Cute Animal Videos Are Stress Relievers Until You Try To Make One

Animals are funny and the cute videos are therapeutic to watch, but making a video with your pet is another story entirely.  

Watching cute animal videos can sometimes cure a mild depression, and they've figured out exactly how long it takes to start feeling relaxed and happy.

A group in the UK looked into the effects that cute animal clips can have and found that blood pressure and heart rates dropped after just a half-hour of watching. The videos where the animals interacted with humans produced the most relaxed, happy feelings.  And some people even said they felt more focused on tasks after watching the animal videos. Yup!  We know this, and we call it "multitasking" at work.

Youtube is full of videos of cats stretching, dogs playing frisbee, and puppies encountering fish, and we are glued.  A curious pet can cure the blahs, and it's impossible to be stressed out when they're on the screen.  At least until a cat sees a cucumber.  Nothing stresses out a poor, unsuspecting cat more than a long, green, snake-like shadow right behind them, and the web soaks it up.  But, have you ever tried making one of those videos?

I wanted to see if cucumbers had an impact on my cats so I put a cucumber behind Willow as she was eating and started rolling the camera.  What an epic fail!  She couldn't care less that there was a big, fat, scary cucumber sitting right behind her, and in fact, she barely even noticed it.  At least paw the thing, Willow.  But nah.  It might as well have been a tube of toothpaste.  It was just something sitting on the floor, and she wasn't having it.  I have a new appreciation now for animal videos on the web, and for cats with a pulse.

Anyway, animal videos are stress relievers, so if you find yourself a little panicked about life this weekend, give yourself thirty minutes with cats falling off window sills and dogs watching their owners play video games, and things will be okay again.