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The Power of Music to Reduce Stress

Heidi Moawad, M.D.
January 26th, 2023
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Listening to your favorite music may have more health benefits than you realize. Here’s how songs can reduce stress and help you heal.

It’s not until we forget our headphones that we realize just how much we rely on music to help us through the day. Our favorite music seems capable of pumping us up before an important moment, calming us down when we’re upset, and just about anything in between.

But is there actually a scientific explanation for this? As it turns out, yes!

Music has been widely studied and revered throughout human history for its ability to both entertain and heal. Countless experts have investigated how listening to music can potentially have therapeutic effects on a range of mental and physical health conditions, or just as a way to cope with everyday life.

Contemporary research suggests music has significant power to help reduce stress and anxiety, relieve pain, and improve focus among many more benefits.

How can listening to music reduce stress?

Stress — the feeling of emotional tension, overwhelm, or feeling unable to cope — affects us mentally and physically.

Stress has a biological impact that causes your body to release specific hormones and chemicals that activate your brain in certain ways. For example, when we are highly stressed, our heart rate and blood pressure can go up, and our adrenal gland begins producing cortisol, also known as “the stress hormone.”

Short term, cortisol can help us find the focus and energy we need to deal with a difficult situation, but when the body is exposed to excess cortisol for a prolonged period of time, it causes perpetual, exhausting states of fight, flight, or freeze. Ongoing or chronic stress can lead to developing an anxiety disorder, depression, chronic pain, and more.

Across time and space, music has had tremendous success as a tool for stress relief. While some types of music such as classical and ambient have long been studied for their calming effects, listening to your personal favorite music of any genre also has benefits.

A 2020 overview of research into music and stress suggests that listening to music can:

  • lower our heart rate and cortisol levels

  • release endorphins and improve our sense of well-being

  • distract us, reducing physical and emotional stress levels

  • reduce stress-related symptoms, whether used in a clinical environment or in daily life

How does music affect your brain?

As of 2019, the average hearing person across the world listened to 18 hours of music a week! This number is likely to be even higher in 2021.

So what is music actually doing to us during those hours we listen to it?

Well, here’s a super simple breakdown:

  • Music sounds move through our ears as vibrations.

  • The inner ear translates these vibrations into electrical signals.

  • Neurons transmit these signals to certain areas of the cerebral cortex in the brain.

  • Dedicated regions of the brain detect the different elements of the signals (like the tone, pitch, rhythm).

  • As the brain puts together all of this information so that you can sense the musical experience, it can influence our emotions and bodily systems, which is why scientists are so interested in studying it!

What does the research say?

Most investigations into music’s health effects center on its ability to calm us down and relieve stress. In recent years, this research has expanded in exciting and surprising new directions.

Some recent findings include the following:

  • Reduced cortisol levels. A recent 2021 study showed that adults who listened to both personal and neutral selections of music, at home and in a laboratory environment, had significantly “reduced cortisol levels.” This was found regardless of the music type.

  • Benefits in mental health treatments. An overview of 349 studies on music’s usefulness as a mental health treatment for conditions including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression, found that 68.5% of music-based interventions had positive results.

  • Reduced burnout. Music therapy also had significant benefit in preventing burnout in operating room staff. A 6-week studyTrusted Source showed that after having access to 30-minute music listening sessions each day at work for a month, staff reported decreased stress levels and less emotional exhaustion.

  • Helps you fall asleep. 62%Trusted Source of respondents to a 2018 survey reported they use music (from multiple genres) to help them fall asleep, mostly because it relaxed them, and distracted them from daily stressors. People who used music less were more likely to have lower quality sleep.

  • Reduced depression. Music listening or music therapy reduced depression levels, according to a 2017 reviewTrusted Source, and was associated with increased confidence and motivation, especially in group settings.

  • Reduced anxiety in children. A 2021 review of articles from 2009 to 2019 showed that music significantly reduced anxiety for children leading up to and during medical procedures.

  • Helps people cope with the pandemic. A surveyTrusted Source of over 5,600 people from 11 countries demonstrated that music has played a very important role during the COVID-19 pandemic in helping people cope during lockdown, and meet their well-being goals across culture, age, and gender lines.

  • Improved quality of life with Alzheimer’s disease. Especially when tried in the form of personal playlists for relaxation, research showed that music interventions can have positive effects on the behavior and cognition of people with Alzheimer’s disease, improving quality of life.

Music as meditation

Meditation is an ancient tradition that is practiced in cultures all over the world and is an integral part of some religions and types of yoga. There are many types of mediation, and people use some types to help treat mental and physical health conditions.

Usually, meditation aims to focus, center, calm, or direct your attention. It can also help relax our bodies. So it can pair well with music for some people.

Often, music used for meditation has a slow tempo, which can reduce heart rate, and also lower anxiety and stress levels. Guided meditation involves music with a narrator or speaker that directs your energy flow and focus, or offers positive affirmations.

