Many of us know by instinct that music can change our mood and energy. That’s why we listen to sad love songs after a breakup or put on a fast tempo to help us push through a hard workout.
You might have Spotify playlists for different events or just listen to your favorite songs all the time. In either case, the way you listen to music can be good for your health and wellness as a whole. You may even find interest in learning about your favorite artists, for example, have you ever looked at Eminem’s net worth?
In fact, music is good for your body, mind, and soul in many ways. It can help with learning, focusing, and remembering. It can also improve your mental fitness, make your body work better, and lessen pain.
When you listen to music, it can:
- Better learning, remembering, and thinking
- Encourage creativity
- Take care of your brain health.
- Lessen stress and keep your mood in check
- Take care of your heart
- Reduce stress and sadness
- Boost your immune system
- Boost motivation and productivity
- Improve sleep quality
- Get your nervous system in order.
So let’s look at how listening to music can help your brain, body, and mind. Then, we’ll talk about the specific benefits of different kinds of music and how to use their power.
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Music’s Effects On The Brain
The human brain processes all of our senses, including hearing. Keeping the brain active by stimulating it in different ways can help keep the brain healthy, especially as we get older. Because of this, listening to music is one of the things that can be good for your brain.
Let’s look more closely at how music changes the brain and keeps it young and healthy.
It Stimulates A Lot Of Your Brain
Music makes use of almost all of the different parts and networks of your brain. It also makes the links between different parts of the brain stronger.
This includes the places that are in charge of:
- Emotions
- Memory and Learning
- Well-being
- Focus and concentration are cognitive functions.
- Better Quality of Life
- Movement
In fact, socializing is the only other activity that uses as many parts of the brain as music.
It Helps People To Learn And Remember
A study on how music affects cognitive skills found that listening to soft background music may improve cognitive skills.
Students were given mental tasks to do with and without music. People who had music playing in the background did more tasks and got more answers right.
There is, however, a catch. The researchers think that the kind of music is important, and they suggest soothing music like classical or smooth jazz.
Other studies have shown that listening to music you like can help you learn and remember things. This could be because the repetitive nature of music helps our brains make patterns that help us remember things better.
While studying or trying to remember something, many people find it helpful to listen to music.
How much it tends to help depends on a lot of things. Some of these things are how much you like the music and how well you know music. People who have studied music are more likely to be distracted by it.
Lastly, one study found that language learners remembered phrases better when they sang them than when they spoke them normally or even rhythmically.
Helps Your Brain To Age In A Healthy Way
Music can also be used to help people with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.
Music therapy is often helpful for older people with these kinds of conditions. People with dementia can benefit from music because it can improve their thinking and help them remember things they have forgotten.
Alzheimer’s patients can get angry, anxious, or have hallucinations. The research showed that music can help to ease these symptoms and make it easier to talk.
It Makes You More Creative
Creativity is one of the best things about being a person. It not only lets us make art, but also helps us figure out how to solve problems and make better products and services. Because of this, it is a core skill for almost every job.
One study found that listening to happy music, like upbeat classical music, can make you more creative.
Positive Impact On Mental Health
We all know that music changes how we feel. You may have a favourite pick me up song in your playlist.
Or maybe you have a song that gets you pumped up before an important meeting or job interview.
But music can do even more than make you feel better about yourself. It’s also a great way to keep your mind in good shape. Here are four ways that music can make you feel better emotionally.
It Helps Stable Your Mood
The stress hormone cortisol goes down when you listen to music. It also gives you an uplift of dopamine, which is the reward hormone and can help make you feel better.
The amygdala is the part of the brain that is in charge of processing music. It’s also where our feelings and moods are controlled. Because of this, listening to upbeat music can help you feel better.
So, listening to upbeat songs often can help keep your brain chemicals in balance. This can help you keep your mind and heart in better balance.
It Lowers Stress
Using music to control your cortisol levels can help you feel less stressed and more in control.
There are different kinds of stress, like short-term and long-term stress. Depending on the situation, a little bit of acute stress can help you deal with the problem at hand.
Stress is a problem when it lasts for a long time. When stress lasts for a long time, hormones get out of balance. This can cause headaches, trouble sleeping, and other physical problems.
If you listen to music often, it can help relieve acute stress and keep it from becoming chronic stress.
It Helps With Depression And Anxiety
About 40 million adults in the US have anxiety. About half of those people are also depressed. If you are one of them, you might want to think about adding music to any treatments your doctor has given you.
This is because dopamine is made when you listen to music. This hormone turns on the pleasure and reward centres in your brain. Getting regular doses of dopamine can help people with depression and anxiety feel better.
It Can Give You A Drive
In research, researchers wanted to see how music affected how motivated people on stationary bikes were. To do this, they changed the music’s speed without telling the participants.
When they sped up the pace by 10%, the cyclists were able to go farther, pedal faster, and put out more power. The opposite happened when the speed of the music was slowed by 10%. This suggests that the faster music gave them more energy.
What Are The Benefits On Your Physical Health?
Music is good for your health in more than just your brain. Music can also be good for your body. Here are seven ways music affects your body.
Keeps Your Heart Healthy
Studies show that listening to relaxing music can slow down your heart rate and lower your blood pressure. This keeps your heart healthy by letting blood flow more freely.
In fact, one study found that music therapy might make blood pressure medication work better.
It Helps Your Immune System
We already know that music can help us feel less stressed and more relaxed by affecting our hormones.
Stress hormones can wreck our immune systems. But music can help you control your stress levels and keep your hormones in balance. This helps your immune system work as well as possible.
It can also boost biomarkers like Immunoglobulin A, which is a key part of the immune system.
It Can Improve Your Sleep Quality
Many people know instinctively that music can help them calm down. If you use music to help you fall asleep or deal with insomnia, you are not alone.
One study found that students slept better when they listened to classical music before bed than when they listened to an audiobook or nothing at all. This means that music can be a part of a good routine for getting to sleep.
How music makes you feel depends on what kind of music you like. But some music is made with specific frequencies and binaural beats to help people relax deeply.
It Can Help With Pain
Multiple studies have shown that listening to music can assist individuals in experiencing less pain, such as after surgery or when taking care of an elderly person. This could be because it gives the patient’s brain something else to think about besides the pain.
Music may also help relieve or manage pain because it calms people down. Because of this, music therapy is often used to help people deal with pain.
It Could Help You To Eat Less
How much food you eat can be affected by the music you listen to. In one study, people who ate at a fast-food restaurant with soft lighting and soothing music in the background ate 18% less calories than the control group.
On the other hand, another study discovered that listening to fast music makes people eat faster. This means that music can help people who want to learn how to eat in a more mindful or natural way.
It Can Make Your Endurance Increase
Many studies have shown that listening to energizing music while you work out can improve your performance and endurance.
There are two main reasons why this is happening. The first is that upbeat music makes your heart beat faster. This improves performance because it increases blood flow.
The second is that music can help you to find the mental drive and resolve to keep going when you feel like your body is giving out.
Now that you know how music can help your physical and mental health, you can listen to your favourite songs whenever you need a boost.
For example, you might listen to rap music when you’re feeling down, metal music before a big presentation, or classical music to help you fall asleep.
