Just 10 Minutes Of Birdsong In Forest Linked To Stress Relief

A new experiment asked college students to sit quietly outdoors for 10 minutes while different sounds played through their headphones, then measured how stressed, emotionally drained, or mentally restored they felt afterward. The results were not subtle. Students reported lower stress and fewer negative feelings after the forest and recorded birdsong condition than after the other three conditions, and the gap registered clearly in a controlled study.

Mental health on college campuses has been deteriorating for years. By 2020, roughly 60% of college students reported experiencing mental health challenges, according to research cited in the study...

Researchers recruited 106 student volunteers from NC State’s College of Natural Resources for the study, published in the journal Environmental Conservation. Most participants identified as female, and the average age was 22.5 years old. Over one roughly two-hour session, each student visited two spots on or near campus, carrying a camp chair, noise-cancelling headphones, and their own cellphone.

One spot was a restored forest along a creek, replanted and re-engineered starting in the early 2000s, with more than 70% tree canopy cover and no view of buildings. Participants faced away from the footpath, toward the trees. The other sat outside the Talley Student Union, a grey, built-up area with more than 70% hard structures and clear sightlines to buildings.

At each spot, participants sat quietly for five minutes to settle in, then listened to one of two 10-minute soundscapes through their headphones: either a birdsong recording from a freshwater marsh at St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in Florida, featuring Carolina wren, blue-grey gnatcatcher, and white-eyed vireo, or traffic noise recorded near a busy intersection outside Paris. Every student went through all four combinations of location and sound.

After each 10-minute exposure, participants completed a short survey on their phones, rating current stress on a scale from zero to ten, along with questions measuring positive and negative feelings during the past 10 minutes and how restorative the experience felt... Of the four combinations tested, stress ratings ran lowest for the restored forest paired with birdsong, which also produced the fewest negative feelings and the most positive feelings. Traffic noise in the grey space produced the opposite result on every single measure: highest stress, most negative emotions, fewest positive emotions, and lowest sense of mental restoration.