Ecotherapy and mental well-being: An integrative narrative review

Urbanization poses a challenge to mental health and increases demands for cognitive resources. The literature shows that exposure to nature is associated with improved mental health and sense of well-being. This narrative review analyses the most prominent theories regarding Ecotherapy and mental health: Stress Reduction Theory, Attention Restoration Theory, and Biophilia Hypothesis; and connects them with contemporary accounts of the Default Mode Network and self-referential processing. Stress Reduction Theory describes rapid psychophysiological stress recovery in non-threatening nature. Attention Restoration Theory supports the idea that natural settings offer soft fascination, allowing the recovery of directed attention. According to the Biophilia Hypothesis humans have an innate tendency to seek connection with nature. Read across these strands, the evidence seems to point to a possible sequential picture. Natural contexts promote an autonomic downshift and affective recovery, this relief in turn permits restoration of directed attention, and under that lower cognitive load self-referential processing shifts away from ruminative patterns toward more constructive self-reflection. We formalize this as the Nature Tuned Self-Regulation model, a probabilistic, context-sensitive account that emphasizes sequential adjustments that together mount up towards specific benefits for mental health. The model aims to clarify how nature can contribute to improved mood and well-being by examining the regulation of the large brain network, the DMN, and offers an integrative framework for designing and evaluating nature-based interventions.