Nature relieves pain

The natural environment the ability to condense pain has already been observed before, when people’s feelings have been asked. But does the sensation of pain itself weaken or does the same pain only disturb less if nature strengthens the general feeling of well-being?

It’s about the weakening of the sensation, says the freshman research. Researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to measure the activity of different parts of the brain while people watched and listened to landscapes from videos and received mild electric shocks.

Videotaped the shore of a natural lake made the pain feel milder than an equally peaceful city pond or an office room.

In the brain, the reduction was seen so that the parts of the neural network that receive and process the sensation of pain work more slowly. So the difference did not arise in the parts dealing with feelings, moods and thinking, which give different meanings to pain.

It might be worth taking nature experiences as part of pain management, the researchers say in their article in the journal Nature Communications.

Published in Science in Nature 6/2025.