Anxiety disorders have increased significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and with it the use of anxiolytics and antidepressants to relieve anxiety symptoms. However, solving emotional distress with pills is not a good idea in the long term, because it can lead to dependency and does not solve the underlying problem. Changing our lifestyle and introducing healthy habits on a daily basis is the best option, and it largely depends on us.
A good example of this is the finding of a new study in which 295 people have participated and which has shown that stopping to listen to birdsong reduces anxiety and irrational thoughts. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) studied how traffic noise and birdsong affect mood, paranoia and cognitive functions.
To do this, they conducted a randomized online experiment with 295 volunteers who listened to clips with different sounds for six minutes that reproduced the usual noise of traffic or birdsong. Before that, they had carried out cognitive tests and answered questionnaires with the aim of evaluating their mental health.
Birdsong is a subtle indication of an untouched natural environment, drawing attention away from stressors that might otherwise signal an impending threat
“Everyone has certain psychological dispositions. Healthy people may also experience anxious thoughts or temporary paranoid perceptions. The questionnaires allow us to identify the tendencies of people without a diagnosis of depression, anxiety and paranoia and to investigate the effect of the sounds of birds or traffic on these tendencies”, explained the first author Emil Stobbe, predoctoral fellow in the Group Lise Meitner Professor of Environmental Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.
Traffic noise aggravated depressive states
The results of the research have been published in Scientific Reports and showed that anxiety and paranoia decrease in healthy people when listening to birdsong, but that this did not seem to influence depressive states. In contrast, traffic noise generally worsened depressive states, especially when the audio clip included many different types of traffic sounds.
It was already known that natural environments have a positive impact on physical and psychological health and that birdsong in particular improves mood, but according to the authors of the work, this is the first study to show an effect on paranoid states, and this happened regardless of whether the birdsong came from two or more different bird species. They also found that neither birdsong nor traffic noise influenced cognitive performance.
The researchers believe that these effects are explained by the fact that birdsong is a subtle indication of an intact natural environment, and this diverts attention from stressors that, otherwise, could alert to an imminent threat. The findings are an interesting starting point for future research and applications, such as manipulating background noise in certain situations or analyzing its influence on patients diagnosed with anxiety disorders or paranoia.
“Birdsong could also be applied to prevent mental disorders. Listening to an audio CD would be a simple and easily accessible intervention. But if we could already show such effects in an online experiment conducted by participants on a computer, we can surmise that these are even stronger outdoors in nature,” says Stobbe, who is a member of the Lise Meitner Group for Environmental Neuroscience at Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, which studies the effects of the physical environment on the individual.
“We were recently able to conduct a study showing that a one-hour walk in nature reduces brain activity associated with stress,” adds the head of the research group, Simone Kühn. “We still can’t say which features of nature (smells, sounds, colors, or a combination of them) are responsible for the effect. The present study provides an additional component to clarify this problem”, continues Kühn. What is clear is that nature improves mental health and well-being.
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