Birdsong reduces anxiety
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development at the University of Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) have found that birdsong reduces anxiety, paranoia and irrational thoughts. Their findings are published in the journal Scientific Reports.
In the study, researchers examined how traffic noise and birdsong affect mood, paranoia and cognitive functioning by performing an online experiment with 295 randomly assigned participants. The volunteers listened to six minutes of traffic noise or different bird songs. Before and after hearing the sound bites, participants completed questionnaires assessing their mental health and performed cognitive tests.
Birdsong relieves paranoid states
The positive influence of birdsong on mood is already known, but to the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to reveal an effect on paranoid states. The effect remained the same whether the songs came from one or more different bird species. The researchers also found that neither birdsong nor traffic noise influenced cognitive performance. Birdsong does not seem to have an influence on depressive states in this experiment. However, traffic noise generally aggravated depressive states, especially if the audio clip involved many different types of traffic noise.
According to the researchers, these effects are explained by the fact that birdsong is an indication of an untouched natural environment, distracting attention from stressors that rather signal a threat such as traffic noises. Overall, the findings suggest exciting avenues for further research and applications for patients with diagnosed anxiety disorders or paranoia.
The chirping of birds could also help prevent mental disorders
“Everyone has certain psychological dispositions. Healthy people may also experience anxious thoughts or temporary paranoid perceptions. Questionnaires allow us to identify tendencies in people without them having a diagnosis of depression, anxiety and paranoia and to study the effect of bird or traffic sounds on these tendencies” explains in a press release one of the authors, Emil Stobbe, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.
“Birdsong could also be applied to prevent mental disorders. Listening to an audio CD would be a simple and easily accessible intervention” he adds. “But if we could already show such effects in an online experiment carried out on participants via a computer, we can assume that these are even stronger outdoors in nature” continues the researcher.
Previous studies have already shown that smelling the scents of nature improves mental health and that spending time in nature benefits us. This new study once again demonstrates the many health and well-being benefits provided by the natural environment, this time through the sound of birds chirping.
