Ulrich and colleagues shift environmental restoration from preference discourse to measurable psychophysiological process. After inducing stress in 120 participants, the study exposed them to audiovisual representations of natural and urban settings and tracked recovery through self-reported affect together with heart period, muscle tension, skin conductance and pulse transit time. Recovery was faster and more complete under natural exposure, with convergent changes across several bodily systems and a movement toward more positively toned affect. The paper’s iconic idea is that environmental content can participate directly in the temporal dynamics of stress recovery: a setting is not merely perceived but enters the regulation of the organism. Methodologically, its strength lies in multimodal measurement and continuous physiological monitoring, which transformed an aesthetic distinction between natural and built scenes into an experimentally testable environmental effect. Its wider significance is architectural and political: ordinary surroundings can either tax recovery or facilitate it, making environmental composition part of the infrastructure of everyday health.