We all know gardening is good, right? But the real question is, how? How can a seemingly stressful task help your body and mind? What made this hobby the best of them all? Well, today, we’re gonna discuss the health benefits of gardening and how it claimed the crown of “the best hobby” across the globe. We’ll learn the physical and mental benefits of gardening and how gardening can help us make a change to our body, mind, and environment. So without any further ado, let’s jump right in.
Top Health Benefits of Gardening
Though there are many benefits of gardening, here are our top picks.
Physical Health Benefits
Let’s have a look at some of the most prominent and surprising health benefits of gardening. Shall we?
Improve Fitness
Gardening works on all the major muscle groups: legs, arms, back, and core. That is why gardening is one of the greatest hobbies you can develop. It helps lower your blood pressure and anxiety levels while increasing your cardiovascular health and vitamin D levels. Not only does gardening help you maintain a healthy lifestyle, but it can also help you prevent a wide range of diseases.
Whether you maintain vegetable gardens or flower ones, gardening can make you disciplined, organized, calm, and witty. Gardening can also help you improve your balance and grip. This amazing psychological and physical activity can help you refresh your body/mind and sharpen your senses.
Prevent Disease
You may have heard that gardening can protect you from diseases like Alzheimer’s and Dementia, right? If that’s the case, you didn’t hear the rest of it.
To be honest, gardening can do so much more. Not only can it reduce the risk of dementia/Alzheimer’s, but it can also offer you a decent level of protection from a wide range of diseases. Regular and moderate exercise of gardening helps us lower the risk of numerous health complications. The list includes obesity, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, heart disease, stroke, depression, colon cancer, and premature death. But to make sure, you nee3d to spend at least 2.5 hours doing gardening tasks outdoor.
Eat Fresh
This kind of benefit mainly works for those who are growing vegetables and fruits in their garden. You’ll have full freedom to grow your own version of chemical-free, organic fruits and vegetables. Who knows, maybe one visit to the garden will be enough to make yourself a tasty and healthy dish. Many people nowadays find different ways to grow their fresh fruits/vegetables themselves, and that is helping them lead a healthier lifestyle.
This is specially dedicated to those areas where people have little access to fresh food. Some form of gardening doesn’t even require much space and resources to grow. So whether from the back of your yard or from a city balcony, gardening can provide you with fresh, pollutant-free foods.
Flexible Workout
Let me just go straight to the point. For a 150-pound person, one hour of hoeing, weeding and digging zaps 324 calories. So whether you are a fan of burning calories or light or just want to maintain a healthy activity, gardening can help you out.
Gardening requires a fair amount of body movement. So you won’t be needing to hit the gym as frequently as before. Daily gardening will provide you with a consistent workflow of body movements, and that is the only way to stay fit. That is why any health professional will suggest you develop gardening as a hobby.
Heal
I hope you have heard the name of horticultural therapy, right? For those who don’t know, horticultural therapy is the engagement of a person in gardening and plant-based activities facilitated by a trained therapist. Not only will this help you recover faster from your fatigue, but it will also improve your mood and keep you busy while you let your body heal itself.
We all know that stress is one of the greatest enemies of rapid recovery, right? Now, if you engage in gardening with your loved ones beside you, in most cases, that will speed up the recovery process like a charm.
Mental Health Benefits
Now, let’s check out the amazing mental health benefits you’ll get from gardening.
Combat Loneliness
Away from your loved ones for a long time? Well, gardening can help you combat loneliness and make you feel more down to earth. Gardening works as a therapy for even clinically depressed people. Not only is gardening only good for your muscles and bones, but it also works to make you more focused, calm, patient, and relaxed.
This is particularly why many doctors and consultants suggest picking up gardening as a hobby after you retire. This will not only improve the quality of life but also help you pass your idle time. The aerobic exercises gardening offers can be really helpful to maintain a healthy and active lifestyle.
Increase Patience
I’m sure you’ll agree that most of our miseries come from either lack of patience or trying to control things we can’t. Once you start gardening, you realize that you can’t control everything. And things don’t magically appear on your doorstep. You have to lower your expectations and learn to be patient. That is why gardening helps many people get the mental clarity they’ve been searching for.
Gardening teaches not to give up easily; it makes you focused and alert working with sharp tools. Exposure to nature can help you calm your nerves down and help you learn to wait for the right moment.
Reduce Stress
Not only can gardening help you unlock a new viewpoint in life, but it also helps you to feel significantly happier. Gardening will reduce your stress level significantly. Gardening helps release your stress hormone cortisol which controls your mood. Working on a garden also helps in various addiction recovery programs. That is why it has been used as an effective rehabilitation tool for many people out there.
Gardening also helps to adopt a growth mindset that exceeds far beyond the physical benefits.
Have An Impact
One other benefit of gardening is it’ll help you do your part to nature. Digging up garden dirt may not sound so appealing to many of you. But let me assure you that it is worth your every effort. This way, you can help reduce your carbon footprint, leave a healthy and connected life. Whether you are working on community gardens or private gardens, you’ll be helping nature for sure.
Gardening will help you feel more connected with nature and help you to be part of a like-minded community. Not only will gardening help you get positive sensory stimulation, but it will also help you battle climate change and become part of something bigger than yourself.
Epilogue
The physical and phycological effects of gardening are vast. Many research has been conducted on this particular lifestyle across the globe. Most of them concluded the same way, praising and suggesting this amazing and healthy hobby.
That’s all for today. I hope this article proves to be helpful to those in need. Please feel free to share your thoughts and experiences with us in the comment section below. Thanks for reading this far. I wish you all a happy weekend. Happy gardening to you.