Secret Health Benefits of Gardening
This might surprise you, but gardening is one of the most health-promoting activities out there. In this article, you will learn the 9 science-based reasons why gardening is a high-return investment for your health. This includes the mental health benefits of gardening, how gardening can reduce inflammation, provide a natural high in dopamine, improve your skin, lung, and gut bacteria, and enhance your overall health through factors such as fresh air and sunlight exposure (like vitamin D synthesis), among others. Let's dive in.
The 9 proven health benefits of Gardening.
1. 🧠 Gardening Microbiome Effect = Anti Depressant.
Digging your hands into the soil exposes you to Mycobacterium vaccae, a natural microbe that increases serotonin and lowers anxiety. Whilst you're not directly eating a handful of soil, you're exposing yourself to it from inhalation and touching hands and face - a bit like how you can pass pathogens (like viruses) to each other.
🔍 Here's how it works:
🫁 Inhalation (Primary route)
When you dig, rake, or disturb the soil, fine dust particles containing M. vaccae become airborne. You breathe them in, where they interact with your lung-associated lymphoid tissue (MALT), helping modulate immune responses and mood.
✋ Skin Contact
Handling soil with bare hands may allow small amounts to interact with cutaneous immune cells (like Langerhans cells), which can stimulate anti-inflammatory and immunoregulatory effects.
🍽️ Ingestion (Less common but possible)
If you eat vegetables with residual soil or touch your mouth after gardening, you might ingest it, but this is not the primary route studied for its neurological effects.
2. ☀️ Gardening Resets your Circadian Biology
A few hours under the morning sun, you're boosting immune regulation, hormone synthesis, and sleep quality without popping a pill. (Context is no sunscreen and sunglasses, which can block the effects)
But remember, sunlight goes WAY past vitamin D. You're also absorbing red light and infrared light, the most abundant wavelengths reaching the Earth. With UVB, you're getting vitamin D but also a more profound genetic activation of POMC, which produces endorphins that reduce hunger, increase appetite, stimulate melanin production, and provide additional sun benefits. My friend, Dr. Sam, shared this image below.
Not to forget, early-morning garden work supports the cortisol awakening response and melatonin cycling, which means a better circadian rhythm, improved metabolism, and better health with sleep and hormones.
3. Gardening Gives You Real Dopamine
Reap the rewards. Engaging in anticipatory reward behaviours, such as picking fruit or vegetables you've grown, activates dopaminergic reward pathways in the brain, similar to hunting or foraging.
Neuroscience and evolutionary psychology studies suggest that achieving goals and acquiring food activate dopamine circuits (ventral tegmental area → nucleus accumbens). Although no significant human trials have specifically focused on gardening, animal models and brain imaging support this approach.
Bonus: Anecdotally, gardeners report a "high" from harvesting, which aligns with theories of dopamine being released during anticipation and achieving rewards.
4. “Green Therapy” Reduces ADHD Symptoms.
A 2004 study by Taylor & Kuo found that exposure to green outdoor activities significantly reduced ADHD symptoms compared to indoor or built environments, and even greater than reading a book.
Geek section: Mechanism: Nature (full spectrum sunlight, grounding + more) exposure modulates prefrontal cortex activity, reduces sensory overload, and enhances executive function.
Gardening, as a form of structured green activity, improves focus, reduces impulsivity, and calms the nervous system through parasympathetic activation.
On the flip side, in preschool children, the use of technology with screen time of more than 2 hours per day increases AHDH by 670% (Ref).
5. ✋ Soil Contact & Nature’s Probiotic
Soil on your hands benefits your microbiome. Regular contact with diverse environmental microbes, like Mycobacterium vaccae, has been shown to train immune tolerance, support gut-skin-lung axis health, and potentially reduce inflammation. These microbes may colonise the skin transiently or be absorbed via mucosal routes (inhalation or minor abrasions).
Contact with biodiverse natural environments (gardens, farms) increases the alpha diversity of skin and gut microbiota, which is associated with better health outcomes, including potential reductions in skin eczema and dermatitis. Rook GA et al. (2013).
6. Zen in the Garden
Gardening has been shown to support more parasympathetic nervous system activity and reduce cortisol, heart rate, and blood pressure. No prescription is needed - we just need to find the time to get outside.
