Watching cute animal videos is really healthy for you

From now on, I have a really good excuse to bother people with videos of my lovely Pebbles. Yes, that is indeed a cat and no, people are not always waiting for that. Almost never, by the way. But now I have a really good excuse to force them to watch, because watching videos of cute animals turns out to be really good for your health.

And that is scientifically proven, huh, at the University of Leeds. They researched that people who were restless or had stress calmed down much more by watching videos of furry, cute, probably small animals. Now I know that a study is often only truly representative if it is a large-scale study, but let's just forget that for convenience.

Only nineteen people participated in this study, but the result is to my liking so we’ll just accept it. These nineteen individuals (fifteen students and four staff members) were shown videos of, among others, puppies, kittens, and baby gorillas (aaahhhh). They were shown this during the winter period, which is a time when they have to take many exams, so that naturally means more stress.

What turns out? In all nineteen, blood pressure dropped while watching these videos. So that's just a result of 100 percent. Also, when filling out the questionnaire afterwards, it turned out that everyone felt better than before. Look, I understand that: give me an hour of kitten videos and my day, week, month can hardly go wrong.

I think I’m going to make this my new evening routine. Every evening before going to sleep, just watch half an hour of animal videos. Just to relax. Apparently it works 100 percent of the time. GREAT.