Music involves more than just your ears. This medium influences your mind, body, and soul in a number of tangible ways. Lyrics and melodies can turn a bad day into a good one, make you experience a wide array of emotions, and put you at ease after a stressful experience.
Although we may view music as something to fill up silence or make a tedious task enjoyable, these sound waves are doing much more than urging us to sing or dance along. Music actually has a direct impact on our overall health.
Listening to songs affects the many parts and systems our bodies are composed of. So before you think twice about turning the volume down on the radio, here’s what you need to know about the impact music has on your health.
Why Music Is Good for You
There’s a reason why we love hearing to our favorite tunes over and over again. The way music ebbs and flows is very similar to the rhythms within our own bodies. We connect with music because our bodies synchronize and relate to it as well.
Listening to music can prompt our brain to perform a number things, from releasing certain hormones that affect our moods to helping us evaluate things from new perspectives. Studies have even shown that listening to songs we enjoy actually releases pain-relieving chemicals in our bodies. Research has also shown that music lowers cortisol levels, a hormone related to stress.
The one caveat to all this is that these beneficial effects are completely determinant on the kind of music you expose yourself too. Calm, soothing melodies will evoke these results while high tempo tunes will do the opposite. This is because our internal rhythms and systems try to match with the external beats that make up our environment.
When we play fast paced music, our heart beats and bodily systems will keep up with it. To slow everything down, slower jams will want to be your soundtrack of choice. Everything the brainstem controls — our autonomic nervous system — including body temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate are all influenced by the kind of music we decided to subject ourselves to.
The Physical Impacts of Music
As unbelievable as it may seem, our physical health is also impacted by the songs we hear. One area this medium has shown great promise in is pain relief. When individuals who had undergone surgery were given the option to listen to music after their procedure, those who did reported feeling much less pain than those who chose to listen to nothing at all.
Another positive side effect of this study was that the patients who chose to listen to music were less likely to need pain medication. You can experience this kind of pain relief too without having to go under the knife. Any pain you experience, chronic or not, can be alleviated by listening to relaxing songs you enjoy.
Music also does wonders for your heart health. Songs affects both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. These systems control how fast or slow your heart works. By incorporating music in your daily routine, you can influence your blood pressure levels to encourage good heart health as well as ease anxiety and stress.
Pieces have even been created for the sole purpose of saving lives. Knowing the right rhythm and tempo to successfully perform the chest compressions of hands-only CPR is enough to give anyone heart palpitations if the time comes when they’d actually had to perform it.
However, songs such as the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” were composed in a way that the beat of the music matched the tempo you should use for CPR. There’s a whole playlist of songs that have the correct beats-per-minute to help anyone guide them through this life-saving procedure.
The Mental Impacts of Music
Listening to music also affects the mind to great extent, both positively and negatively. What we hear has an enormous impact in what and how we feel. Different songs possess different emotional qualities. Whether we’re happy, sad, or mad before turning on the radio, music has a way of altering what we feel despite what our current moods were.
Due to this phenomenon, therapists have utilized the emotion altering effects of music to help patients who have trouble controlling how they feel. When their client is in distress, listening to certain songs can bring them to a healthier mental state. However, hearing music that is sad or angry in nature will have listeners echoing those same moods.
Music choice can be used as a way to regulate your own emotions whether you’re aware of it or not, with some music-listening habits incurring long-term effects on the brain.That being said, counselors now incorporate music therapy in their practice to help their clients reach their mental health goals.
When music is used as therapy, clients not only listen to music, but also compose it, play instruments, and even sing. Different goals will require different forms of music therapy — and no one genre is considered more beneficial than the other. It’s very much up to the client’s preferences which music will work the best for them.
Music transcends cultures and is enjoyed by multitudes of people. However, many of us aren’t aware of the effects that occur whenever we turn on the radio or music app. Songs have ways of healing our minds and bodies that we would have never imagined before. So the next time you hear a song playing, actually take the time to listen to it. You never know what health benefits you could be receiving.
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