Science says that watching cat videos is actually good for us, because science is great

You’re nine cat videos deep on YouTube and you’re feeling a smidge guilty for wasting so much time watching clips of kittens being adorbs. But ARE you really wasting your time? According to science, maybe not so much.

As Jezebel reports, there was recently a study published in Computers in Human Behavior that makes a pretty strong case for cat video watching actually being good for people.

The study first lays out some pretty mind-blowing cat video stats. As of 2014, there was 2 million cat videos posted on YouTube with nearly 26 billion total views, which averages out to about 12,000 views per video. It’s no secret that the internet loves itself some cats. The question becomes WHY, what is it about our furry whiskered friends that makes them so gosh-darn watchable?

As the study revealed (to no cat-lover’s great surprise), after watching cat videos, participants reported feeling more energetic, hopeful, and optimistic, and also reported feeling less anxiety and sadness after watching cat videos. So, basically kitteh vids function like internet self-medication. Sometimes you just need a quick dose of ninja cats to get through an exhausting, stressful, and/or just-this-side-of-depressing work day.

This is the part where we say the study was stacked a little bit in favor of cat-lovers. 36% of study participants were self-described “cat people,” while another 60% of participants loved cats and dogs equally (only 3% of people in the study were “dog people.”) Additionally, 88.4% of participants were women and 90.4% were white, so this study definitely is just the start of a scientific exploration into why we who love cat videos love this section of the internet with the fire of a thousand suns. Still, it’s rad that we’re getting some scientific evidence to back the the cat-lovers of the internet up and make us feel like we’re not, you know, COMPLETELY wasting our time watching that Surprised Kitty video over and over again.

Related posts:

Cats have won the internet- here’s why

There is now a 24/7 cat TV channel and we can’t get enough

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