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There's no better feeling than getting outside in the sun and soil, whether we re working in large landscapes or in a few containers on a front porch. We're rewarded each day with beautiful trees, shrubs and flowers in our landscapes and abundant fruits and vegetables from our gardens. If you've never gardened before and you're wondering what all the fuss is about,you should stop hesitating about it and give it a try. Gardening is one of the most rewarding hobbies you can take up, with long-lasting positive effects on yourself, your community, and the world at large.
Gardening is a great form of exercise for your physical health. General gardening is a low to medium impact form of exercise that requires a certain amount of strength and stretching to perform. This amount of strength and stretching works all of the major muscle
Groups. One benefit of this workout is that it may decrease the shortage of calcium in the bone later in life. Because of its low impact nature, gardening makes for an excellent activity for those who are older, have disabilities or suffer from chronic pain.
The love of gardening and beautification can be a real boon for local communities.Residents who live in areas with natural landscapes know their neighbors better, spend more time outdoors, and generally live in a safer environment. Beautifying roads can have the dual effect of providing pleasing roadside landscapes while at the same time providing natural ways to make the roads somewhat safer for surrounding communities. A growing phenomenon across the country that backs up gardening and the sense of community is the rising
Popularity of community gardens. Whether it's someone with an extra plot of land to share with their neighbors or a group of row houses getting together on a vacant lot to share in the harvest of happy gardening, community gardens bring neighbors and families together through hard work and a shared bounty.
Besides all of the benefits that gardening provides to ourselves and our local communities,gardening offers an even greater benefit to the world around us. We live in a reciprocal relationship with our plants. Plants can use sunshine to produce food from both the carbon dioxide we breathe out and the water they take in through their roots. In turn, these plants send out oxygen which allows us to breathe and prevent polluted water from reaching into streams and lakes. What's more, the plants we grow help to provide both food and shelter to wildlife, allowing for a diverse natural habitat.
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How Loneliness Affects Our Health and Well-being
We've all experienced loneliness from time to time. As humans are an incredibly social species, being alone or left out of a group causes the inevitable feeling that we experience as loneliness. Although feeling lonely is a normal part of being human, it doesn't mean that loneliness——especially prolonged loneliness is healthy.
Loneliness may do harm to the body. Scientists believe that since humans evolved to live in groups, being alone would make people more vulnerable to threats. Thus, loneliness is associated with paying more atention to threatening informnation. For example, when presented with photos of threatening and non-threatening faces, the brains of lonely adults process threatening information faster. This suggests feeling lonely puts our bodies on high alert,making us more responsive to threat than we typically are. While this hyper-vigilance can be adaptive when there is really an imminent threat to worry about, it also takes a toll on the body: Attention to threat increases our stress hormones, which in turn increases our blood pressure and affects the functioning of our immune systems.
There is also direct evidence that loneliness has an immediate impact on our brain. One study revealed that afer periods of being socially isolated, adults showed activation in similar brain regions that are active when we're hungry. Another study looked at adults' brains during an activity after researchers convinced them that they were being excluded from a game with their peers. The parts of the brain that were most active when the adults thought they were being excluded are the same parts of the brain that are active when we feel physical pain.These suggest that loneliness literally hurts.
Then, what should we do? The obvious solution is to look for social support wherever we can find it. In a study of children who mostly grew up among a number of risk factors including poverty and family problems, the children who had the best outcomes on a number of measures had support from different people in their lives, including grandparents, youth leaders, and members of voluntary organizations. So having people in our life that support us can obviously help fight feelings of loneliness. We can also reach out to someone and talk about our feelings when we feel lonely, and we might find that we aren't as alone as we might have thought.
But what if we don't have enough social support? Research suggests that giving social support might be just as important for relieving stress as taking it. While both giving and receiving social support were related to better psychological outcomes, giving support was related to lower threat activity in the brain during a stressful task. So, helping others may do just as much to cope with the stress of loneliness as getting support from others, if not more.
In conclusion, feeling lonely is a normnal part of being human, but it could cause serious health consequences. Fortunately, we can fight loneliness by getting or giving social support.
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