Abstract
Therapeutic psychedelic administration and contact with nature have been associated with the same psychological mechanisms: decreased rumination and negative affect, enhanced psychological connectedness and mindfulness-related capacities, and heightened states of awe and transcendent experiences, all processes linked to improvements in mental health amongst clinical and healthy populations. Nature-based settings can have inherently psychologically soothing properties which may complement all stages of psychedelic therapy (mainly preparation and integration) whilst potentiating increases in nature relatedness, with associated psychological benefits. Maximising enhancement of nature relatedness through therapeutic psychedelic administration may constitute an independent and complementary pathway towards improvements in mental health that can be elicited by psychedelics.
Highlights
Nature relatedness has been associated with a broad range of benefits to psychological health and well-being
We propose that the ability of psychedelics to increase nature relatedness may be a component of a more general sense of connectedness so often associated with the psychedelic experience
The experience of awe has been linked to enhanced well-being (Anderson et al, 2018b; Dong and Ni, 2019; Rudd et al, 2012), life satisfaction (Rudd et al, 2012), prosociality (Bai et al, 2017; Piff et al, 2015; Sturm et al, 2020), and reduced negative affect (Lopes et al, 2020), and mental distress (Sturm et al, 2020), in addition to being associated with nature relatedness (Bethelmy and Corraliza, 2019) and pro-environmental behaviour (Wang and Liu, 2019; Zhao et al, 2018), all enduring effects associated with psychedelic use (Gandy, 2019)
Summary
Nature relatedness has been associated with a broad range of benefits to psychological health and well-being. In addition to being a key component of the long-term benefits reported in both clinical and healthy populations undergoing psychedelic sessions (Aday et al, 2020; Barrett and Griffiths, 2018; Johnson et al, 2019), this experience has been found to be strongly associated with enduring positive changes in people’s relationship to nature in a retrospective study of people’s first psychedelic experiences (Kangaslampi et al, 2020).
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