It's in Her

by Manny Rea

Mother nature’s simplest forms of greenery may be enough to help curb problematic drinking risks. One of the latest nature studies from the Department of Health Education and Behavior (HEB) explores just how greenspaces could be a tool in treatment for limiting alcohol and substance use harms.

Shahar Almog, an HEB Ph.D. student, remembers there being something unique about the exercise class she used to lead back in Israel. Mothers would bring their babies in strollers to the park to participate together, and while the mother-child connection was part of it, the added natural element is what made these sessions so special for Almog and her participants, she said. Fast forward 15 years, and Almog is working to complete her Ph.D. by researching how nature can affect mental health, alcohol and substance use.

Almog chose to study the relationship between nature and alcohol use because of a gap in knowledge on the effects of the outdoors on people with substance use disorders. Impulsive decision making and negative affect, or the swath of negative emotions such as anxiety and depression, can be risk factors for problematic drinking. Ultimately, this behavior can lead to injury and even death. According to the Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention, excessive alcohol use contributed to more than 140,000 deaths in the U.S. between 2015 and 2019.

The immediate dangers of this behavior prompted Almog to explore a solution as a first-time primary author of the article, “Spending Time in Nature Serves as a Protective Factor against Problematic Alcohol Use: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach.”

Recruiting more than 300 participants from a crowdsourcing survey site, Almog set out to capture responses from a study sample representative of the drinking trends in the U.S. She developed two structural equation models (SEM) to find associations between exposure to nature and alcohol consumption as well as alcohol-related problems. Using SEMs allowed for Almog to consider differences between time deliberately spent in nature and passive exposure to neighborhood greenness as well as the demographics of her participants which may all have played a role in forming the answers they gave to the survey.

Almog would find in her survey results that general alcohol consumption is related to both positive or negative moods. In other words, feeling good or bad