Birds might be the key to improving your mental health

If you want to improve your mental health then you should probably start committing a little time each day to sit and listen to the birds chirping outside your windows. It turns out science has shown that the songs birds sing can have surprising impacts on your brain. 

Researchers have long known that nature can have a lot of positive effects on the body and brain but birds and their songs appear to have a particularly potent ability to help humans heal from the things that are ailing their minds according to one 2022 study. 

In the study, researchers asked 1292 participants to spend time writing about their daily interactions with nature while using the Urban Mind app on their mobile devices. The participants were not informed that the study would be focused on bird interactions. 

Important information was collected on sleep cycles, their socioeconomic status, as well as any prior mental health issues they may have dealt with. Each participant was also asked a question when they encountered a bird to determine their mental well-being. 

Over 26,000 thousand assessments were collected by researchers between April 2018 and October 2021, with the total revealing a significant trend in how birds had helped the participants improve their mental well-being day-to-day. 

“Everyday encounters with birdlife were associated with time-lasting improvements in mental well-being,” the study’s authors wrote in the introduction of their research paper. 

“These improvements were evident not only in healthy people but also in those with a diagnosis of depression, the most common mental illness across the world,” the study’s authors added. But the study’s findings were more detailed than just general improvements. 

The researchers found that not only did encountering birds and listening to their songs help their participants' mental health, but those positive effects lasted long after their encounter with the animal according to The Washington Post’s Richard Sima.

Sima explained that after an encounter the Urban Mind app would check in a few hours later with the participant and the record data showed that those who reported seeing or hearing a bird in their day said they had higher mental well-being. 

“The special thing about birdsongs is that even if people live in very urban environments and do not have a lot of contact with nature, they link the songs of birds to vital and intact natural environments,” Emme Strobbe explained to The Washington Post. 

Strobbe is the co-author of a different study on the impact birds have on human health and her research showed most people don’t even need to be in the actual presence of real birdsongs to benefit from the positive effect they can have on your brain.

The second study showed that just listening to audio clips of birds chirping for six minutes was enough to reduce the feelings of anxiety, depression, and paranoia in participants that were deemed healthy. They also studied the harmful impact of noisy urban sounds.

Traffic noises, even at a low sound level, were enough to increase feelings associated with depression according to the study’s authors but they found that bird songs could minimize those effects, leading them to suggest that it could be used as therapy. 

Richard Hamound is a PhD candidate at King’s College London as well as a coauthor of the first study that looked at bird encounters and he told The Washington Post that Strobbe and her co-authors’ research was a “very very nice finding.”

“Listening to birdsong through headphones was able to hit the same pathways that might be beneficial toward mental well-being,” Hammoud added, so maybe the next time you’re driving in a construction zone you may want to turn on a bird tune.  

According to AZ Animals, the birds that have the most beautiful songs in the world are the Nightingale, followed by the Hermit Thrush and the Linnet. But if you want to listen to a bird to ease your anxiety you should close your browser and pop outside!