Your Mind On Music
The impact of music on your mental health
Music has many benefits for your body, mind, and soul. It can improve learning, concentration, and memory. It can also boost your mental fitness, enhance physical performance, and reduce pain.
Before we begin talking to other artists about the impact music has on their mental health, I thought it would be best to start by exploring what role music plays in our mental clarity…so let’s begin.
Listening to music can be entertaining, and some research suggests that it might even make you healthier. Music can be a source of pleasure and contentment, but there are many other psychological benefits as well. Music can relax the mind, energize the body, and even help people better manage pain.
The notion that music can influence your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors probably does not come as much of a surprise. If you've ever felt pumped up while listening to your favorite fast-paced rock anthem or been moved to tears by a tender live performance, then you easily understand the power of music to impact moods and even inspire action.
The psychological effects of music can be powerful and wide-ranging. Music therapy is an intervention sometimes used to promote emotional health, help patients cope with stress, and boost psychological well-being. Some research even suggests that your taste in music can provide insight into different aspects of your personality.
So let’s explore the benefits of listening to music for your overall health.
All of our human senses — including hearing — are processed by the brain. Keeping the brain active by stimulating it in a variety of ways can protect brain health, particularly as we age. This is why listening to music is one of the activities that can have a positive effect on brain health.
Let’s take a closer look at how music affects the brain and helps to keep it young and healthy.
1. It stimulates most of the areas of your brain
Music activates almost all of your brain’s different regions and networks. It also strengthens connections between different parts of the brain.
This includes the areas responsible for:
Emotions
Memory
Learning
Well-being
Cognitive function, including focus and concentration
Quality of life
Movement
The only other activity that activates as many brain regions as music is taking part in social interactions.
2. It strengthens learning, memory, and cognition
According to a study on the effects of music on cognitive skills, listening to soft background music may improve cognition.
Students were asked to complete cognitive tasks with and without the music. Those with the background music completed more tasks and got more answers right.
There is a caveat, though. The researchers believe the type of music is important and recommend relaxing music, such as classical or smooth jazz.
Other studies have found that listening to enjoyable music can improve memory and learning. This may be because music’s repetitive nature helps our brains to form patterns that improve our memories.
Not everyone finds it useful to listen to music while studying or trying to retain information, but many people do.
The extent to which it helps depends on several factors. These include how much you like the music and how musically trained you are. People with musical training are more likely to find music distracting.
Finally, one study found that language learners found it easier to remember phrases after singing them rather than just speaking normally or even rhythmically.
3. It helps your brain age gracefully
Music can also form part of the treatment for conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.
Older adults living with such conditions often benefit from music therapy. Music can help people living with dementia by improving their cognition and helping them recover lost memories.
Alzheimer’s patients can become agitated or suffer from anxiety and hallucinations. The research found that music can help to alleviate these symptoms and facilitate communication.
4. It boosts your creativity
As humans, creativity is one of our greatest assets. Not only does it allow us to create art, but it also helps with problem-solving and creating better products and services. This makes it a core competency in almost any role.
According to one study, listening to happy music — such as arousing or uplifting classical music — can enhance your creativity.
Benefits of music on mental health
We all know music affects our mood. Perhaps you put on “Happy” by Pharrell Williams when you need a pick-me-up.
Or maybe you have a power song that gets you pumped up whenever you have an important meeting or job interview.
But music can go even further than giving you a more positive mental attitude. It’s also a great way to support your mental fitness.
Here are four ways music can boost your mental health.
1. It helps regulate your mood
When you listen to music, the levels of the stress hormone cortisol drop. It also gives you a boost of dopamine, the reward hormone, which can help to elevate your mood.
The part of the brain called the amygdala is responsible for processing music. It’s also the center of our mood and emotions. That’s why listening to upbeat music can help put you in a more positive mood.
Therefore, listening to happy music regularly can help regulate your brain chemistry. This can help you maintain greater mental and emotional balance.
2. It reduces stress
Regulating your cortisol levels with music can help relieve stress and make you feel more grounded.
There are different types of stress, including acute stress and chronic stress. Depending on the situation, a certain amount of acute stress can be beneficial as it helps you to deal with the problem at hand.
Stress becomes a problem when it becomes chronic. Chronic stress causes hormonal imbalances. This can lead to headaches, insomnia, and other physical symptoms.
Listening to music regularly can relieve acute stress, which can prevent it from turning into chronic stress.
3. It relieves anxiety and depression
Anxiety affects around 40 million adults in the US. Around half of those also suffer from depression. If you are one of them, you might want to consider adding music as a complement to any medical treatments prescribed by your doctor.
This is because listening to music releases dopamine. This is the hormone that activates your brain’s reward and pleasure centers. Getting a regular dopamine hit can help relieve symptoms of depression and anxiety.
4. It can increase your motivation
In one study, researchers wanted to test the effect of music on the motivation levels of cyclists on static bikes. To do this, they changed the tempo of the music without the participants’ knowledge.
When they increased the tempo by 10%, the cyclists’ performance increased in terms of distance, pedaling speed, and power exerted. Decreasing the speed of the music by 10% had the opposite effect. This suggests that the higher-tempo music increased their motivation.
The benefits of music on health don’t stop at your brain. Music can also support your physical health.
Here are seven ways music affects the body.
1. It keeps your heart healthy
Research shows that listening to relaxing music can slow your heart rate and lower your blood pressure. This helps to keep your heart healthy as blood can flow more freely.
One study even found that music therapy could make blood pressure medication more effective.
2. It boosts your immune system
We know by now that listening to music can help relieve stress and induce states of relaxation by regulating our hormones.
