Bird singing is the right therapy to preserve mental well-being

If we want to improve our mental well-being we should watch and listen to birds. Two studies published some time ago on Scientific Reports they explained in fact, as the Washington Postthat observing or listening to birds can have positive effects on our psychology.

If, in general, scientific research has told us in various ways that contact and interaction with natural contexts is good for our physical and mental health, birds seem to be one of the deepest and most specific sources of these effects. Also because they are everywhere: they represent nature itself that comes looking for us. And even when we can’t see them, hidden among the branches of the trees, we can obviously listen to their calls and signals which are of truly complex types. A volume that came out a short time ago explains it very well, The secret life of birds (La nave di Teseo) by the writer and science popularizer Jennifer Ackerman, a journey to discover their formidable communication strategies.

“The particularity of bird songs is that even if people live in very urban environments and do not have much contact with nature, they connect bird songs to vital and intact natural environments,” he explained. Emil Stobbe, an environmental neuroscience graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and author of one of the studies. Another recent research also shows that listening to recordings of their songs, even through headphones, can alleviate a large number of negative emotions.

In the first study The researchers asked 1,300 participants to collect information about their living environment and well-being three times a day using a smartphone application called Urban Mind. The app also collected other data such as sleep quality, subjective rating of air quality and location. Thus, the 26,856 surveys collected offered a rich dataset of what those people associated with mental well-being in the concrete reality of their daily lives. Among these aspects, the association between seeing or listening to birds emerged and remained very strong even when other possible explanations were taken into account such as education, employment or the presence of green and aquatic areas , also associated with positive effects on mental health by several surveys. What’s interesting is that the effect is continued even after the encounter with the birdsfor hours, until a possible subsequent meeting.

Beneficial effects on depression and anxiety

Intriguingly, the birds produced these effects on both participants without problems and those diagnosed with depression, which is one of the most common mental illnesses worldwide and doesn’t always respond to conventional pharmaceutical treatments.

A second job instead he found that listen to short audio clips as short as six minutes long can reduce the sensations of anxiety, depression And paranoia in healthy participants. “Listening to birdsong through headphones was able to activate the same mechanisms that might be beneficial for mental well-being,” he said. Ryan Hammoud, PhD candidate at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London and author of the first survey – it’s a very, very beautiful discovery».

The researchers, led this time by Stobbe, asked 295 online participants to self-assess their emotional states and to undergo a cognitive memory test. Then they randomly asked participants to listen to i birds songs or the city ​​traffic noise. The researchers then asked the volunteers to re-measure their emotional and cognitive states. The result? Participants who listened to more diverse bird songs (with the acoustic acrobatics of eight species) reported a decrease in depressive symptoms in addition to a significant decrease in feelings of anxiety and paranoia. And even those who listened to less rich bird songs (only two bird species) reported a significant decrease in feelings of anxiety and paranoia. Traffic noise instead, and as expected, aggravated those negative sensations.

The psychological value of nature

But why does the relationship with nature produce these consequences? A guess, known as attention restoration theoryposits that being in nature is helpful for improving concentration and decreasing mental fatigue associated with living in stressful urban environments. Natural stimuli, such as birdsong, can therefore allow us to engage in a “soft charm”, which gently holds our attention but also allows it to replenish itself. Or rather, of have fun with refreshments.

As for, more specifically, birds singing, the reasons why they are able to interact so deeply with our brain they are not clear. The only way to explain this is to refer to a number of previous studies that have found stress-reducing brain responses linked to other forms of exposure to nature. Among other things, going out for birdwatching still encourages us to do more physical activity which, by its nature, triggers significant effects on the body. If you are unsure of a bird’s song there are several apps, from Merlin Bird ID to BirdNetboth made by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which can help us identify the species (as well as eBird) and even view its spectrogram. Platforms like BirdCastinstead, they provide real-time maps of the migrations in your area.

The Promise of Return: 10 Fearless Migratory Birds

How much nature does it take to feel good? Two hours a week