The state of mental health on university campuses has been deteriorating for many years. By 2020, nearly 60 percent of students reported experiencing some kind of mental health issue, and the pandemic only worsened the situation.
Spending time in nature is one of the few remedies that consistently proves beneficial. Short visits can reduce stress, boost mood, and sharpen attention, which tends to fade amid daily routines.
Two long-established concepts explain this. One suggests that natural surroundings relieve stress by calming the body, while the other holds that nature restores depleted focus by gently directing the mind outward.
A new experiment aimed to separate two things that usually go together outdoors. It posed a more precise question: what has a greater impact on the mind—the place itself or the sounds of that place?
The work was led by Nils Peterson, a professor at North Carolina State University (NC State). His team wanted to determine how much of nature’s benefit comes from what people see versus what they hear. The findings were published in the journal Environmental Conservation.
This question matters especially in cities. In built-up areas, green spaces are scarce, so knowing which component plays a key role can help decide where to direct limited funds.
Birdwatching gave the team a useful angle on this. It is inexpensive, requires no special skills, and its most basic feature—birdsong—reaches places where trees do not. Birds fit this need perfectly. They thrive equally well in cities and forests, so their songs can be heard by almost anyone within earshot, even on a concrete square.
The simple design of the experiment was intentional. Each of the 106 students spent time in two very different spots on the Raleigh campus. One was a restored strip of coastal forest along Rocky Branch Creek, a waterway rebuilt and replanted between 2002 and 2006. The other was a gray plaza in front of a busy student center, surrounded by buildings and roads.
At each location, participants sat on folding chairs wearing noise-canceling headphones. Through these headphones, they heard either 10 minutes of birdsong from a Florida swamp or 10 minutes of recorded traffic from a busy intersection in Paris. The order of places and sounds was varied for each person. This allowed the team to separate the effect of the landscape from the effect of the sound.
After each session, students rated their stress levels and emotional state. They also assessed how restorative they found the experience—meaning how much it refreshed their minds and eased tension. A clear picture emerged. The combination of forest and birdsong produced the best mood, the least stress, and the strongest sense of renewal.
“Participants in the green space who listened to birdsong showed a significant effect,” said Peterson. “Positive emotions increased, negative emotions decreased, stress levels dropped, and the feeling of restoration grew more than with any other combination of factors. On the other hand, the complete opposite occurred when participants in the gray urban environment listened to traffic sounds, and more mixed reactions happened when the sounds and setting did not match.”
Each element contributed. Mismatched scenes—birdsong on the gray plaza or traffic among the trees—fell neatly between the two extremes. For stress relief and strong emotional expression, sound and setting held roughly equal importance. Birdsong lowered stress regardless of whether people sat among the trees or facing concrete.
The restoration measure showed a slightly different pattern. The feeling of mental freshness depended more on the forest than on the sound, though both played a role. One reason might lie in the survey itself. It repeatedly asked about the “place,” which likely drew people’s attention to what they saw rather than what they heard in their ears.
This was not some ancient forest. It was a modest patch of restored woodland vegetation located on a university campus. That small detail matters. The restored forest, only twenty years old, produced a calming effect that scientists usually attribute to mature forests. Peterson sees a practical lesson in this for bleak urban corners. A harsh plaza can be softened without demolishing anything.
“When you have a really ambiguous situation that might cause people stress and negative experiences, if you can change that space so it includes natural sounds, you can lessen the negative effects of that ambiguity,” said Peterson. “In our research, we have evidence for using bird sounds, but there is also a lot of literature supporting the use of water sounds and other natural phenomena.”
The design hints at something reassuringly inexpensive. The only thing students needed from the bird world was its sounds. No binoculars, no species guides, no long hikes into the woods. Students just needed 10 minutes to sit on a bench.
The forest itself was small, squeezed into a functioning urban campus. This suggests that the same approach could work in a well-placed city park if it had a suitable spot and view. That kind of reach is the real advantage here. A recording and a few trees can bring a little calm to a busy city block.
The main catch is fairness. Green places rich with birds tend to be located in wealthier areas, so the mental health benefits might bypass those who need them most. Students, in particular, often lack access to traditional psychological support. An affordable opportunity to spend time in nature could help some of them where clinics are unavailable.
Restoring both trees and the birds that live in them could spread this positive effect to a wider audience. Just 10 minutes and a bit of birdsong demanded very little from the students, and they left feeling better.
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