Trips out of the city help mentally exhausted urban residents recover, and one ingredient is consistently present in every “recipe” for this recovery: nature. Researchers at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang and their colleagues reached this finding. The results were published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

The researchers surveyed 474 visitors at four leisure destinations in the belt around Shenyang—the term specialists use for suburban areas surrounding a major city where residents can relax without traveling far. The surveys ran from April to July 2026, and each respondent answered questions about the place they were visiting at the time. The destinations included scenic Mount Qipanshan, a rice-themed resort park, an archaeological park at an ancient fortress, and an amusement park. Each participant assessed the site's “therapeutic qualities” across four dimensions: nature, buildings and infrastructure, social atmosphere, and a symbolic dimension encompassing the site's history and culture.

Getaways close to home are cheaper and more accessible than long-distance travel, and they work through several pathways at once: the quality of the surroundings improved both types of well-being among visitors—the simple pleasure of relaxation and a deeper experience of meaning, reflection, and personal growth. According to the calculations, the latter was linked to these getaways almost one and a half times as strongly. Both types of experience contributed to psychological recovery.

The authors then looked for effective combinations of conditions—a kind of recipe for high levels of recovery. No single element was necessary on its own, and there was no one “super-ingredient.” Yet nature was a core component in all five recipes identified: the effective formula was “nature plus something”—infrastructure and pleasure, the company of others and both types of experience, or infrastructure and meaning. The combination of nature, social atmosphere, and both types of experience proved effective most often.

Leisure opportunities on the outskirts of cities should be built around nature, while also providing comfortable conditions and places where people can spend time together and reflect. This is especially important given the growing pressures on urban residents, the authors note.