If Lost Start Here is a guide for the anxious, curious, lonely and lost. Featuring everyday places and at-home prompts designed to help you live a life that feels good.
If Lost Start Here is a guide for the anxious, curious, lonely and lost. Featuring everyday places and at-home prompts designed to help you live a life that feels good.
You’ve chosen to explore the Nature Section of our Guidebook.
The human brain and body react to nature in ways that enhance our sense of connection, reduce pain, help fight anxiety, and allow us to experience a deep sense of calm. Additionally, time in nature has been shown to lower blood pressure, increase immunity, boost creativity, reduce anxiety and depression, improve concentration, and improve work satisfaction.
Devoting some time to nature is sure to leave you better than it finds you.
Here you’ll discover more ways being in nature can benefit your mental health and emotional well-being.
Need some inspiration for how to bring more nature into your life and access its well-being benefits?
Check out the guide entries below. Here we feature places designed to allow you to immerse yourself in nature: a botanical garden, a garden center, and a succulent-making workshop.
We cover the festivals that celebrate the great outdoors.
And we go from the innovative and unusual—bouncing in a converted quarry—to the frankly down and dirty—getting muddy on an adventure course.
You can even go classic and plan a visit to a National Park or National Trust.
P.S. When we say nature we mean all of it: don’t forget our blue spaces (oceans, lakes, rivers) are equally as impactful as our green ones.
Explore 42 Acres, a 173-acre regenerative estate and nature reserve in Somerset offering transformative retreats and nature-based experiences. Swim in the lake, meditate in the treehouse, or nourish yourself with farm-to-table food grown on-site.
Seek out this farm in Somerset centered on learning and creativity, exchanging skills and ideas, while connecting you with the healing properties of nature. It’s truly a place to grow.
Discover a community of friendly and fun-loving women of all ages, backgrounds and fitness levels based in the UK. With Women Outdoors, founder Emma Winters has created an environment where you can be your authentic self, develop outdoor skills, connect with like-minded women and go home with a big smile on your face.
Discover why we’re supporting Mental Healh Swims, the multi-award-winning mental health peer support community.
Discover the well-being benefits of a world-class botanical garden beloved by locals and visitors alike
Seek wonder at The Lost Gardens of Heligan and discover a land once forgotten.
We talk to Rachel Ashe about the social enterprise she founded that offers mental health peer support through cold water dips.
We spoke with Karen Brazier about how Dorset’s FOLDE is connecting more people with nature and how this contributes to their, as well her own, wellbeing.
The sea contains multitudes and it is exactly this complexity that keeps calling designer Sarah Robertson to it in moments of loss and need.
We speak to Amber Rich, founder of The Little Retreat and The Big Retreat Festival about how she arrived at these projects, how wellness is now something that we all reach for, and her role as a curator of discovery and awe.
A garden and studio in Hackney promoting the well-being benefits of herbs and our connection with nature.
A London based not-for-profit bringing the therapeutic benefits of gardening to young people and changing who gets to garden one project at a time.
As we’re forced to head outside this winter, we’re looking to an open-air art museum for awe and wonder in a natural setting.
Beyond the best name for a store dedicated to cacti, Prick is making wider access to the greenery we all need part of its mission.
As many of us have realized how vital nature is to how we function in our worlds, places like Fforest have been holding that idea for a while for us.
In a moment when time is stretching out, Anthony Gormley’s “Iron Men” captures the wonder of shifting lives.
Is it too soon to start planning for a different year? The Good Life Experience is one festival that might get you back to enjoying everything that life has to offer.
Head to Pilea to choose a houseplant that won’t just brighten your room but also brighten your day.
Simon Hodgson writes about what wild swimming, pebbly stones notwithstanding, does for his sense of wellbeing.
Illustrator Michaela Hobson revisits an old favorite, London’s Natural History Museum, and finds a place for inspiration, knowledge and respite.
Writer Tiffany Francis-Baker takes us both back in time and brings us into the moment on the South Downs.
Zabby Allen, and her dog, find a world away from London as we know it, and a place to make her world just a little less isolated.
What does one of the most popular visitor attractions in the UK have to do with wellbeing? A lot it would seem.
The Sheppey rewards those who seek it out with character in abundance, and music to pay attention to, thoughtful rooms to suit your different moods and barrels of cider on the bar to blurry away your day.
The Bear Trail gives you full nature immersion in the up-to-your-knees/waist/neck mud version. This is an outdoor adventure assault course for adults and kids that starts with things to scramble over and ends in the showers!
As MindFood’s motto goes, “Gardening is cheaper than therapy and you get tomatoes.” The Ealing-based social enterprise has this idea at its core: it’s founded on nature and uses food as the framework for figuring out our mental health concerns.
Bryony Gordon launched Mental Health Mates as “a sort of walking/running group for the people for whom it is perfectly normal to feel weird”. Right from its start in London a few years ago people have consistently shown up, with outings now throughout the UK and abroad.
Maybe the problem is less about who we are and how we escape and more about the walls we try to contain ourselves within.
Neuroscientist Dr. Daya Grant discovers a sanctuary in Los Angeles for reflection and a moment of respite from it all.
A plant shop in Portland that does it all just that little bit differently, from the plants they stock to how they think about the environment.
At a moment when many of us are turning to nature, guest writer Kat Vellos finds her calm at Tilden Regional Park
Rawly Bold Founder Pamela Delgado on why New York’s Governors Island is the place she turns to when she needs some balance in her life.
Moab is a place to discover yourself in the present, but with a deep sense of being cradled by the past. A place to feel beloved on the earth.
The great irony of Marfa is that it isn’t really trying to be anything other than what it is: a tiny, dusty Texas town. The city of Marfa website pitches it as “more than just a place. . . . It’s a state of mind,” but my mom and I agreed that that gives the wrong idea.
Most city gardens are well manicured and pretty to visit, but Descanso maintains a unique kind of messiness that instantly transports you into a magical world of plants, trees, and flowers.
Waking up in Joshua Tree was waking up in another world. Had I even seen the sun rise before? Had the light ever touched anything with such intention?? It hit me fairly quickly what people find appealing about this place. In the light of day, the landscape feels less like a barren wasteland and more like a waiting canvas, a palpable feeling of possibility filling the limitless space.
A birdwatching collective founded by and for people of colour that’s as much about mental health, creativity, ecology and community as ornithology.
We talk to Rachel Ashe about the social enterprise she founded that offers mental health peer support through cold water dips.
We spoke with Karen Brazier about how Dorset’s FOLDE is connecting more people with nature and how this contributes to their, as well her own, wellbeing.
We speak to Amber Rich, founder of The Little Retreat and The Big Retreat Festival about how she arrived at these projects, how wellness is now something that we all reach for, and her role as a curator of discovery and awe.
Here's our curated list of the best places to stop en route to Devon or Cornwall.
Embrace nature's healing power and find clarity amidst the chaos.
Explore our guide to UK wellbeing destinations that get you outdoors, help you connect with others, and have more fun. Discover the places we seek out to feel good during the summer months.
Looking for something else? Where will you go next?