Walking in nature does seem to be better for your brain than walking in a city, at least for the hour or two afterward. In small experiments, a walk through a park or forest eased rumination and calmed stress-linked brain areas, while the same walk along a busy road didn't.
The detail most write-ups skip is what "city" meant. In almost every study it was a traffic-heavy road or a shopping street, and the "nature" walk was often green space inside a city.
Maybe your daily walk is the stretch along the main road to work, or laps of the block at lunch. You may wonder whether it does anything for your head. It still counts for your body. For your mind, which street you take may matter more than how far you go.
Is Walking in Nature Better for Your Brain Than a City Walk?
In the short term, yes. Four experiments compared a nature walk with an urban one of the same length, and each found a benefit that only the nature walk produced.
| Study | Who walked | Nature walk | City walk | What the nature walk improved more |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stanford, 2015 | Healthy adults | 90 minutes in grassland with oak trees | 90 minutes beside a four-lane road | Less rumination and less activity in a brain area tied to it |
| Stanford, 2015 | 60 adults | 50 minutes in a natural area | 50 minutes in an urban area | Less anxiety and rumination, better working memory |
| Michigan, 2012 | 20 adults with major depression | About 50 minutes in an arboretum | About 50 minutes on downtown streets | Better memory span, a bigger lift in good mood |
| Berlin, 2022 | 63 healthy adults aged 18 to 47 | 60 minutes in an urban forest | 60 minutes on a busy shopping street | Lower activity in the amygdala, a stress-linked area |
These are small studies, mostly of young adults near universities. They measured what happened right after one walk. None of them followed people for months.
What Did the "City Walk" Mean in These Studies?
Mostly traffic. Stanford's urban group walked along a traffic-heavy four-lane roadway, while the nature group walked through grassland scattered with oaks and shrubs. In Michigan, the downtown route was largely on traffic-heavy streets. In Berlin, it was a busy shopping street with malls.
Now look at the nature side. The Michigan walk was in the Ann Arbor Arboretum, which the researchers describe as a park near campus. The Berlin team walked people through the Grunewald, and their paper calls it an urban forest.
So the contrast tested was quiet green space against a loud, busy street, both inside or near a city. A walk through your local park is much closer to the "nature" condition than to the "city" one.
The busy street didn't seem to make things worse for the brain, at least in Berlin. There, amygdala activity was stable in the urban environment, which the authors read as a lack of evidence that the street walk raised it. It just didn't bring the calm the forest did. For the body, traffic is a different story, covered below.
How Does Walking in Nature Change the Brain?
Two brain areas linked to worry and stress went quieter after a nature walk. Both results come from scans taken shortly after a single walk in healthy adults.
In the 2015 Stanford study, a 90-minute nature walk decreased both self-reported rumination and activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex. The authors note this area has been tied to the self-focused withdrawal seen in rumination. The urban walk changed neither.
Rumination is replaying the same worry over and over. The Stanford team describes it as linked to a higher risk of depression and other mental illnesses. That's why a drop after one walk caught their interest. If looping thoughts are a daily pattern for you, how to break the rumination cycle has more tools.
The Berlin study scanned 63 people, 29 of them women, before and after a one-hour walk. Activity in the amygdala, which the authors call a key stress-related brain region, fell after the forest walk only. The participants had no diagnosed psychological or neurological conditions.
The second Stanford study looked at feelings and thinking rather than scans. Sixty people randomly assigned to a 50-minute nature walk had decreased anxiety, rumination, and negative affect compared with the urban group. They also did better on a demanding working memory task.
Does Walking in Nature Help With Depression?
It may help your thinking and mood for a while, but it's no replacement for treatment. Only one of these studies tested people with depression.
In Michigan, 20 adults diagnosed with major depression, 12 of them women, each did both walks a week apart, in a counterbalanced order. The routes were matched at 2.8 miles (4.5 km). Before each walk, they were asked to think through a painful, unresolved memory.
Memory span rose after the arboretum walk and not after the downtown one. Good mood rose more after nature, while bad mood eased after both walks. The researchers had worried a solo walk might leave depressed people ruminating and feeling worse, and that didn't happen.
The authors say nature walks may be useful clinically as a supplement to existing treatments. They also flag their small sample of 19 people with complete data, and that volunteers may have been more motivated than most people with depression.
Is Walking Along a Busy Road Bad for Your Body?
It's still exercise, but traffic fumes can blunt some of the gain, at least in older adults. A study from Imperial College London tested this directly.
Researchers asked 119 volunteers over 60 to walk for two hours, once on Oxford Street and once in Hyde Park. Some were healthy and some had stable COPD or heart disease. In the park, lung capacity improved within the first hour and often stayed better for over 24 hours.
Arteries got less stiff in the park too, by more than 24% at most in healthy and COPD volunteers. On Oxford Street, the best change for healthy volunteers was 4.6%, and lung capacity rose only a little. The researchers suggest older adults walk in green spaces away from traffic pollution.
This was not a study of younger women, so the size of the effect may differ for you. Walking still counts wherever you do it, and how much walking you need for health covers the amounts that matter for your heart.
