Watching Sports Changes Brain to Improve Mental Wellbeing, Study Finds

Audible gasps, bated breath, pregnant pauses, climactic cheers - audience fervour reaches fever pitch at the Paris 2024 Olympics, where the world's greatest athletes break records, perform staggering physical feats and win medals gloriously.

It's no secret that watching sports generates a real buzz, but it turns out that the benefits go beyond enjoyment, entertainment and relaxation, and extend to improving mental well-being, too. New research, a collection of three studies, published in Sports Management Review has found that watching sports boosts feelings of happiness, and, more notably, may gradually change brain structures and increase grey matter, one of the two main tissues in the central nervous system that serves to process information.

The research

A team led by Waseda University's Faculty of Human Sciences conducted three studies on over 20,200 Japanese participants using a variety of methods, including brain scans, self-reports and analysing existing data.

The first two studies, involving 20,000 and 208 participants respectively, confirmed that watching sport was linked to elevated well-being. After looking at the connection between sports viewing and the type of sport observed, the team also found that happiness was more enhanced for popular sports like baseball, rather than less popular activities, like golf.

Most marked, however, was the third study, where researchers looked at the brain activity of 14 participants while they watched sports clips using multi-modal MRIs. The viewers exhibited activation of the brain's reward circuits that release feelings of pleasure, with those who watched sports more often displaying higher grey matter volume in areas associated with reward circuits. As time goes on, therefore, there is the implication that viewing could lead to gradual changes in brain structure and long-term improvements in happiness levels, especially when watching sport.

What is grey matter?

According to research, grey matter makes up the outermost layer of the brain and plays the most significant part in allowing humans to function normally daily. It is where you process, among others: sensation, voluntary movement, learning, speech and cognition, says the Cleveland Clinic.

Study lead Professor Sato, said: 'Both subjective and objective measures of well-being were found to be positively influenced by engaging in sports viewing. By inducing structural changes in the brain's reward system over time, it fosters long-term benefits for individuals. For those seeking to enhance their overall well-being, regularly watching sports, particularly popular ones such as soccer, can serve as an effective remedy'.

It's worth noting that the studies were done on existing sports fans, rather than a more general sample of individuals who had varying relationships with sports consumption, but encouraging to hear nonetheless.