Birds fly above the rainbow – so why can’t you see your worries fly away too? OR Bird is the word.
A new study from North Carolina State University published in Environmental Psychology found that bird watching can help students improve their mental health.
Studies have shown that spending time in nature can improve overall well-being, but researchers have found that bird watching yields particularly promising results.
“There has been a lot of well-being research conducted during the pandemic that suggests that adolescents and college-aged children are the ones who struggle the most,” Nils Peterson, corresponding author of the study and professor of forestry and environmental resources in North Carolina. State University said in a university press release.
“Especially when you think about college and graduate students, it seems like these are groups that have difficulty accessing nature and getting those benefits,” Peterson added.
The researchers divided the study participants into three different groups. One group was a control group, another group was assigned five nature walks, and a third group was tasked with five 30-minute birding sessions. The researchers then asked each person in the study about their mental state based on the World Health Organization’s five indices of well-being. The index asks them to rate their well-being on a scale of zero to five, with zero being the worst and five being the best.
All three groups saw an improvement in their well-being scores, but the birding group started lowest and finished highest.
The scientists then used another questionnaire called STOP-D to measure distress. Participants in the nature walking and bird watching group performed better than those in the control group. This study was different from previous studies in that it compared people in nature walking and bird watching groups to people in a control group instead of participants exposed to something more strenuous like traffic noise.
“One of the studies we looked at in our paper compared people who listened to birds to people who listened to traffic sounds, and that’s not really a neutral comparison,” Peterson said.
“We had neutral control where we just left people alone and compared it to something positive,” he added.
The study found that bird watching improved the mental health of participants and further research could be carried out to find out why.
“Bird watching is one of the most common ways that humans interact with wildlife globally, and college campuses provide access to this activity even in more urban environments,” Peterson said.
New York Post
