Scientific Reasons to Have Indoor Houseplants

Why it's high time to birth some green babies

Adding the outdoors into your indoor living space isn’t just aesthetically pleasing—it’s also hugely beneficial to your health and well-being.

The science on why and how houseplants benefit human health is fascinating. I’ll give you some highlights, then recommend some good plants for beginners, and also give you some tips on how to make it affordable to go green.

What the science says about houseplants: the cheat sheet

1. Houseplants improve indoor air quality

2. Potting plants has been shown to reduce stress in young people

3. Houseplants help hospitalized patients recover more quickly

4. Houseplants increase creativity and productivity at the office

5. Houseplants lower older people’s blood pressure

Houseplants improve air quality

This is huge.

Many people don’t realize that things like new furniture, office equipment, and conventional perfumes release volatile organic compounds into the air we breathe.

Toxic VOCs can impede our breathing, cause asthma, and damage our lungs. Even worse, of course, are the noxious odorless gasses, like radon, that are linked to lung cancer and other health issues.

Plants “breathe” in our carbon dioxide and “breathe” out oxygen. So it makes sense that the more houseplants you have, the more noxious chemicals will potentially be sequestered. These chemicals do no harm to the plants.

A 1989 report by scientists from NASA, “Interior Landscape Plants for Indoor Air Pollution Abatement,” which you can read on-line in PDF form, found that houseplants increase the quality of indoor air, reduce the phenomenon known as “sick building syndrome,” and can even help remove concentrations of indoor air pollutants like cigarette smoke, solvents, and radon.

The 22-page NASA report includes the results of how well different varieties of plants removed chemicals like formaldehyde, benzene, and trichloroethylene during a 24-hour exposure period.

Some of the easiest plants to grow indoors—ones that thrive off low light and relative neglect—proved the most effective at sequestering harmful chemicals.

Houseplants reduce stress in young people

In a fascinating set of experiments published in 2015 in the peer-reviewed Journal of Physical Anthropology, a team of Japanese and Korean scientists devised a clever experiment to compare how the human nervous system responds to computer-related activities versus plant-related activities.