Music therapy

Music therapy is different from just listening to music, although listening is a big part of it!

Music therapists work with a variety of patients of all ages. Like other forms of therapy, including art therapy, music therapists plan individualized sessions to help you meet your goals.

Music therapy can include goal-oriented music listening, playing and composing music, and songwriting, among other activities. These kinds of “purposeful” interactions with music can help you work through emotions or issues that are bothering you, encourage positive feelings, and even assist with speech or physical therapy.

A 2015Trusted Source study compared the effects of music therapy with a therapist versus music medicine (where music was played without a therapist) among people with cancer. Even though all music listening showed positive results, 77% of patients preferred music therapy sessions to just listening to music on their own.

Music as a pain reliever

Research shows that music can help relieve both chronic pain and post-operative pain:

  • ResearchTrusted Source shows that listening to “self-chosen, pleasant, familiar music” reduced pain in people with fibromyalgia.

  • According to a small-scale 2017 studyTrusted Source, listening to music in headphones while under local or general anesthesia can lower cortisol levels during surgery, and decrease post-op pain and stress.

How does it work? Scientists believeTrusted Source the effect may result from music actually shifting brain activity away from pain-related connectivity patterns, as well as creating positive emotions, and offering a distraction.

Music isn’t just limited to helping with physical pain. Stress causes emotional and psychological pain as well, which music can help alleviate.

Music as a focus aid

Maybe you’ve found yourself searching for “study playlists” on Spotify or YouTube. Well, it turns out there’s a reason why millions of other people stream these playlists too!

Listening to music has been shown to improve focus on certain tasks, especially if the task is more complex. Music may also help sharpen our brain’s ability to recall information and make connections.

In one recent experiment, participants were asked to press a button anytime the hand on a special clock started moving. The authors found that when people listened to their preferred background music while doing this “low-demanding sustained-attention task,” their minds wandered less, and they were more focused, compared to those without music.

Music to reduce anxiety

Anxiety, stress, and pain often hang out together. Music may be one way to help manage them and their troublemaking.

As some of the previously discussed research indicates, music can help reduce anxiety in both adults and children before and during medical procedures.

In one studyTrusted Source of over 950 critically ill patients, 30 minutes of music therapy a day was consistently associated with lower rates of anxiety and stress. Music’s ability to decrease biological stress responses like heart rate and cortisol levels also helps tackle anxiety.

Music as a grounding tool

The sympathetic and parasympathetic parts of your central nervous system are involuntary or automatic, meaning they work without you having to think about them.

Doctors may refer to the parasympathetic side as “rest and digest,” since it takes care of things when the body is at rest, while sympathetic is “fight or flight,” in charge of the body in motion.

When we are thrown into a stressful situation, it’s hard to calm back down and stay grounded. Deep breathing is one way to activate the parasympathetic nervous system to move back into “rest and digest.”

One studyTrusted Source shows that some types of music may also be a way to reactivate the parasympathetic nervous system quicker following a period of increased heart rate, like after exercising.

Are some types of music better for reducing stress?

Certain genres of lyric-less music, like classical and ambient, are historically the subject of most research studies into music and stress. While there’s evidence that they can reduce stress and anxiety, that doesn’t mean they’re “better” than other genres of music.

For many of the studies mentioned in this article, music listening involved multiple genres or songs chosen by both the participants and the researchers. In fact, the American Music Therapy Association states that “All styles of music can be useful in effecting change in a client or patient’s life.”

We also use different kinds of music for different purposes. Since we all have special relationships with our favorite songs and genres, we can use those to invoke certain emotions and feelings unique to that relationship. For example:

  • Classical music is associated with a soothing, calming effect.

  • Rap music can be inspiring and motivating when in a low mood or dealing with difficult life circumstances.

  • Heavy metal music can “enhance identity development” and help you become better-adjusted.

Musicians, researchers, and music therapists have actually claimed to create “the most relaxing” song ever, called “Weightless.” But you’ll have to decide for yourself.

Let’s recap

Listening to your favorite music has more benefits than you realize. It’s also safe, cost-effective, and widely available.

Music is certainly not a magical cure, nor is it a substitute for therapy, medication, surgery, or any other medical treatments. But music can be an important element of your well-being and self-care on a daily basis, as well as a helpful partner in dealing with more acute health conditions.

Music listening, therapy, and interventions have many benefits like:

  • lowered stress and anxiety

  • better mood

  • reduced pain

  • improved sleep

  • sharpened focus or memory

  • relaxing your body and helping with meditation

  • assistance with speech or physical therapy

  • fostering community and a sense of togetherness

Research into music’s healing and stress-relieving properties is ongoing and sometimes with mixed results. But ultimately, perhaps the most important takeaway is: keep listening!

Last medically reviewed on August 17, 2021

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Medically reviewed by

https://psychcentral.com/reviewers/heidi-moawad-md

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