Music calming effect

Releasing Stress Through the Power of Music | Counseling Services

Music can have a profound effect on both the emotions and the body. Faster music can make you feel more alert and concentrate better. Upbeat music can make you feel more optimistic and positive about life. A slower tempo can quiet your mind and relax your muscles, making you feel soothed while releasing the stress of the day. Music is effective for relaxation and stress management.

Research confirms these personal experiences with music. Current findings indicate that music around 60 beats per minute can cause the brain to synchronize with the beat causing alpha brainwaves (frequencies from 8 - 14 hertz or cycles per second). This alpha brainwave is what is present when we are relaxed and conscious. To induce sleep (a delta brainwave of 5 hertz), a person may need to devote at least 45 minutes, in a relaxed position, listening to calming music. Researchers at Stanford University have said that "listening to music seems to be able to change brain functioning to the same extent as medication. " They noted that music is something that almost anybody can access and makes it an easy stress reduction tool.

So what type of music reduces stress the best? A bit surprising is that Native American, Celtic, Indian stringed-instruments, drums, and flutes are very effective at relaxing the mind even when played moderately loud. Sounds of rain, thunder, and nature sounds may also be relaxing particularly when mixed with other music, such as light jazz, classical (the "largo" movement), and easy listening music. Since with music we are rarely told the beats per minute, how do you choose the relaxation music that is best for you? The answer partly rests with you: You must first like the music being played, and then it must relax you. You could start by simply exploring the music on this web page. Some may relax you, some may not. Forcing yourself to listen to relaxation music that irritates you can create tension, not reduce it. If that happens, try looking for alternatives on the internet or consult with Counseling Service staff for other musical suggestions. It is important to remember that quieting your mind does not mean you will automatically feel sleepy. It means your brain and body are relaxed, and with your new calm self, you can then function at your best in many activities.

The links below each open relaxing musical selections in YouTube.

A Moment of Peace Meditation
Aneal & Bradfield, "Heaven and Earth Spirits" track from Life & Love). Lovely contemporary piano music with accompanying instruments and nature scenes.

Echoes of Time
C. Carlos Nakai from the Canyon Trilogy. Serene Native American flute music, with a picture of Nakai backlit by the sun at the Grand Canyon.

The Winding Path
Ken Kern from The Winding Path. Highly rated, beautiful piano music with accompanying instruments with pictures of exquisite flowers and plants.

Classical Indian Music for Healing and Relaxing
Gayatri Govindarajan, "Pure Deep Meditation" track. Lovely and rhythmic music played on the veena, the most ancient of the Indian plucked-instruments, with nature scenes.

Angels of Venice
Angels of Venice from Music for Harp, Flute and Cello. Classical with 3 instruments with nature pictures.

Earth Drum
"Spirit Vision," (David & Steve Gordon. Serene and lovely contemporary Native American informed-drumming music utilizing Taos Log Drum and Incan Pan along with other instruments and ocean/forest nature scenes.

Buddha Spirit
Aneal & Bradfield from Light & Love. Reflective but strong contemporary music utilizing various instruments and occasional humming voices with colorful oscillating fractals

Spa Relaxing Music
Tranquil contemporary instrumental with piano and a fixed candle light.

Relaxation Music: 1-Hour Meditation Candle
Serene contemporary instrumental with piano and one flickering candle.

Sleep Deeply
Dan Gibson. Nature sounds and instrumental, tranquil sleep music.

Weightless
Marconi Union. The sounds on this video are carefully arranged harmonies, rhythms, and bass lines that help slow a listener's heart rate, reduce blood pressure, and lower levels of the cortisol stress hormone.

Can Listening to Music Reduce Stress? Research, Benefits, and Genres

Listening to your favorite music may have more health benefits than you realize. Here’s how songs can reduce stress and help you heal.

It’s not until we forget our headphones that we realize just how much we rely on music to help us through the day. Our favorite music seems capable of pumping us up before an important moment, calming us down when we’re upset, and just about anything in between.

But is there actually a scientific explanation for this? As it turns out, yes!

Music has been widely studied and revered throughout human history for its ability to both entertain and heal. Countless experts have investigated how listening to music can potentially have therapeutic effects on a range of mental and physical health conditions, or just as a way to cope with everyday life.

Contemporary research suggests music has significant power to help reduce stress and anxiety, relieve pain, and improve focus among many more benefits.

Stress — the feeling of emotional tension, overwhelm, or feeling unable to cope — affects us mentally and physically.

Stress has a biological impact that causes your body to release specific hormones and chemicals that activate your brain in certain ways. For example, when we are highly stressed, our heart rate and blood pressure can go up, and our adrenal gland begins producing cortisol, also known as “the stress hormone.”

Short term, cortisol can help us find the focus and energy we need to deal with a difficult situation, but when the body is exposed to excess cortisol for a prolonged period of time, it causes perpetual, exhausting states of fight, flight, or freeze. Ongoing or chronic stress can lead to developing an anxiety disorder, depression, chronic pain, and more.

Across time and space, music has had tremendous success as a tool for stress relief. While some types of music such as classical and ambient have long been studied for their calming effects, listening to your personal favorite music of any genre also has benefits.

