Birdwatching can help students improve mental health and reduce anxiety

For students looking to improve their mental health, a possible answer may lie just outside their window: bird watching.

A new study finds that people with nature-based experiences report better well-being and fewer psychological problems than those who don’t. Birdwatching in particular showed promising results, with greater gains in subjective well-being and greater reductions in suffering than more general nature exposure such as walking.

Because birdwatching is an easily accessible activity, the results are encouraging for students, who are among those most likely to suffer from mental health problems.

“There has been a lot of research on the well-being that has emerged from the pandemic, showing that adolescents and school-age children are struggling the most,” said Nils Peterson, corresponding author of the study and professor of forestry and environmental resources at North Carolina University. Carolina State University.

“Especially when you think about students and college students, it seems like these are groups that have difficulty accessing nature and getting those benefits.

“Birdwatching is one of the most ubiquitous ways people worldwide interact with wildlife, and college campuses provide a place where that activity can be accessed even in more urban environments.”

To quantitatively measure subjective well-being, researchers used a five-question survey known as the World Health Organization-Five Well-Being Index (WHO-5). This tool asks participants to rate statements about well-being from zero to five, depending on how often they have felt that way in the past two weeks.

For example, if the participant asks “I feel calm and relaxed,” they would mark a zero for “never” or a five for “always.” Researchers can calculate a raw well-being score by simply adding up the five answers, with zero being the worst possible and 25 the best possible quality of life.

Researchers divided participants into three groups: a control group, a group assigned five nature walks, and a group assigned five 30-minute birdwatching sessions. Although all three groups had improved WHO-5 scores, the birdwatching group started lower and ended higher than the other two.

Using STOP-D, a similar questionnaire designed to measure psychological distress, researchers also found that engagement with nature outperformed the control group, with participants in both birdwatching and nature walks showing a decrease in distress.

This study differed from previous research, Peterson said, in that it compared the effects of birdwatching and nature engagement with a control group rather than with a group that more actively experienced negative conditions.

“One of the studies we discussed in our article compared people listening to birds to people listening to traffic sounds, and that’s not really a neutral comparison,” Peterson said. “We had a neutral control where we just left people alone and compared that to something positive.”

The study supports the idea that birdwatching helps improve mental health and opens up many avenues for future research. For example, future research could explore why birdwatching helps people feel better or the moderating effects of race, gender, and other factors.

The article ‘Birdwatching linked to increased psychological well-being on college campuses: a pilot-scale experimental study’ was published in Environmental psychology. Co-authors include Lincoln Larson, Aaron Hipp, Justin M. Beall, Catherine Lerose, Hannah Desrochers, Summer Lauder, Sophia Torres, Nathan A. Tarr, Kayla Stukes, Kathryn Stevenson, and Katherine L. Martin, all of NC State.