Listening to music can help reduce anxiety, pain, or motivate you to play sports. Music acts on the brain’s reward system and stimulates the release of dopamine, which makes us feel better. So… add it to your playlists!
Music is motivating and a source of pleasure
Music can convey positive emotions. It provides a feeling of pleasure by acting on the reward system, thanks to dopaminergic neurons that release dopamine in the brain. Proof that music softens morals, a study has shown that listening to music while driving has a positive effect on the mood of drivers.
Music reduces stress and anxiety
Music would help reduce the high heart rate caused by stress, hypertension, and cortisol levels, all three of which are markers of stress. For example, in a study published in 2009, the day after a cardiac surgery operation, patients listened in their bed to thirty minutes of soft and relaxing MP3 music; others rested in bed for the same amount of time. There was a significant difference in the level of cortisol between the two groups after these thirty minutes: 484.4 mmol/L with the music and 618.8 mmol/L in the controls. In another study, music was even more effective than an anxiolytic to reduce the anxiety of patients who were to undergo an operation.
Did you know?
Cortisol is a hormone produced by the adrenal glands from cholesterol. This is often called the “stress hormone.”
Music helps ease pain
In a small 2013 study, patients with fibromyalgia listened to music once a day for four weeks. Compared to a control group, those who listened to music said they felt less pain. In another study, 60 patients who were to be operated on spine listened to music from the day before surgery until two days after surgery. Listening to music reduced pain, as well as anxiety, before and after surgery.
When it comes to sports, endurance is better with music.
Music promotes memory and cognitive functions
As music promotes motivation, it can also aid in learning. In a 2014 study, students who were learning a foreign language, Hungarian, had to speak or sing sentences in Hungarian. The singing group remembered the phrases better. Like music and singing, have positive effects on mood and memory, a music therapy program, Music and Memory, has been devised for patients with dementia such as Alzheimer’s.
Music helps exercise
In a British study, participants had to listen to music while walking on a training mat until exhausted. Compared to people who did not listen to music, those who did this exercise to music were more enduring. Perhaps the music acted on the motivation. Another hypothesis is that the music distracts us and saves us from thinking about the effort. This is what a small study carried out on obese young people who trained on a treadmill suggests: being distracted by music allowed them to run longer.
When too much music makes the listener listless
This is the result of a scathing study published by a British researcher. The generalization of listening to music throughout the day would tend to drown the individual in a kind of insensitivity to the musical art.
If there is a “malmusic” as there is junk food, it is perhaps not so much in the quality of the productions as in their hype in all our daily activities. Music in the elevator, music in supermarkets, music on television, music in certain pedestrian streets, music in the car, and now even music at work, in the metro, and while jogging, thanks (or because) of expensive walkmans, CD walkmans, mobile phones, and others iPod that have invaded homes for 20 years.
“Music accessibility seemed to say it was taken for granted and does not require deep emotional engagement when paired with music appreciation,” said British musicologist Adrian North. His team based at the University of Leicester conducted the study for two weeks with 346 guinea pigs and concluded that the famous MP3 Generation is made up of young people who do not really appreciate music and songs. The more you listen to it, the less sensitive you become to it. “The degree of accessibility and choice has led to a drift towards passive attitudes against everyday music listening.”
Because of its continual hype in the mass media, “music would nowadays be seen more as a commodity that is produced, distributed, and consumed like any other,” summarizes AFP.
Adrian North recounts that in the 19th century, music was seen as a “valuable treasure with fundamental and almost mystical powers of human communication.” Today, where all styles and musical genres are accessible with a click or at a record store, communication has taken precedence over music, and people are more enthusiastic about the latest version of Skype than before the last symphony by an unknown composer. A theory that remains to be confirmed.
