For college students looking to improve their mental health, one possible answer may be right outside their window: bird watching.
A new study finds that people who have nature-based experiences report greater well-being and less psychological distress than those who do not. Bird watching, in particular, yielded promising results, with greater gains in subjective well-being and greater reductions in distress than more generic exposure to nature, such as hiking. Because bird watching is an easily accessible activity, the results are encouraging for college students, who are among those most likely to suffer from mental health problems.
“There has been a lot of research on well-being through the pandemic that suggests that teenagers and college-age children are struggling the most,” said Nils Peterson, corresponding author of the study and professor of forestry and environmental resources at North University. Carolina State. “Especially when you think about students and graduate students, it seems like they’re groups that are struggling in terms of accessing nature and getting those benefits.
“Bird watching is one of the most ubiquitous ways humans interact with wildlife globally, and university campuses provide a space where there is access to that activity even in more urban environments.”
To quantitatively measure subjective well-being, the researchers used a five-question survey known as the World Health Organization Well-Being Index of Five (WHO-5). This tool asks participants to assign a rating from zero to five to statements about well-being, depending on how often they have felt this way in the past two weeks. For example, when asked “I have felt calm and relaxed,” a participant would mark a zero for “none of the time” or a five for “all the time.” Researchers can calculate a raw well-being score by simply adding the five responses, with zero being the worst possible quality of life and 25 being the best possible quality of life.
The researchers divided the participants into three groups: a control group, a group assigned five nature walks, and a group assigned five 30-minute bird-watching sessions. While all three groups improved their scores on the WHO-5 scale, the bird-watching group started lower and finished higher than the other two. Using STOP-D, a similar questionnaire designed to measure psychological distress, the researchers also found that nature participation performed better than the control, with participants in both bird watching and nature walks showing a decrease in anxiety.
This study differs from some previous research, Peterson said, in that it compared the effects of bird watching and nature engagement with a control group rather than a group that more actively experiences negative circumstances.
“One of the studies we reviewed in our paper compared people who listen to birds to people who listen 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 it to something positive.”
The study supports the idea that bird watching helps improve mental health and opens many avenues for future research. For example, future studies could examine why bird watching helps people feel better or the moderating effects of race, gender, and other factors.