One study found reduced salivary cortisol and improved mood after 30 minutes of gardening versus reading indoors, as compared by Van Den Berg & Custers (2011).
7. Cognitive Effects
Engaging in gardening, particularly in a social or community setting, can help slow cognitive decline and protect against dementia in older adults.
A 2016 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that older adults who participated in community gardening showed better attention, memory, and executive function than those who didn't.
Gardening supports neuroplasticity
Regular engagement in stimulating, hands-on activities, such as planting, weeding, or harvesting, can help maintain brain plasticity, particularly in the hippocampus. This region is crucial for memory and is often one of the first regions affected by Alzheimer's.
Physical and sensory activities stimulate neurotrophic factors (like BDNF) that promote synaptic growth and repair.
Social gardening reduces isolation, a known dementia risk
Social interaction in community gardens combats loneliness and depression, both of which are strong predictors of cognitive decline. Intergenerational gardening (e.g., with grandchildren or local schools) provides additional brain-stimulating challenges and emotional rewards.
Even small tasks, like seed sorting or watering plants, can help calm agitation and improve mood in people with mid-stage Alzheimer's (Park et al., 2008).
8. Is Gardening a Good Workout?
Gardening improves physical activity, another protective factor for longevity. Mild physical movement helps prevent frailty, a syndrome strongly tied to declining brain health.
Gardening involves bending, lifting, squatting, and twisting, a real-world, functional movement pattern model. These movements maintain joint integrity, balance, proprioception, and muscle tone, especially in the hips, knees, and lower back. Unlike gym workouts, gardening builds strength in a practical context by getting up and down, carrying tools, using a machete, and climbing ladders.
It likely offers a "functional patterns" benefit compared to pure strength training, as it improves daily movements while engaging the brain simultaneously.
9. Gardening Reduces Inflammation
When you're connected to Earth, be it through your feet touching the dirt or by getting your hands dirty with planting or pruning, you're picking up free energy, "electrons," from the Earth —the most important antioxidant. This is called grounding, and gardening can provide just that.
Every time you:
Dig with your bare hands
Kneel or stand barefoot on the soil
Touch living roots, compost, or leaves
Breathing in the fresh air and soil spores
Exposing your naked eyes and skin to the sun.
Not wear airpods and listen to leaves rustling or monkeys howling.
You’re absorbing the Earth's electrons, photons, phonons through your body.
It’s natural bioelectric regulation. There is no supplement.
🧬 Studies show grounding reduces cortisol, improves heart rate variability, lowers inflammation markers, and supports sleep cycles. (Learn more about grounding HERE)
My Gardening Experience
Nothing feels better than accomplishment. These days, they're short-lived and quick (think cheap dopamine). What we're after is the real dopamine. It is the act of hard work, getting your hands dirty, sweat on your brow, planting the seeds, and then reaping the rewards with the fruit in the coming season.
This has recently struck a chord with me living in Nicaragua, with the slower pace of life and the more decentralized life approach to becoming more independent - be it with water (water well), electricity (solar panels), and food with bananas, plantains, a few chickens, pigs, goats and sheep or even transport with horses.
It turns out that, whilst many are drawn to the efforts of Bryan Johnson and the recent explosion in the biohacking tech space, the good old-fashioned "biohacks" practised by our grandparents still offer true biological health benefits. Gardening is not just for retirees on their plots at the allotment or rural folks with their wellies, Land Rovers, and harbour jackets with acres of land. It can be an apartment dweller with a few plants indoors, on the window, on a balcony, or even someone with no outdoor space in their house who owns an allotment.
In Closing
You don't need an expansive landscape to reap the rewards. Even apartments, places like nursing homes, and care centres now use horticultural therapy as a formal intervention.
With my land in Nicaragua, I have opportunities galore and much gardening work. If you had asked me five years ago, this is what I would have been thinking about: what type of grass or plants to purchase, what the fastest-growing trees are, and so on. I would not have believed it.
The seven effects of gardening (possibly a few more) work together, much like killing seven birds with one stone.
As I said, you don't need land; you can use indoor plants instead. Start with one and grow your family one by one; that's what I did in London.
– Ryan
Live Vitae | Oath Food Co.
