Seeing sporting events in person boosts mental health as much as getting a job!
CAMBRIDGE, UK — Sports fans are sure to love the results of this study from the UK. There’s a good reason to attend your favorite team’s games in person — and it’s not about learning about potential sports history or enjoying greasy stadium food. Researchers from Anglia Ruskin University say that watching live sporting events actually improves well-being and can reduce feelings of loneliness.
The results come from a survey of more than 7,000 adults showing that sports fans who attend games in person — whether professionals or amateurs — outperform those who don’t when it comes to life satisfaction.
The large-scale study is the first to examine the benefits of participating in sporting events. Overall, sports fans say that watching games live makes life feel “more rewarding”. In fact, these feelings are so powerful they’re comparable to the boost you get when you’re hired for a new job!
So why does live sport make us so much happier? Study authors say the impetus comes from the events, which foster “group identity” and a sense of “belonging” among fans.
Using sporting events as mental health therapy
Going forward, the researchers behind the groundbreaking study believe that attending sporting events could be used as a powerful public health tool to improve loneliness and well-being. Although many current initiatives promote the benefits of physical participation in sport, few have addressed the mental health benefits associated with watching live sporting events.
The research team from the University’s Faculty of Psychology and Sport Sciences analyzed the results of the Participating survey, conducted between 2019 and 2020. This survey surveyed 7,209 adults aged 16 to 85 living in England. The results show that people who attended live sporting events performed better on two key measures of subjective well-being: life satisfaction and feeling that life is “worth it.”
Attending sporting matches, from local cricket and football teams to crucial Premier League games, also resulted in lower levels of loneliness.
These observations are even more common when viewed in conjunction with previous studies that associated similarly high levels of life satisfaction with fewer life-limiting illnesses and better physical health, successful aging, and lower mortality rates.
The lead author Dr. Helen Keyes hopes her team’s research could help shape future public health strategies, such as B. Offering discounts to specific people. “Previous research has focused on specific sports or small population samples, such as B. College students in the United States,” she said in a statement. “Our study is the first to examine the benefits of attending a sporting event for an adult population, and therefore our results could be useful in designing future public health strategies, e.g. B. offering reduced ticket prices for certain groups.”
dr Keyes added that while more studies are needed into the differences in well-being between support for different teams and the level at which the sport is played, her team’s study proves that live sports provide opportunities for social interactions that are available in few other environments. “The live events covered by the survey ranged from free amateur events, such as From watching village sports teams to Premier League football matches,” she says. “Therefore, more research needs to be done to see if these benefits are more pronounced for elite sport or are more closely associated with supporting a particular team.”
“However, we know that watching live sports of all kinds provides many opportunities for social interaction and this helps forge group identity and belonging, which in turn reduces loneliness and increases well-being,” she concludes.
The study will be published in the scientific journal frontiers in public health.
South West News Service writer James Gamble contributed to this report.