Look how beautiful! The role of natural environments for employees’ recovery and affective well-being

Recovery from work is important for promoting employees’ well-being but little is known about which environments are most conducive for recovery. This article examines the relationship between recovery and experiencing nature and, thus, provides a link between recovery research and environmental psychology. In two studies, we drew on the Effort-Recovery Model and proposed that contact with nature is associated with employees’ recovery experiences and affective well-being. In Study 1, we theorized that appraising nature as aesthetic is an underlying mechanism in the relationship between being in nature and recovery. Using an experience sampling approach with multisource data from self-reports and smartphone photos (N = 50, measurements = 411), we found that being in nature was indirectly related to recovery experiences (i.e., relaxation, detachment) and affective well-being (i.e., positive activation, serenity, low fatigue) via perceived attractiveness. In Study 2, we theorized that appreciative contact with nature (i.e., nature savoring) is linked to enhanced recovery and well-being. Using a randomized controlled trial (N = 66), we found that a nature-savoring intervention, compared to a waiting-list control group, had beneficial effects on recovery experiences and positive affective states. Overall, our results suggest that contact with nature is a prototypical setting for employees’ recovery, and we discuss theoretical and practical implications of this finding for occupational health psychology