That's space, Julia.

Hi everyone, it's Florence Williams, your guest host for the week.

Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Thursday.

If you've been listening, you know that my writing and reporting is all about the benefits of the outdoors.

And one of the first things that come to mind when we think about nature is the color green.

So today I'm going to talk about what happens in our brains when we see green,

how it's helped us survive as humans, and how we can use the color green to improve the way we feel,

even if it's not attached to a green space, for say.

We know from psychologists that different colors create different moods in us,

and create different levels of emotion or anxiety.

The color red, for example, is well known to be an alerting color.

It kind of provokes a sense of, oh, danger or warning, possibly because berries are red and sometimes they're poisonous,

blood is red and we know to really, whoa, pay attention to things that are red.

When we see the color green, on some deep level we start to feel kind of calm and relaxed.

It makes sense that since we evolved, depending on plants to survive,

that we would feel like we were safe when we came to a landscape that had lots of greenery.

This is a landscape in which we could find food, we can find shelter,

there's probably enough clean water here, and so we feel good amidst the color green.

We know from a number of really large-scale epidemiological studies that people in cities who live near green space live longer.

They suffer from fewer stress-related diseases, they have fewer strokes, fewer heart attacks, fewer migraine headaches,

fewer respiratory illnesses, there's something about green space that makes us healthy.

And this is the case even if people aren't necessarily using the green space.

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