Use sounds of nature to de-stress (and connect with nature)

As a cat caregiver you want to be in the best state of mind that you can achieve in order to discharge your duties and responsibilities towards your cat companion to the highest standard! 😉😎 A pretty fancy introduction don't you think? But essentially true. 

The modern world is pretty stressful because it's more competitive than ever before and there's that background noise of impending WW3 and that background noise of climate change which I think makes a lot of people anxious as it is ever present.

Listening to the sounds of nature to destress on your daily commute. Image: MikeB using AI - Bing's Copilot.

So, we need to do all we can to de-stress ourselves and I've always said that if everybody connected with nature by walking in a park every day for half an hour it would help. I do it (Richmond Park - a fabulous place). 

But if you can't do that then you can listen to the sounds of nature on your daily commute on the train which, according to a small study, reduced stress levels by 35% compared to those who had listened to nothing at all.

This is called a 'pilot study' because it's quite small and non-peer reviewed. It was commissioned by South Western Railway, a British railway company. They conducted the test on a loop-line from Waterloo Station and back to Waterloo station; a 45 minute circular journey leaving London and then returning. I have used that line often.

Forty-two passengers participated. The participants in one group were asked to listen to nature sounds for 15 minutes, followed by a 15-minute break, followed by 15 minutes of listening to audio of their choice such as music or perhaps a podcast.

The second group did the same thing in reverse order. Their mood was assessed using a questionnaire described as an "industry-standard mood assessment questionnaire".

They reported "a significant decrease in the average feelings of stress when the passengers listened to the nature-inspired soundscape as compared to their baseline levels".

The research has not been peer reviewed and neither has it been published in a scientific journal. It was carried out in consultation with Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford.

Comment: as mentioned in the first sentence, I believe that all humans need to ensure that they connect with nature because we come from nature. Too often we distance ourselves from nature with concrete, steel, televisions and mobile phones. We live in this human-generated artificial consumer-orientated techno-world which is anathema to nature. Connect with nature, walk in nature as best you can and as regularly as you can and it will help ease some of that pent-up stress and simmering anxiety.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins. Also: sources for news articles are carefully selected but the news is often not independently verified. Also, I rely on scientific studies but they are not 100% reliable.