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It’s True ☑️ : Beavers eating cabbage can help reduce your stress!
It’s True ☑️ : Beavers eating cabbage can help reduce your stress! https://www.citizenme.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Honey-Photo-Blog-Banner.png 2240 1260 Ivona Ivanova Ivona Ivanova https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/78e75720415f6373d3768a60e65e855b?s=96&d=mm&r=gAfter extensive (non!) scientific testing among our wonderful community (yes, that includes you), we can confirm that watching a cute mammal crunching cabbage appears to reduce stress for many people 🙏
How stressed do you feel after watching this video?
A cute animal video going viral across the Internet is, let’s be honest, hardly remarkable! As I write, the original Twitter post, by Dick King-Smith tribute account @DickKingSmith, has been viewed more than 4 million times. But it was the throwaway video description that intrigued us:
![](https://www.citizenme.com/public/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Capture.png)
Many people rushed to praise the video as being “better-than-meditation” (some even considered buying a beaver as a Christmas present??), while others argued that the claim couldn’t be true. So we checked the source and it was only tested with 17 people – and we thought…why not do some Citizen Science together with our awesome CitizenMe community 🤷♂️
In total, almost 1,000 Citizens from around the world have now shared their stress level both before and after watching the video. Here’s what we found:
Firstly, after watching the video, the number of participants who said that they didn’t feel stressed at all increased by 17%.
![](https://www.citizenme.com/public/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/❓Fact_or-Fiction_-Stress-Levels-and-Memes-chart-4.png)
![](https://www.citizenme.com/public/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Capture3.png)
Therefore, it appears that the claim that this particular video reduces stress…may be true! Of course, if we were to do this scientifically, we would be more rigorous, for example, adding a control group and testing other videos. However, this result is a very strong indication that the right type of screen-time can sometimes be beneficial to us.
We were also curious to find out whether we all feel that viral social media content can generally reduce stress; and the results supported this too. 59% of us say that online visuals can improve our stress level, while only 5% see them as a threat to our well-being:
![](https://www.citizenme.com/public/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/❓Fact_or-Fiction_-Stress-Levels-and-Memes-chart-3.png)
Finally, on the flip-side, we asked what the negative aspects of visuals might be. A “waste of time” was given as the top reason why online content such as memes might influence stress levels negatively.
![](https://www.citizenme.com/public/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/❓Fact_or-Fiction_-Stress-Levels-and-Memes-chart-2.png)
So our Citizen Science experiment confirms that whilst some memes and videos can be beneficial to our mental health, we also feel that Social Media in general can have a negative impact on our mental health.
See the results live on the CitizenMe app. We’ll be testing more claims soon, so stay tuned! Download the app here: https://www.citizenme.com/public/for-citizens/
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