The science
The science of stepping outside.
Rewyld for Work rests on a simple, well-studied idea: short, regular time in nature restores what an always-on workday wears down. Here is the research, with every figure cited. Nothing on this page is ours to claim. It is the body of work we build on.
Back to Rewyld for WorkThe findings we lead with
Four results, chosen for how they map to a working day.
Five minutes of activity outdoors measurably lifts mood and self-esteem, with the largest single gain coming from just the first five minutes.
Barton & Pretty, 2010, Environmental Science & Technology (meta-analysis, 1,252 participants).
Working memory improved by about twenty percent after a walk in nature. An equivalent walk through the city produced no reliable gain.
Berman, Jonides & Kaplan, 2008, Psychological Science.
A fifteen-minute outdoor walk at lunch left employees more focused and less fatigued through the afternoon, across two randomized controlled trials.
Sianoja, Syrek, de Bloom et al., 2018, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology.
People with at least two hours of nature contact a week are significantly more likely to report good health and wellbeing, and short sessions across the week count as much as one long visit.
White et al., 2019, Scientific Reports (19,806 people).
The cost of always-on
The modern workday quietly drains attention and wellbeing.
The average person now spends about six and a half hours online every day.
DataReportal, Digital 2025 Global Overview Report.
After a single interruption, it takes about twenty-three minutes to return to full focus on the original task.
Mark et al., University of California, Irvine, 2005.
The average time a person spends on one screen before switching, down from about two and a half minutes in 2004.
Mark, Attention Span, 2023.
Of employees worldwide feel a lot of stress during the workday.
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, 2024.
Only about one in five employees worldwide were engaged at work in 2025, a gap Gallup estimates costs the global economy around $10 trillion in lost productivity.
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, 2026 report. Global figure; the dollar estimate is revised each year.
The World Health Organization defines burnout as an occupational phenomenon: chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.
World Health Organization, ICD-11, 2019.
Sustained, effortful focus fatigues our directed attention. Restoring it takes a genuinely different kind of environment, not more of the same screen.
Kaplan, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 1995 (Attention Restoration Theory).
What time in nature does
Time outside measurably restores it.
A review of 143 studies links time in green space with lower stress-hormone levels, lower blood pressure, and better self-reported health. The breadth is the point: this is a wide body of work, not a couple of studies.
Twohig-Bennett & Jones, 2018, Environmental Research (meta-analysis of 143 studies). Largely observational, so linked with, never proven to cause.
A short break in nature measurably lowered cortisol, the stress hormone, with the biggest payoff in a window of about twenty to thirty minutes.
Hunter et al., 2019, Frontiers in Psychology.
Pooled research on natural sounds, the kind a real walk happens inside, shows a moderate drop in stress and annoyance.
Buxton et al., 2021, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (meta-analysis of 18 studies).
A walk in nature improved attention and working memory in a controlled study. An equivalent walk through the city did not.
Berman, Jonides & Kaplan, 2008, Psychological Science.
A ninety-minute walk in nature reduced rumination and quieted activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex, a brain region tied to the risk of depression. An urban walk did not.
Bratman et al., 2015, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Time among trees raised natural killer cell activity by up to half, an immune effect that lasted more than thirty days, linked to the airborne compounds trees release.
Li, research on forest bathing (shinrin-yoku).
People who spend about 120 minutes in nature a week are more likely to report good health and high wellbeing, whether that comes in one long visit or several short ones.
White et al., 2019, Scientific Reports.
Closest to how Rewyld works
Short daily guided audio, tested at work.
In a workplace trial of 238 employees at two large companies, a short daily guided audio practice delivered by phone improved wellbeing and lowered job strain, with gains still present sixteen weeks later.
Bostock, Crosswell, Prather & Steptoe, 2019, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. The audio was indoor mindfulness, not outdoor nature, so it validates the daily guided-audio format, not the outdoors.
Why a little, often, works
A few minutes, most days, is the whole idea.
The 120-minutes-a-week benefit held whether the time came in one long visit or many short ones. Which is exactly what five minutes a day adds up to.
White et al., 2019, Scientific Reports.
A review of 22 studies found that short breaks of ten minutes or less reliably reduce fatigue and increase energy. They restore how people feel; recovering from deeply depleting work can take longer.
Albulescu et al., 2022, PLOS ONE (meta-analysis of 22 studies).
See it on your own team, free, for four weeks.
Rewyld supports everyday wellbeing and is not a clinical treatment.