Forest Therapy and Burnout: What the Forest Can Actually Do

Burnout is not tiredness that a weekend fixes. The World Health Organization classifies burn-out in ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon rather than a medical condition, and defines it through three dimensions: energy depletion or exhaustion, mental distance or cynicism about one's job, and reduced professional efficacy (WHO, 2019). Forest therapy may support relaxation and recovery from stress, but forest therapy does not treat burnout — and the single most direct piece of evidence on this question says so plainly.

A randomised controlled trial gave physicians and other healthcare professionals a single three-hour guided shinrin-yoku walk and compared their burnout scores with a control group. The walk produced no measurable change in burnout, even though participants overwhelmingly described feeling less stressed and mentally better afterwards (Kavanaugh et al., 2022). That gap between how people felt and what the burnout instrument recorded is the most useful thing on this page. It draws a clean line between what a forest walk reliably does — interrupt a stress state for a while — and what burnout actually needs, which is repetition and, usually, a change in the conditions that produced it.

I have been facilitating people in nature since 2019, and exhausted people are most of who comes. So this article is written the way I would answer the question in person: what the research supports, what it does not, and what a forest day can honestly offer someone running on empty. Forest therapy is not a replacement for medical or psychological care. If you are deep in burnout, please talk to a doctor or a psychologist first, and treat the forest as something you add.

What one walk did not do

The Kavanaugh trial is worth reading carefully, because it is the rare study that tested forest bathing against burnout directly rather than against stress in general. Physicians and healthcare professionals — a group with well-documented burnout rates — were randomised to a guided three-hour shinrin-yoku walk or to a control condition. Burnout scores did not shift, either against the participants' own baseline or against the control group (Kavanaugh et al., 2022). The authors' own conclusion is that a one-time nature intervention has limits against chronic burnout, and that an ongoing practice is what deserves testing next.

This does not mean nothing happened. The same participants reported less stress and better mental wellbeing after the walk, which is exactly what I hear at the end of a session. Burnout questionnaires ask about weeks of work, not about an afternoon: how depleted you feel by your job, how distant you have become from it, how effective you believe you are. An afternoon among trees does not answer those questions differently, and it would be strange if it did.

I say this to clients before they book, and it costs me nothing. A forest day sold as a cure for burnout is a promise the evidence will not carry, and the person who buys it once and stays exhausted will not come back.

What forest time does have evidence behind it

Time in a forest measurably shifts the body toward a calmer, parasympathetic state. Field experiments across 24 Japanese forests with 280 participants found lower cortisol, lower pulse rate and lower blood pressure, along with more parasympathetic and less sympathetic nervous activity, compared with matched time in a city (Park et al., 2010). A later meta-analysis of 21 blood-pressure studies covering 2,270 participants found the same direction for blood pressure and salivary cortisol against urban controls, and reported that sessions of at least around twenty minutes outperformed shorter exposures (Qiu et al., 2022).

The honest headline over all of it is moderate-to-low confidence. A review of 11 systematic reviews covering 131 studies concluded that the evidence for cardiovascular, immune and mental-health benefits — stress, depression, anxiety — sits at moderate to low confidence (Stier-Jarmer et al., 2021). The effect is real and repeatedly observed. The field is also young, samples are often small, most cohorts are Asian, and long-term trials are scarce. Anyone quoting forest therapy research at you without that sentence is selling something.

Sleep is where the burnout connection gets interesting, because sleep is usually the first thing burnout takes and the last thing to return. A small preliminary study measured heart-rate variability during night-time sleep after thirteen participants walked the same 1.8 km route at lunchtime through either a natural or a built environment; markers of vagal activity during sleep were significantly greater after the nature walk (Gladwell et al., 2016). Thirteen people is thirteen people, and I would not build a programme on it. As a hint about why a midday hour among trees sometimes shows up in how you sleep that night, it is worth knowing.

Repetition looks like the thing that matters

The studies that show movement on clinical measures are the ones that ran more than a single session. A programme of six urban forest therapy sessions with 47 patients diagnosed with depression eased depression from moderate to mild on the Beck Depression Inventory and improved sleep quality and somatic symptoms, while the control group barely moved (Yeon et al., 2022). Six sessions, in an ordinary city forest, not a wilderness retreat. Set that next to the single-walk burnout trial that found nothing, and a pattern appears that matches what I see in practice.

