Nature Reduces Pain, According to Brain Scans

When it comes to human health and wellbeing, nature appears to be the gift that keeps on giving.

Nature “prescriptions” are providing mental and physical health benefits, such as reduced blood pressure and lower depression and anxiety scores.

A walk in nature has been shown to enhance specific executive control processes in the brain to a greater extent than what is associated with exercise.

Nature has also helped humans treat disease; approximately 40% of pharmaceutical products on the market today are drawn from nature and traditional knowledge – with a helping hand from modern science of course.

Now, a team of neuroscientists from the University of Vienna has published brain scan evidence demonstrating that exposure to nature can reduce pain. The research is available in Nature Communications.

Can nature alter pain perception?

In 1984, Dr. Roger S. Ulrich published a report in Science showing that surgery patients who had a window view of trees in their hospital room were prescribed less analgesics, had more positive outcome notes from healthcare providers and left the hospital earlier when compared to patients facing a brick wall. Ulrich’s study was one of the first to suggest nature might have analgesic effects, but the mechanisms underpinning such effects have not yet been identified.

While significant research has continued exploring links between nature and experiences of pain, many studies have faced methodological limitations.

“Most previous evidence is based on self-reported measures of pain,” Max Steininger, a doctoral student at the University of Vienna, and lead author of the new Nature Communications study, told Technology Networks.

“Although such measures are important, they are also associated with several drawbacks. For instance, self-reported pain is influenced by many different factors that are not specifically related to pain. Whether or not a person tells you something is painful depends on the actual sensory signal the person receives from the body (in the context of pain, this is called nociception), on emotional aspects (fear, anxiety and anger), cognition or memory,” he continued.

Steininger added that, while all these factors shape the subjective experience of pain, they also occur in other phenomena, meaning they are not unique to pain. That’s why, in the new study, Steininger sought to test the hypothesis that exposure to nature would not only reduce self-report responses to pain but also neural responses, or “pain signatures”, in the brain.

Forty-nine participants (25 male and 24 female) permitted their brain activity to be measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they were subjected to electric shocks that elicited acute, transient pain. “Using functional MRI helped us achieve a more definite answer whether the changes we see are truly specific to pain because certain neural responses show a very high specificity to painful but not other phenomena,” Steininger said.

The electric shocks were administered while participants were exposed to different “blocks” of virtual environments, including an indoor scene, an urban scene and a nature scene. Participants were asked to immediately self-report ratings of experienced pain intensity and unpleasantness. 

Pain signature reduced while watching nature

When participants watched virtual nature scenes, they reported feeling less pain than watching the indoor scenes or urban scenes. Their fMRI data also showed changes in certain brain processing responses.

Steininger and colleagues measured different types of signals in participants’ brains. The first is highly specific to the sensory qualities of the pain – in other words, where it is happening and how intense it is. “We found that this signal was reduced while watching nature scenes,” Steininger said.

Another type of brain signal associated with pain but more related to the emotional and cognitive qualities of the painful experience, was not affected by exposure to nature stimuli. The study therefore provides new evidence as to why nature might produce analgesic effects.

“Our findings suggest that the pain-relieving effect of nature is genuine, although the effect we found was significantly less than that of painkillers,” Steininger said. “People in pain should certainly continue taking any medication they have been prescribed. But we hope, in the future, alternative ways of relieving pain, such as experiencing nature, may be used to help improve pain management.”

Steininger believes that, in the context of acute pain, the findings from this study are actionable right now: “Several studies show that exposure to nature in medical settings (for instance before, during, or after surgery) can help to alleviate pain.”

More research is needed to show if and under which circumstances nature exposure might help alleviate chronic pain, which affects an estimated 30% of the global population. 

Reference: Steininger MO, White MP, Lengersdorff L, et al. Nature exposure induces analgesic effects by acting on nociception-related neural processing. Nat Comms. 2025;16(1):2037. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-56870-2

About the interviewee

Max Steininger is a doctoral student at the University of Vienna.