Portable Digital Nature Experience significantly reduces stress

Pooling 118 effect sizes from 36 randomised controlled trials with 2,925 participants across 17 countries, a three-level meta-analysis found that portable digital nature experiences, such as virtual reality or screen-based nature content, produced a significant reduction in stress compared with control conditions (g = -0.51, 95% CI [-0.73, -0.28], p < .001). This was one of three mental health outcomes examined alongside anxiety and depression.

For clinicians, care settings and workplaces where access to real outdoor nature is limited, digital nature content offers a substitute route to stress reduction through simulated natural exposure rather than physical greenery. The same analysis found green space content outperformed mixed landscape content for stress specifically, pointing towards content type as a design factor when deploying such interventions at scale.

The estimate rests on a formal meta-analysis with a fairly wide confidence interval (-0.73 to -0.28), reflecting variation across the 36 pooled trials rather than a single tightly controlled study. The same pooled analysis also reports effects for anxiety and depression, drawn from mixed populations and settings across 17 countries; no significant differences emerged by sex, age, clinical status or intervention duration, so who benefits most within this pattern remains unclear.