Stress hormones can wreak havoc on our immunity (think about how you often get sick following a period of stress). But managing your stress levels through music regulates your hormones. This helps your immune system function at its optimal level.
It can also improve biomarkers such as Immunoglobulin A, which plays a vital role in immunity.
3. It improves your sleep quality
Many people are instinctively aware of the relaxing power of music. Perhaps you already use music to help you fall asleep or manage insomnia, and if so, you’re not alone.
One study found that listening to classical music before bed helped students sleep better than those who listened to an audiobook or nothing. This means music can form part of a sleep hygiene routine.
The type of music that’s most relaxing for you depends on your musical tastes. However, some music is designed for deep relaxation using specific frequencies and binaural beats.
4. It eases pain
Multiple studies have found that listening to music can help people feel less pain, for example, after surgery or in geriatric care. This may be because it gives the patient’s brain another stimulus to focus on, helping to distract them from the pain.
It may also be the relaxing properties of music that help to alleviate or manage pain. This is why music therapy is a tool often used in pain management.
5. It can help you eat less
Listening to music can affect how much food you eat. In one study, researchers found that people eating in a fast-food restaurant with soothing background music and soft lighting ate 18% fewer calories than the control group.
Conversely, another study found that listening to fast music increases the speed with which people eat. This means music can support people who want to learn mindful eating or intuitive eating.
6. It increases endurance
Many studies have shown that listening to stimulating music during a workout can boost your physical endurance and performance.
There are two main explanations for this. The first is that motivating music increases heart rate. This increases blood flow and therefore improves performance.
The second is that music can help you find the mental strength and determination to push through when you feel you’re at your physical limit.
7. It regulates your nervous system
Your nervous system has two main settings: “fight or flight” and “rest and digest.” Only one can be activated at a time.
The fight or flight response is designed to come online when we face difficult situations. Once the stressor has passed, the nervous system switches back to rest and digest as the default setting.
But our stressful lives can tip that delicate balance and flood your body with too many stress hormones. Listening to music can activate the rest and digestion response by decreasing stress hormones and releasing reward and relaxation hormones.
For too long, many people have silently battled mental health issues, putting on a happy face for the rest of the world — including musicians.
In a 2018 study from the Music Industry Research Association, 50 percent of musicians reported battling symptoms of depression, compared with less than 25 percent of the general adult population. Nearly 12 percent reported having suicidal thoughts — nearly four times the general population. According to a 2019 study published by the Swedish digital distribution platform Record Union, the numbers are even starker: It found that 73 percent of independent musicians have battled stress, anxiety, and depression.
As album sales continue to fall and record labels and digital distributors gobble up the majority of streaming revenue, artists essentially have no choice but to tour more and more. “We’ve hit a tipping point where the people who work in our industry — artists as well as crew — are commodities,” says Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman, a professor at the University of Southern California’s music school and a longtime mental-health advocate. “People are working twice as hard to stay in the same spot they used to. The pressures are ratcheted up.”
Aside from financial instability, all kinds of stressors accompany this literal gig economy: loneliness; being surrounded by drugs and alcohol; strain on relationships; poor sleeping and eating habits; lack of access to quality health insurance and care, and so on. “Creatives in the industry today suffer more because their routines are so destabilized,” says Dr. Chayim Newman, a Toronto-based clinical psychologist whose private practice focuses on performers and touring artists. “The intense, long hours on the road or in the studio create a challenge in maintaining health routines and healthy relationship routines.” Or, as Osborne puts it, “it’s the perfect collision” for a breakdown.
While top-tier musicians aren’t immune to these problems, they tend not to be the ones hardest hit, at least when it comes to financial and healthcare issues. “For every artist that stands onstage, there are 10 to 100 crew members invisible to the public who make that performance, tour, or album run,” says Newman. “Those crew members all burn out in the same way [as the artist].”
There may even be neurological reasons why so many artists struggle with mental health. “Centers in the limbic system that control negative emotion tend to be more heavily [located] in the right side of the brain,” says Newman. Translation: “Right-brained” people — like artists, who can more easily tap into their feelings — “tend to dominate the side of the brain that creates more negative emotions,” he says. “We might even say there’s a predisposition for [that].”
What’s more, performing can throw an artist’s bodily systems out of whack. “With the pressure and rush of the stage, artists are in this ramped-up sympathetic-activation mode,” says Newman. “It almost looks like the equivalent of a panic state, except it’s being induced by voluntary circumstances.”
In the past few years, these problems have played out in striking and tragic terms. In 2019 alone, Silver Jews’ David Berman, guitarist Neal Casal, Yonder Mountain String Band founder Jeff Austin, and Prodigy singer Keith Flint all died by suicide. In the two years prior, rapper Mac Miller suffered an accidental drug overdose, and superstar DJ Avicii, Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, and Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington all died by suicide.
Now, the music industry is taking action like never before to address the growing mental health crisis. New initiatives are popping up from both corporate giants and grassroots organizations; festivals and benefits are being planned to raise awareness of mental health; and efforts by record labels and artists to destigmatize mental illness. In recent years, many musicians have been doing their part to destigmatize mental health issues by opening up about their struggles.
And now, you and I are going to add to that support by exploring this with some of your favorite musicians.
Have you heard the trailer for Come Back To Earth Yet?
Come Back To Earth
We are calling all music lovers and mental health warriors! Exciting news! We're thrilled to announce the launch of our brand-new podcast, "Come Back To Earth." Join us on this incredible journey where we explore the profound connection between music and mental health all told through stories from your favorite artists!