Make Room For Music In Your Life — How It Will Help You Mentally and Physically
When we play or listen to music, how come we generally feel so much better afterward? This has always fascinated me as I am a sort of musician. I studied piano and organ as a teenager.
I was hopeless at the violin. My father says I threw it in the river but that is not true. It just became a family joke!
Think about the last time you listened to music. Perhaps you felt calmer, more human and humane. When you go jogging, you plug in your earbuds because it seems to help you run the extra mile. That can also help to ease the pain as you finish the run, exhausted.
Here is some of the research that I found which now makes me more determined than ever to listen to music more often.
Music can be a pain reliever
I have always loved Bob Marley’s quote:-
“One good thing about music, is when it hits you, you feel no pain.”
Some fascinating research was done at the University of Central Florida. Researchers wanted to ascertain whether listening to music after knee surgery would help to reduce pain when patients started to walk again. Over time, the study showed that patients who listened to music felt less pain and there was decreased use of opioids as well.
Lots of studies show that music increases your dopamine neurotransmitter which leads you to want more and more. Dopamine kicks into action after pleasurable activities such as eating. This is what is going on when you want that extra piece of cake!
When pain is involved, music can increase the dopamine dose. That helps to drown out those nasty pain signals which make it more bearable.
You can read the fascinating article here where many research studies are mentioned which explains the title — A Dose of Music For Pain Relief.
Next time you have a headache, try listening to your favorite music.
Music may help to relieve stress
If you are about to undergo surgery, you probably will feel stressed and some anxiety.
Music has been found to help reduce the stress in these and similar situations.
Dr.Veena Graff is an anesthesiology expert and works at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Their work has shown that music helps to calm nerves and may also be more effective than an anxiolytic medication such as Midazolam.
“Music lights up the emotional area of the brain, the reward system and the pleasure pathways. It means patients can be in their own world, they can be comfortable and have full control.”- Dr. Veena Graff.
Daniel Levitin, a neurologist at the McGill University of Montreal and his team have reviewed about 400 studies on the benefits of music for our overall health. Not surprisingly, they found that music can reduce stress and also strengthen the body’s immune system. It also helps to reduce the levels of the stress hormone known as cortisol. More research needs to be done but the results so far are more than promising.
There are even more exciting scenarios too. Watch the video here where Kira actually is awakened during brain surgery at Seattle Children’s Hospital and asked to sing so that her musical ability will be preserved. It worked!
Not sure I want to risk that when I have brain surgery as I might sing out of tune!
For the moment I am just going to listen to quiet classical music when I feel stressed out after writing for Medium.
Music may help to keep your brain active and live longer
Music can be great for your brain. How?
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have asked musicians to undergo brain scans (fMRI). In this way, they can study which areas of the brain are activated while they hear the music. It seems our brains do a lot of computing to understand what is going on and that can only be good. It means that we are keeping our brains active.
“Music is structural, mathematical and architectural. It’s based on relationships between one note and the next. You may not be aware of it, but your brain has to do a lot of computing to make sense of it.” — Johns Hopkins researcher.
Even a simple act like strumming a guitar involves many complex tasks such as reading the notes and organizing where to put your fingers and what pressure to use and so on. This is the sort of activity that can stimulate memory by refreshing what you have learned.
Mental activity such as this is ideal to prevent brain cell death. One great way to help prevent dementia. Other ways to stimulate your brain such as reading and doing crossword puzzles are mentioned in this Harvard Medical School report.
Don’t worry if you are not a musician because the benefits of just listening to music can light up your brain’s reward system. The dopamine effect.
Music is like a total brain workout!
Music can help your fitness goals & sports performance
Whether you are biking, running on the treadmill or jogging, music can really help you get moving faster if that is what you want to do. You can upload some faster music on your iPod.
Researchers have developed an app called Cruise Control (not an affiliate link). You can load all your favorites but the great thing is that the app will select the best track in accordance with your fitness goals. It makes it so much easier to start walking or jogging faster.
An added bonus is that listening to music after a workout helps your body recover more quickly. There are added physical benefits such as:-
- Lower blood pressure
- Improves sleep
- Helps you eat less
Music therapy may help with depression.
It is sad to reflect that 300 million people globally are suffering from depression. Christian Gold from The University of Bergen in Norway is a well-known researcher on music therapy for treating patients with depression.
“We can now be more confident that music therapy in fact improves patients’ symptoms and functioning, and that this finding holds across a variety of settings, countries, types of patients, and types of music therapy,” — Christian Gold
University of Missouri studies showed that when patients listened to upbeat music, they were happier. The experiment lasted two weeks. More research is needed with many more participants but it seems that the dopamine neurotransmitter can take a lot of the credit for improved mood and a sense of well-being.
The takeaway
We should be listening to more and more music whenever we can. The mental and physical health benefits as I have shown can be numerous.
Now start playing or listening to music!
“If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.”−Einstein, 1929.