Ongoing research from the National Wildlife Federation suggests that nature and outdoor time can help alleviate stress and foster improved sleep and healing in children who may be experiencing heightened levels of stress and even trauma.

Most fully-grown Americans understand how a walk outside can help clear their head or have a calming effect—a phenomenon that a 2010 Japanese study confirmed, noting how a walk in the woods can lower stress. Getting outdoors has other benefits, too: vitamin D for more efficient brain and physiological functioning, exposure to natural light to normalize sleep patterns, fresh air to lower blood pressure and support cognitive function, and soil bacteria that increase serotonin levels.

These benefits extend to kids. Research has shown that kids who spend time outdoors get more physical activity—and the endorphin boost that comes along with it—than children who spend their whole days indoors. In addition to offering therapeutic benefits to students who have been under stress, outdoor spaces are highly supportive of students’ learning and academic performance. One study found that “doses of nature serve as a safe, inexpensive, widely accessible tool for managing ADHD symptoms.” Researchers found that even spending as little as 20 minutes outside was enough to improve concentration when students came back to the classroom.

Nature and outdoor time have also been shown to improve the amount and quality of sleep a child gets. In our 2011 report, Green Time for Sleep Time, we found that time in natural light can help reset a child’s natural circadian sleep rhythms and offset the sleep-robbing blue light that kids are exposed to while staring at electronic screens. Many of America’s kids are sleep deprived, and natural light is often an overlooked remedy for those feeling high levels of school-related stress. 

There are many ways in which schools can address elevated stress levels in students, whether it is brought on by safety drills or by other factors such as community violence, academic burden, or bullying. In comparison to the other tools that schools are using to approach student stress, nature and the outdoors provide a unique opportunity, since they can be used either immediately after a particularly nerve-wracking event or as part of an ongoing program at the school.

The National Wildlife Federation offers the following tools to help schools make their grounds greener and more nature-like:

• Trees for Wildlife by the National Wildlife Federation is a program that provides thousands of free trees to schools and youth groups. Creating green spaces that are wildlife-friendly is one way communities can help combat the wildlife crisis.
• National Wildlife Federation Schoolyard Habitats is America’s largest school garden program supporting a network of 7,000 schools that have created onsite wildlife habitats. These habitats provide food, water, shelter, and places to rear young for native wildlife species such as birds, small mammals, amphibians, and pollinators.
• The Campus Wild is a report on higher education campus greening by the National Wildlife Federation. Many college, community college, and university campuses have extensive garden, tree, and landscaping programs. The report has a special section on trees.

If you are interested in learning more about the effects of “green time” on the performance of students, check out our Back to School – Back Outside report.   

But it is a perfect time to take a look and some of the things we’ve learned about sleep from studies of nonhuman animals:

Orcas: Those Wakeful Whales

Humans are born pretty helpless and apparently very tired, because newborns sleep around 12 hours a day. Why? To keep the body’s full attention on development and eventual mobility. But, the first months of life don’t work that way for all creatures. Consider orca, a.k.a. killer whale, calves. They start swimming at birth, and for the first month or so of their lives stay awake and on the move with hardly a break. All that activity helps them stay clear of predators and maintain their body temperature until their size and their blubbery insulation develop. Movement also keeps them breathing properly in a watery environment in which young calves can drown. 

Does Orca Sleep Differ from That of Humans?

You better believe it does! A lot. University of California–Los Angeles neuroscientist Jerome Siegel and post-doctorate fellow Oleg Lyamin have found that for the first month after giving birth, killer whale moms and their calves don’t get a wink of normal sleep, not ever, not at all. Adult orcas normally snooze 5 to 8 hours a night, closing both eyes and floating motionlessly. But for the first 30 days after a calf is born, forget about it, neither babe nor mom shut their eyes, and neither stops moving for more than a few minutes at a time, because new orca mothers must constantly beware of sharks and teach calves to breathe.

Missed Sleep: It Can Be a Killer

Going a month without sleep may be child’s play for an orca calf, but some animals die without proper sleep. Rodents and flies can die more quickly from lack of sleep than from lack of food. Two sleepless weeks can kill a lab rat. Siegel thinks that the amount of sleep an animal needs is dictated less by biological functions than by the animal’s environmental niche. The long night’s rest typical of bats, for example, helps the animals save energy. Siegel: “If a bat eats insects for only three hours in the evening, then maybe the best thing is to go hang in a cave upside down for the rest of the day.”

Different Sleep for Different Creatures

In case you haven’t noticed yet, sleep is not the same activity for one creature as it is for another. How peculiar is this: In dolphins, half the brain may rest while the other half stays wide awake; meanwhile, the dolphin carries on normal activities. Dolphins sleep literally with one eye closed—the eye shuts on the side of the body opposite the dozing brain hemisphere, since the right-brain hemisphere works the left eye and vice versa. Like killer whales, dolphin calves spend less than 1.5 percent of their time snoozing shortly after birth but gradually increase to 16 percent by three months.

It’s a Fact: We Need Shut Eye

For unknown reasons, closed eyes seem to be a prerequisite for most forms of sleep.

Why the Human Brain Needs Sleep

Neuroscientist Clifford Saper—a Harvard Medical School researcher who has studied a variety of species, including rats, mice, cats, monkeys and humans—says evidence suggests that sleep is no more effective for restoring tired muscles or any other body system than is a similar period of wakeful resting—except for one critical organ: the brain. The human brain apparently cannot do without sleep. Studies show that going too long without sleep makes memory, alertness, coordination and judgment decline. So if you are reading this late at night, go to bed!  The text will still be here in the morning.

Ponder This Risk of Missing Sleep

“If humans are deprived of sleep for long periods they lose motor, cognitive and memory function. The effect of 20 hours of wakefulness on driving is the equivalent of two shots of whiskey.”

– Harvard neuroscientist Clifford Saper

What Sleepless Species Teach Humans

Studies of creatures that normally undergo periods of sleeplessness may allow researchers to provide late-shift workers, military personnel, doctors and other assorted night owls with new methods for adapting to limited sleep without losing effectiveness. “We could live 20-hour lives instead of 12- or 14-hour lives,” says psychologist Verner Bingman of Ohio’s Bowling Green State University.

Bingman is studying Swainson’s thrushes, which during migrations between Canada and Peru go from a normal night’s sleep of 10 to 12 hours down to about 2.5 hours. To handle the energy output of the long migration they must nearly double the amount of fat in their bodies, switching from a diet of seeds to one of fruits and insects. This dietary change means they must search for food during the day and fly at night, which limits sack time. Bingman: “All of a sudden they are subject to an enormous amount of sleep deprivation.”

Bingman and doctoral student Thomas Fuchs have discovered that during morning and midday hours, the thrushes take as many as 50 micro naps per hour, most lasting about 10 to 20 seconds. Brain monitoring shows that these napping behaviors look very much like normal sleep. Bingman: “The trick would be to develop techniques or drugs that could recreate a similar brain pattern in humans.” 

[This text is adapted from a National Wildlife magazine story by Michael Tennesen, August/September 2007. You may want to read the full text.]