Don’t knock Donald Trump for playing so much golf. Here’s why | Oliver Burkeman

It really is good that he is out in nature

Spending time in nature, as you're surely aware by now, is good for your mental health. Like, really, really good. People criticise Donald Trump for whiling away so many hours on golf courses, but they're wrong: imagine the damage he'd wreak if his rage and repressed self-loathing weren't offset by the restorative benefits of all that greenery! So there's nothing intrinsically surprising about a new study, led by Viren Swami of Anglia Ruskin University, in Cambridge, suggesting that natural environments improve people's body image; after all, they improve everything. What remains debatable is why. One of the most beguiling answers - first given three decades ago by the US academics Rachel and Stephen Kaplan - is also maybe the most pleasingly named concept in psychology. In a world of relentless, aggressive demands on our attention, the Kaplans argued, nature does something different: it exerts "soft fascination".

Soft fascination has two crucial components. First, it's effortless: you don't need to "try to focus" on the wind in the trees, or a moor top blanketed in heather. Second, it's partial: it absorbs some attention, but leaves some free for reflection, conversation or mind-wandering. The result is what the Kaplans called "cognitive quiet", in which the muscle of effortful attention - the one you use to concentrate on work - gets to rest, but without the boredom you'd feel if you had nothing to focus on. This helps explain why nature's benefits aren't restricted to, say, trips to the Grand Canyon or Great Barrier Reef. Those places seize your whole attention, whereas your local park may seize just enough of it to let the rest of your mind relax.