It’s True ☑️ : Beavers eating cabbage can help reduce your stress!

It’s True ☑️ : Beavers eating cabbage can help reduce your stress! 2240 1260 Ivona Ivanova

After 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:

Dick King-Smith’s original post went viral

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%.

Respondents’ stress levels before watching the video
Respondents’ stress levels after watching the video

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:

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.

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/