"Mental well-being must be built into society"

Freddie Lymeus, researcher in environmental psychology

Communities and cities must be built so that the people who live there can feel good. Mental well-being is not only the responsibility of the individual, but of the entire society. It is also a necessity in the sustainability transition. This is according to Freddie Lymeus, researcher in environmental psychology at IBF.

Freddie Lymeus is a psychologist and has worked for a long time with CBT and stress management. He is now researching how people are affected by modern city life, which involves a high information flow and pace, constant performance demands and in many ways unsustainable social development. Much of the focus is on how people can find recovery in their urban everyday life.
– I am interested in nature experiences and why people are often drawn to them when they are tired and stressed and what happens then. As a doctoral student, I developed a meditation training program to recognize the need for recovery and teach how to get in touch with environments and experiences that promote recovery, he says.

The program was developed within the so-called Linnaeus Collaboration for Studies on Nature, Health and Sustainability, which brings together researchers in psychology and other subjects around the opportunities and issues raised in the Botanical Garden in Uppsala. In Linnaeus' time, botanical gardens were at the absolute forefront of science as hubs for research into the importance of plants and nature for human health.
– The Botanical garden is now a part of the museum operations. The garden still makes important contributions to preserving endangered species and educating the public, and it has become an important place for people to relax and enjoy nature. We saw the opportunity to renew it as a research environment, now with a focus on social and behavioral sciences and questions about how such a place can contribute to solutions to today's major challenges. I am the coordinator of the various studies that we are working on. Among other things, we look at how students use the gardens as a recovery environment, what they experience and how it affects them.

For just over 10 years, the Linnaeus Collaboration has conducted field experiments and observational studies of visitors to the garden.
- One thing we have seen is that those who have a need for recovery often seek out parts of the garden with greater species richness. That people seem to be drawn to a more perceptually rich environment that creates the feeling that they are getting away from the demands of everyday life and can be engaged in something else. The living nature reminds us of something bigger and more important than personal aspirations and concerns, says Freddie Lymeus.

In his meditation program, which was developed in the tropical greenhouse in Uppsala, participants practice taking in impressions from their surroundings and letting the environment engage and keep them in the present, as a way of dealing with stress. At the same time, Freddie Lymeus is critical of the fact that psychology often treats stress as a problem to be solved at the individual level.
– Stress-related ill health is an enormously widespread and costly problem and yet the responsibility is often placed on the individual, even though the cause is how we build our cities and organize our work and lives. If we arrange this in a more sustainable way, we could achieve much more, says Freddie Lymeus and continues:
– If we are to address the fundamental problem, we need a broader approach and apply psychological knowledge out in the world, for example in urban and community planning and out in organizations. I try to encourage my students to see and explore the possibility that psychological methods do not have to be limited to conversational treatment of affected individuals and groups.

Over the years, the subject of environmental psychology has gone from being about physical problems in people's everyday environments, such as flickering light bulbs and disturbing background noise in the workplace, to how to build and organize societies that provide better conditions for what we want to achieve, such as sustainable performance and good stress management. In recent years, ecological sustainability and how we as a society deal with this challenge have also been more integrated into the subject area.

Today, the focus, even when it comes to ecological sustainability, tends to end up on motivating and inspiring the individual to make changes, says Freddie Lymeus. But sustainable behavioral change requires more than personal efforts. People need to be given better conditions to experience contact with both their surroundings and themselves.
- They are prerequisites for each other. People are drawn to nature and benefit from nature experiences to handle the demands of everyday life. At the same time, we need to feel okay in order to be present and in touch with the life that is going on around us, and this is a prerequisite for being considerate and acting sustainably in relation to the environment.