By reducing stress levels and providing a strong competing stimulus to the pain signals that enter the brain, music therapy can assist in pain management. It eases pain. Music can meaningfully reduce the perceived intensity of pain, especially in geriatric care, intensive care or palliative medicine. It helps people eat less.
Playing soft music in the background and dimming the lights during a meal can help people slow down while eating and ultimately consume less food in one sitting. It increases workout endurance. Listening to those top workout tracks can boost physical performance and increase endurance during a tough exercise session.
How do you use music to improve your well-being or the well-being of a loved one? Try these methods of bringing more music—and brain benefits—into your life. Listen to what your kids or grandkids listen to, experts suggest. It might not feel pleasurable at first, but that unfamiliarity forces the brain to struggle to understand the new sound. Reach for familiar music, especially if it stems from the same time period that you are trying to recall.
Listening to the Beatles might bring you back to the first moment you laid eyes on your spouse, for instance. Pay attention to how you react to different forms of music, and pick the kind that works for you. What helps one person concentrate might be distracting to someone else, and what helps one person unwind might make another person jumpy. Magnetic resonance imaging MRI : A large machine that uses powerful magnets and radio waves to see inside your body.
Unlike an X-ray, MRI testing does not use radiation. Research has shown that listening to music—at least music with a slow tempo and low pitch, without lyrics or loud instrumentation—can calm people down, even during highly stressful or painful events. Music can prevent anxiety-induced increases in heart rate and systolic blood pressure, and decrease cortisol levels—all biological markers of stress.
In one study , researchers found that patients receiving surgery for hernia repair who listened to music after surgery experienced decreased plasma cortisol levels and required significantly less morphine to manage their pain. In another study involving surgery patients, the stress reducing effects of music were more powerful than the effect of an orally-administered anxiolytic drug.
Performing music, versus listening to music, may also have a calming effect. In studies with adult choir singers, singing the same piece of music tended to synch up their breathing and heart rates, producing a group-wide calming effect. In a recent study , premature babies were exposed to different kinds of music—either lullabies sung by parents or instruments played by a music therapist—three times a week while recovering in a neonatal ICU. Music has a unique ability to help with pain management, as I found in my own experience with giving birth.
In a study , sixty people diagnosed with fibromyalgia—a disease characterized by severe musculoskeletal pain—were randomly assigned to listen to music once a day over a four-week period. In comparison to a control group, the group that listened to music experienced significant pain reduction and fewer depressive symptoms. In another recent study , patients undergoing spine surgery were instructed to listen to self-selected music on the evening before their surgery and until the second day after their surgery.
The researchers concluded that music is a robust analgesic whose properties are not due simply to expectation factors. Undergraduate students had their salivary IgA levels measured before and after 30 minutes of exposure to one of four conditions—listening to a tone click, a radio broadcast, a tape of soothing music, or silence. Those students exposed to the soothing music had significantly greater increases in IgA than any of the other conditions, suggesting that exposure to music and not other sounds might improve innate immunity.
According to a meta-analysis , authors Mona Lisa Chanda and Daniel Levitin concluded that music has the potential to augment immune response systems, but that the findings to date are preliminary. Jill Suttie explains why we love music and how it strengthens social bonds. Throughout our history, humans have felt compelled to make art.
Ellen Dissanayake explains why.
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