Gardening Keeps Your Body Toned, Improves Your Mood, and Reduces Stress

Gardening may seem like just a simple hobby at first, but for most it's so much more than that. While gardening may be enjoyable for a multitude of reasons, it has been proven to do wonders for both your mental and physical health. That's right gardening is more than just a simple activity, it can reduce your stress levels, improve your mood, keep your body toned, and even help those who suffer from depression and PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder).

If you're looking to get into gardening you may be wondering what exactly it does to your body and what the science is behind the fact it can help out with stress and boost your mood. Read on to find out what exactly you need to know about the impact gardening has on your mind.

Gardening Does a Body Good

In 1988, then 32-year-old Robert Stephens (a pseudonym) was misidentified as the armed robber of a 7-11 convenience store from a single frame taken from footage recorded on a grainy, black-and-white security camera. Never having had so much as a parking ticket before his arrest, Robert didn't believe he needed an attorney to handle his arraignment because he was innocent. Robert was wrong.

Held for 42 days in jail with violent offenders before the real criminal was caught in another holdup, Robert emerged from jail to find he had lost his home, his job, and his savings, and he had been unceremoniously dismissed from a major university's doctoral program. All of this happened to Robert without so much as "We're sorry" from his accusers or the police department in the North Carolina city where he had been held. Adding to his distress, Robert learned that a beloved aunt and uncle in that city had provided the police with false information that led to his arrest, for no apparent reason other than meanness, and continue to provide false information for many months thereafter.

At first Robert visited the community-based counseling service to which he had been referred, but when the counselor told him that he could not possibly have grown up in a Czech-speaking community in Texas and maybe he needed in-patient treatment to cure his delusion—Robert fought off a court order for treatment by demonstrating his ability to speak Czech to a linguist brought in from the nearby university—Robert decided to move as far away from North Carolina as he could. He managed to get half a continent away. Anxiety, depression, and fits of despair plagued him, however, until his father gave him half an acre (about 2,000 square meters) on which to plant a garden.

With a hoe, a shovel, a "man" (a long-pronged spading fork for piling soil), Robert began to offer his services raking leaves and cutting weeds for free to obtain the raw materials for his compost pile. A neighbor gave him 150 railroad ties, 6 feet (almost 2 meters) long and weighing 125 pounds (a little under 60 kilos) each. Robert carried them on his shoulders nearly a mile (1600 meters) to his garden site.

Within a year, Robert had a garden site that was the envy of gardeners for miles around. And within 18 months, Robert's flashbacks and post-traumatic stress had abated enough that he was able to work at an 8 to 5 office job to continue rebuilding his professional life. "Gardening gave Robert his life back," his father noted happily.

What is it about gardening that does a body—and the mind—so much good? Gardening helps relieve depression, requires a unique kind of physical exercise, and rewards gardeners with a great source of organic nutrition.
 

Getting Down and Dirty to Relieve Depression

It is possible that Robert's decision to build a compost pile was key to his recovery. A bacterium called Mycobacterium vaccae that is nurtured in the soil, Dr. Christopher Lowery of the University of Colorado at Boulder says, can interact with the human brain.

When this bacterium is absorbed into the human gastrointestinal tract, either from dirty fingers or by inhalation and ingestion while a gardener is working in the dirt, it stimulates the lining of the digestive tract and the brain to release the mood modifying neurotransmitter serotonin. In effect, this species of bacteria that is common in gardens performs the same function as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac and Paxil, only by increasing the brain's supply of serotonin rather than by preventing the reuptake of serotonin.

Changes in brain chemistry are not the only reason gardeners enjoy gardening, but for gardeners who suffer depression and post-traumatic stress, they certainly help. The unique kind of exercise provided by gardening also helps restore metabolic health.

 

Garden Time vs. Gym Time

One of the most popular programs for building muscle in a short time is an exercise system known as P90X. Offering 12 different workout routines plus three 30-day diets, P90X promises to take you from "regular to ripped" in just 90 days. Serious gardeners, however, get some of the same benefits from working out with their flowers and veggies. Here are some similarities between gardening and the P90X program.

P90X requires users to do all the exercises, even the ones they don't like. Any serious gardener is going to run into situations that require exercising all their muscles, even ones they don't usually use.

Robert, for instance, had trouble taking groceries out of his car when he started gardening. After a few months, however, he was able to carry a railroad tie on each shoulder over hundreds of feet of muddy ground to build vegetable and flower beds. A particularly deep-rooted weed may test laterals and glutes, and a gardener who is determined to shoo bunnies from her begonias may find a new ability to sprint. Gardening requires gardeners to use all their muscles, even ones they don't like to use.

P90X requires users to concentrate on form first. Gardening requires gardeners to concentrate on technique to get all their gardening done.

The purpose of mastering form first is to prevent injuries later. Weak muscles are vulnerable muscles. The P90X system ensures that sore muscles and torn ligaments will be kept to a minimum.

Gardeners usually learn the importance of form the hard way. A back injury or a torn rotator cuff may keep a gardener indoors for weeks or even months. However, most gardens eventually become very efficient with routine gardening chores, and build new muscle and new eye-hand coordination skills when Mother Nature poses gardening challenges.

P90X tells its users to make the first month a crash program for success. For gardeners, the critical first month that lays the foundation for future success is called spring.

Gardeners who have space, as well as gardeners who don't, tend put in a lot of physical effort in a very short time as they start their garden seasons. Apartment-dwelling gardeners may lug heavy pots and bags of soil up flights of stairs to balconies and rooftops. Drought-stricken gardeners may carry buckets of water to plants their automatic watering systems don't reach. Frost-fearing gardeners may tuck their plants under frost-protective cloth every night and roll up the cloth every morning, and summer-struck gardeners may follow the opposite routine with shade cloths.

The physical challenge of gardening can make gardeners just as "ripped" as gym aficionados. And gardeners can enjoy the same metabolic benefits.

When a muscle is stressed so much that it needs to build new muscle fibers, there is a two- or three-hour window that it is approximately 50 times more sensitive to insulin. This enables the muscle to take in glucose and water to build the glycogen that "pumps it up," and amino acids to build new and stronger muscle fibers.

The change in insulin sensitivity that P90X encourages by "tricking" muscle groups and that gardening encourages by the reality that there's always something new to do has profound metabolic benefits for the entire body. Gardeners and gym rats alike become metabolically fit as they build new muscle.

And gardeners have the added advantage of being rewarded with healthy, safe, uncontaminated fresh food. Gardeners not only help themselves become more fit, they help the world become more fit, as they meet their needs for nourishment on multiple levels.