout. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30385543/

Employee burnout: The Biggest Myth. (2020). https://www.gallup.com/workplace/288539/employee-burnout-biggest-myth.aspx

Envisioning the Future of Cities (2022). https://unhabitat.org/sites/default/files/2022/06/wcr_2022.pdf

Kaplan R., Kaplan S. The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective. (1989) Cambridge University Press

Lee, J., et al. (2014). Influence of Forest Therapy on Cardiovascular Relaxation in Young Adults. https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ecam/2014/834360/

Muller, M., The ABC of Life. (2023). Amsterdam University Press.

Johanna Sorrentino is a writer and content strategist specializing in health, science, and education. You can read more of her work and connect with her on LinkedIn.

The science says yes.

Nature-Based Urban Planning