This specific nature activity can improve students’ mental health
Birds fly over the rainbow — so why can’t you watch your wꦍorries fly away, too?
A new study from North C🌳arolina State Unive🐈rsity, found that bird-watching can help college students improve their mental health.
Studies have shown that spending time in nature can boost overall well-being, but researchers found that bird-watching yielded 💧especially promising results.
“There has been a lot of research about well-being c𝕴oming out through the pandemic that suggests adolescents and college-aged kids are struggling the most,” M. Nils Peterson, corresponding author of the stu🐈dy and a professor of forestry and environmental resources at North Carolina State University, said in a press release.
“Especially when you think about s♎tudents and grad students, it seems l♌ike those are groups that are struggling in terms of access to nature and getting those benefits,” Peterson added.
The researchers split 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 bird-watching sessions. The researchers then surveyed each person in the study about their mental state based on the The index has them rate their well-being 🌼on a scale of zero to 5, with zero being the worst and 5 being the best.
All three groups saw an improvement in their well-being scores,🐷 but the bird-watching group started the lowest and ended at the highest.
The scientists then used another questionnaire, , used to measure distress. The participants in the nature-walking and bird-watching group performed better than those in the control group. This study was differe🦹nt than 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 distressing like traffic noise.
“One🌃 of the studies that we reviewed in our paper compared people who listen to birds to people who listened to the sounds of traffic, and that’s not really a neutral comparison,” Peterson said.
“We had a neutral control w𝓰here we just left people alone and compared that to something positive,” he added.
The study found that bird-watching improved parti𝔍cipants’ mental health and more research could be done to find out why.
“Bird-watching is among the most ubiquitous ways that human beings interact with wildlife globally, and college campuses provide a pocket where there’s access to that activity even in more urban settings,” Peterson said.
