Walking Alone in Nature Could Be the Best Cure for Loneliness

The walk takes maybe twenty minutes, down a slope of birch and pine to where Lake Mjøsa opens out before you. It’s Norway’s largest lake, nearly 370 square kilometres of grey-blue water bordered by forested ridges, and on a clear morning the view has a quality that is difficult to name but immediately felt. Something like recognition. Something like relief.

Sindre Johan Cottis Hoff, a sociologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, has spent considerable time trying to put that feeling into measurable terms. His question: can spending time in natural surroundings protect people against loneliness, not because they meet other people there, but because of the environment itself? The answer, drawn from survey data covering 2,544 residents of the Mjøsa region, turns out to be a qualified yes. Qualified, because the details matter rather a lot.

Beyond the Social Fix

Loneliness has acquired the status of a public health emergency. One in seven Norwegians report significant or severe loneliness; globally, the World Happiness Report found that nearly one in five young adults had nobody they could count on for support in 2023, a figure 39 percent higher than in 2006. The standard prescription leans heavily on social interventions: get people together, give them something to do in company, encourage mixing. It makes intuitive sense. It also, the research suggests, doesn’t work particularly well. A meta-analysis of interventions designed to reduce loneliness found that simply providing opportunities for social interaction had surprisingly modest effects.

Hoff’s study, published in the journal Health and Place, takes a different angle. It argues that the protective effect of nature comes not primarily from the people you might meet while out walking, but from two psychological states that outdoor activity can cultivate: connectedness to nature, meaning a felt sense that you are part of the natural world rather than separate from it, and place attachment, the emotional bond to a specific location. Both, the data suggest, act as buffers against loneliness.

How Walking on Ice Changes Everything

The researchers asked Mjøsa residents how often they engaged in nine different activities on or near the lake: walking the shoreline, fishing, paddling, winter bathing, enjoying the waterside with no particular goal, and so on. They also measured loneliness across three dimensions: social loneliness (lacking a network), emotional loneliness (lacking intimate relationships), and overall subjective loneliness reported directly.

The results, analysed using structural equation modelling, revealed something counterintuitive. Activities around the lake were linked to reduced loneliness, but almost entirely through indirect pathways. The activities built up feelings of connectedness to nature and attachment to Mjøsa, and those feelings in turn reduced loneliness. Cut out the mediating variables and much of the effect disappeared.

More striking still was what happened when researchers looked at the specific activities. Jogging along the shore had the weakest association with nature connectedness of any activity measured, and no significant association at all. Walking on the ice in winter, by contrast, had the strongest. As did “enjoying life along the shore,” a category that essentially describes sitting, watching, noticing. The pattern points to something specific about how people attend to their surroundings when they are not optimising for performance.

“When you see yourself as part of nature,” Hoff said, “you create a sense of belonging to a community. Many people have previously argued that loneliness only relates to human contact and human communities, but in recent years, several studies have shown that attachment to places and natural environments also have a pronounced effect.”

The Paradox of Going Alone

Here the findings take a turn that challenges most existing intuitions about loneliness and solitude. The protective effect of lake activities was significantly stronger when people did them alone. Going out by yourself, it turns out, is better for building the kind of nature connectedness that buffers against loneliness than going with others. The researchers suggest this is because solitude allows something that company tends to interrupt: genuine attention to the environment. When you are not managing a social interaction, you can notice the texture of ice under your boots, the quality of the light on the water, the way a particular bend in the shoreline carries personal history.

The Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss drew a distinction between mere activity and what he called activeness: not getting from A to B, but genuinely inhabiting the space between them. Næss urged people to identify with nature rather than merely pass through it. The data now provides something approaching empirical support for that position. Noticing the world around you is, apparently, a skill worth cultivating for reasons beyond aesthetics.

“Strengthening the sense of belonging,” Hoff said, “not just to other people, but to natural environments and the surroundings, appears to have a protective effect against loneliness.”

This matters for policy in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. Existing nature-based social prescribing tends to focus on getting people together in green spaces, arranging group walks, community gardens, supervised outdoor sessions. The Mjøsa findings don’t argue against any of that (group activities still built place attachment, which reduced social loneliness in particular). But they do suggest that the design of such programmes might be missing something if they treat the nature as a backdrop for sociality rather than as a destination in its own right. “Loneliness and a sense of not belonging are major public health challenges,” Hoff observed. “If natural environments are destroyed or become less accessible, it may be costly for society.”

There’s a specific intervention that existing research has found effective at building nature connectedness: the “three good things in nature” exercise, where people write down three positive observations from the outdoors each day over a sustained period. The effects persist. The mechanism is essentially the same as what the Mjøsa data captures, attention directed intentionally at natural details, and it can be done anywhere there are trees, or a sky, or a puddle catching light. You don’t necessarily need a lake the size of a small sea. What you might need is to stop jogging for a moment and actually look at it.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2026.103617

Frequently Asked Questions

Does going for a jog in nature actually help with loneliness?

Probably less than you’d hope. A study tracking nearly 2,500 Norwegians found that exercising along a lakeside had the weakest link to nature connectedness of any activity measured, and no significant protective effect against loneliness at all. The researchers think this is because exercise tends to focus attention inward on performance rather than outward on the environment, and it’s that outward attention that seems to do the work.

Why would going outside alone be better for loneliness than going with others?

It sounds backwards, but the evidence from the Mjøsa study suggests that solitude actually strengthens the sense of connection to the natural environment more than company does. When you’re not managing a social interaction, you’re more likely to genuinely notice your surroundings. That noticing builds what researchers call “connectedness to nature,” which turns out to be a meaningful buffer against feelings of loneliness.

Is the loneliness benefit really about nature, or just about getting out of the house?

The study controlled for how much physical activity people did and whether they simply spent time outdoors, and still found that nature connectedness and place attachment were the key variables driving the effect. Simply being in motion outside wasn’t enough. What made the difference was whether people developed a felt sense of belonging to the natural environment, something that mindful, unhurried activities like shoreline walks seemed to build more reliably than goal-directed ones.

Could urban parks work as well as a Norwegian lake?

Possibly, though the study only looked at one specific natural environment. Separate research has found that the “three good things in nature” exercise, which involves writing down three positive observations from any natural setting each day, reliably builds nature connectedness over time and can be done in a city park as easily as on a lakeshore. The key mechanism seems to be attentional, not geographical.