a little green · two minutes · new this season
Being near living things feels good; the interesting part is how little it takes. A 2015 meta-analysis pooled 32 studies of brief contact with nature — a walk, a view, sometimes only pictures — and found a reliable lift in positive feeling from minutes, not hours. A 2019 study of nearly twenty thousand adults in England found the weekly dose that matters most: about two hours, in any pieces, with the benefit topping out around three or four.
Attention rests differently on things that are alive and moving slowly — leaves, a bird, a dog — than on a screen. Two minutes at a window won’t pay the weekly bill on its own, but it starts the account, and it gets you looking up.
The two-minute version rests on a meta-analysis of brief exposures, not a clean trial of two minutes. The big study is cross-sectional: people who feel well may also go outside more. The honest dose is about two hours a week; this is the doorway, and the page says so.
A birdhouse. Start the clock, find three living things, tap each one. A “nearest green” button asks once for a rough location and opens the map; that location stays on the phone.
Try it in the meadow →from Attuned Work Design
Anything you type in the meadow stays on your phone. There is no account and no server that sees it. · About · Make one for someone