It’s 5 pm and this writer is besieged with distractions - incoming emails on 2 separate accounts, office white noise, and intolerable Pandora song recommendations. I’m cranky, unproductive and aggressive (at least, towards Pandora). How can I recapture my focus circa 11am? What should I do?

A research paper published last month by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign suggests the better questions of “What should I have been doing (in the first place)?” Because what I should have been doing is working and living closer to nature and/or easily accessible green spaces.

Environmental science and psychology professor France Kuo has identified correlations between increasing violence and aggression and arid urban settings. In her fieldwork among Chicago public housing communities, Kuo and colleagues found that residents with no immediate view or access to nature reported a greater incidence of conflicts with partners or children than peers – living within the same community - who lived near trees and grass. The same correlations were also observed in relationship to crime in the same community.

Quite a stretch, though, to apply this to productivity in the workplace? But consider the growing body of findings linking proximity to nature with positive influences on mood, life and work satisfaction. Children with ADHD are calmer after taking a break in a park as opposed to a concrete playground. General health can be predicted by available green space within a 1-3 mile radius, discovered the Dutch. And the Japanese found that elderly adults living in walking distance of parks lived longer in general.

These disparate findings don’t establish any conclusive facts – but what’s the harm in scheduling regular park lunches come spring and summer?

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Find a nearby green space in New York City