Watching live sports is a valuable pass time for people all over the world. Aside from providing unique entertainment, it allows people to connect with like-minded individuals and build relationships on a foundation of similar interests. It is very apparent that watching sports has a positive impact on our societies and families, but not much is known about the effect it can have on our individual mental well-being. Two separate studies, conducted at universities in Japan and England, hope to ascertain the relationship between the act of watching sports and overall mental health. The methods of these studies include surveys and neural activity examination.
A study conducted at Angila University of Cambridge, England, and published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health in March of 2023 analyzed the emotions of people who frequented live sporting events. As reported by Eric Blakemore of The Washington Post, the study looked at data from a survey given to “7,209 16- to 85-year-old people living in England. The survey asked participants questions about their lives and well-being, and included questions about whether they attended sporting events.” The results, as relayed in Science Daily, “found that attending live sporting events results in higher scores of two major measurements of subjective well being — life satisfaction and a sense of ‘life being worthwhile’ — as well as lower levels of loneliness.” Those who attended live sporting events had a more positive outlook on life and were more likely to conclude that their lives were worth living compared to those who did not attend sporting events. The evidence from this study is anecdotal and does not help to specify whether it is the act of watching live sporting events or the social aspect of the activity that helps people feel less lonely. A team in Japan did similar things to define this.
A study conducted by collaborators of Waseda University and Nanyang Technological University was published in Sports Management Review in March of 2024. This included three separate studies that were meant to assess “both subjective and objective measures of well-being,” as stated by Professor Shintaro Sato from the Faculty of Sports Science at Waseda. As reported in Science Daily, the first of the three studies included the analysis of “large-scale publicly available data on the influence of watching sports on 20,000 Japanese residents.” This study confirmed what previous studies, including the one conducted in Cambridge, found, showing a positive correlation between watching sports and overall happiness and content. The second study involved “an online survey aimed at investigating whether the connection between sports viewing and well-being varied depending on the type of sport observed.” 208 participants were shown various events of popular sports and events of lesser-known sports to see if the popularity of a sport altered its impact on mental well-being. This study found that the more popular a sport was, the stronger its impact on mental health was.
The most significant results from these studies came from the third study in which neuroimaging techniques were used to assess changes the brain goes through when watching sports. As reported in Science Daily, “the brain activity of fourteen able-bodied Japanese participants was analyzed while they watched sports clips. The results of this investigation illuminated that sports viewing triggered activation in the brain’s reward circuits, indicative of feelings of happiness or pleasure.” In addition, those who reported watching sports regularly “exhibited greater gray matter volume in regions associated with reward circuits, suggesting that regular sports viewing may gradually induce changes in brain structures.” This is the only quantitative piece of evidence that watching sports has benefits that go beyond our social lives. Rodielon Putol, a staff writer for Earth, stated that information regarding the effects that watching sports has on the brain is an important tool that can be used by researchers, sports managers, and health policymakers. “For public health officials, promoting sports viewing could be integrated into programs aiming to boost community health and cohesion,” helping to develop public health strategies. In the future, his data could lead to changes like lower fares at sporting events for specific individuals.