A pilot study in Hong Kong points the same way over a shorter horizon. One hundred community members took a 30-minute guided nature walk in an accessible country park; 88 percent felt more connected with nature and 81 percent said they could apply what they learned in daily life, and in a subgroup of 55 followed up two weeks later, improvements in distress, resilience, mindful attention and sleep quality were still present (Wong et al., 2025). This was a pilot without a control group, so read it as encouraging rather than conclusive. The interesting part is the two weeks: the effect did not evaporate on the drive home, and the people who kept practising held it best.

One more study is worth naming, with its limits attached. A survey of forestry workers in a Polish forest district found little disengagement and only minor signs of exhaustion, with overtime hours and career stage as the strongest predictors of the exhaustion that was there; the authors suggest the forest environment itself may reduce burnout risk (Bielinis et al., 2025). This is correlational work in one district, so it cannot prove the trees are doing it. It is still a striking result for a physically demanding job, and it fits the direction of everything above.

The practical reading is dose, not event. If you are exhausted, one two-hour forest walk a month plus twenty minutes among trees a few times a week will do more for you than one heroic weekend retreat a year. How often should you go to the forest works through the frequency evidence in detail, including the 2026 meta-analysis finding that programme length predicts the effect while session frequency does not. For the wider evidence base across outcomes, what the research says about forest therapy goes through it study by study, and nature and the nervous system covers what those twenty minutes are doing physiologically.

Why a guided walk works differently from going outside more

People often tell me they are already outside a lot. Usually what they mean is that they move through outside — commuting, running, walking the dog while finishing a phone call. The body is in nature and the attention is still at work. Exhausted people are the least likely to interrupt that on their own, because deciding to stop is itself a decision, and decisions are the resource that has run out.

A forest therapy session removes those decisions. The walk covers two to three hours over a very short distance, sometimes only a few hundred metres — it is not a hike, not nature education and not psychotherapy. The framing I was trained in puts the guide's job plainly: the forest is the therapist, the guide opens the doors (Clifford & Page, 2019). In practice that means invitations — simple sensory prompts, open to your own interpretation, with no correct outcome. Sit here for twenty minutes. Notice what is moving. Follow a smell. Between invitations we sit in a circle, and whoever wants to speak speaks, and whoever does not, does not.

The walk ends with a forest tea ceremony — tea from a local plant, one cup poured for the forest, one for each person. It sounds small. In practice it is the part people remember, because it marks a clear ending rather than letting the afternoon dissolve back into the day. If you want the full shape of a session before booking one, what to expect at your first forest therapy session walks through it step by step.

What this looks like for a team

Burnout is rarely an isolated personal problem. If three people on a team are exhausted, the cause is usually not three separate personal failures. A forest day works differently from a workshop about resilience: nobody presents, nobody role-plays, the group walks slowly, spends stretches in silence, and sits in a circle where the usual order of who speaks first quietly stops applying. Participants often report that colleagues talked to each other differently afterwards — not because anything was facilitated about communication, but because the day removed the conditions that make people perform.

A half-day in the forest does not fix a workload problem, and I would rather say that before an HR manager books than after. If people are burning out because there is too much work and not enough people, the forest is a good afternoon and a bad solution — and the Kavanaugh result is the evidence for exactly that caution. What a forest day can do is give a team a genuine reset, show that the organisation takes recovery seriously enough to buy time for it, and open a conversation that meeting rooms tend to close. If you are weighing this for a team, our forest days for companies explain the formats and what a half-day includes.

If you are the one running on empty

Twenty minutes is the floor. The meta-analysis on session length points that way — under about twenty minutes, the measured effects were weaker (Qiu et al., 2022). A five-minute walk between meetings is fine, but treat it as a break rather than as recovery.

Leave the phone in the bag, not for purity but because divided attention keeps the nervous system in the same gear you are trying to leave. And an urban forest counts: the depression programme that moved clinical scores ran in a city forest, not a wilderness (Yeon et al., 2022). In Ljubljana, Rožnik and Golovec are enough. Slovenia makes this easier than most places, since roughly 58 percent of the country is forest, which for most people here means a fifteen-minute drive rather than a holiday.

Go with a guide at least once, then keep going on your own. The point of a guided session is not dependence; it is learning what slowing down actually feels like in your own body, so that you can find it again alone on a Tuesday. Forest therapy may support relaxation and wellbeing, and participants often report sleeping better and feeling steadier for a while afterwards, but it is not a treatment for burnout and not a replacement for medical or psychological care. If you would like to try one, our sessions and prices are here.