A 2020 overview of research into music and stress suggests that listening to music can:

lower our heart rate and cortisol levels
release endorphins and improve our sense of well-being
distract us, reducing physical and emotional stress levels
reduce stress-related symptoms, whether used in a clinical environment or in daily life

How does music affect your brain?

As of 2019, the average hearing person across the world listened to 18 hours of music a week! This number is likely to be even higher in 2021.

So what is music actually doing to us during those hours we listen to it?

Well, here’s a super simple breakdown:

Music sounds move through our ears as vibrations.
The inner ear translates these vibrations into electrical signals.
Neurons transmit these signals to certain areas of the cerebral cortex in the brain.
Dedicated regions of the brain detect the different elements of the signals (like the tone, pitch, rhythm).
As the brain puts together all of this information so that you can sense the musical experience, it can influence our emotions and bodily systems, which is why scientists are so interested in studying it!

Most investigations into music’s health effects center on its ability to calm us down and relieve stress. In recent years, this research has expanded in exciting and surprising new directions.

Some recent findings include the following:

Reduced cortisol levels. A recent 2021 study showed that adults who listened to both personal and neutral selections of music, at home and in a laboratory environment, had significantly “reduced cortisol levels.” This was found regardless of the music type.

Benefits in mental health treatments. An overview of 349 studies on music’s usefulness as a mental health treatment for conditions including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression, found that 68.5% of music-based interventions had positive results.

Reduced burnout. Music therapy also had significant benefit in preventing burnout in operating room staff. A 6-week study showed that after having access to 30-minute music listening sessions each day at work for a month, staff reported decreased stress levels and less emotional exhaustion.

Helps you fall asleep. 62% of respondents to a 2018 survey reported they use music (from multiple genres) to help them fall asleep, mostly because it relaxed them, and distracted them from daily stressors. People who used music less were more likely to have lower quality sleep.

Reduced depression. Music listening or music therapy reduced depression levels, according to a 2017 review, and was associated with increased confidence and motivation, especially in group settings.

Reduced anxiety in children. A 2021 review of articles from 2009 to 2019 showed that music significantly reduced anxiety for children leading up to and during medical procedures.

Helps people cope with the pandemic. A survey of over 5,600 people from 11 countries demonstrated that music has played a very important role during the COVID-19 pandemic in helping people cope during lockdown, and meet their well-being goals across culture, age, and gender lines.

Improved quality of life with Alzheimer’s disease. Especially when tried in the form of personal playlists for relaxation, research showed that music interventions can have positive effects on the behavior and cognition of people with Alzheimer’s disease, improving quality of life.

Meditation is an ancient tradition that is practiced in cultures all over the world and is an integral part of some religions and types of yoga. There are many types of mediation, and people use some types to help treat mental and physical health conditions.

Usually, meditation aims to focus, center, calm, or direct your attention. It can also help relax our bodies. So it can pair well with music for some people.

Often, music used for meditation has a slow tempo, which can reduce heart rate, and also lower anxiety and stress levels. Guided meditation involves music with a narrator or speaker that directs your energy flow and focus, or offers positive affirmations.

Music therapy is different from just listening to music, although listening is a big part of it!

Music therapists work with a variety of patients of all ages. Like other forms of therapy, including art therapy, music therapists plan individualized sessions to help you meet your goals.

Music therapy can include goal-oriented music listening, playing and composing music, and songwriting, among other activities. These kinds of “purposeful” interactions with music can help you work through emotions or issues that are bothering you, encourage positive feelings, and even assist with speech or physical therapy.

A 2015 study compared the effects of music therapy with a therapist versus music medicine (where music was played without a therapist) among people with cancer. Even though all music listening showed positive results, 77% of patients preferred music therapy sessions to just listening to music on their own.

Research shows that music can help relieve both chronic pain and post-operative pain:

Research shows that listening to “self-chosen, pleasant, familiar music” reduced pain in people with fibromyalgia.
According to a small-scale 2017 study, listening to music in headphones while under local or general anesthesia can lower cortisol levels during surgery, and decrease post-op pain and stress.

How does it work? Scientists believe the effect may result from music actually shifting brain activity away from pain-related connectivity patterns, as well as creating positive emotions, and offering a distraction.

Music isn’t just limited to helping with physical pain. Stress causes emotional and psychological pain as well, which music can help alleviate.

Maybe you’ve found yourself searching for “study playlists” on Spotify or YouTube. Well, it turns out there’s a reason why millions of other people stream these playlists too!

Listening to music has been shown to improve focus on certain tasks, especially if the task is more complex. Music may also help sharpen our brain’s ability to recall information and make connections.

In one recent experiment, participants were asked to press a button anytime the hand on a special clock started moving. The authors found that when people listened to their preferred background music while doing this “low-demanding sustained-attention task,” their minds wandered less, and they were more focused, compared to those without music.

Anxiety, stress, and pain often hang out together. Music may be one way to help manage them and their troublemaking.

As some of the previously discussed research indicates, music can help reduce anxiety in both adults and children before and during medical procedures.

In one study of over 950 critically ill patients, 30 minutes of music therapy a day was consistently associated with lower rates of anxiety and stress. Music’s ability to decrease biological stress responses like heart rate and cortisol levels also helps tackle anxiety.

The sympathetic and parasympathetic parts of your central nervous system are involuntary or automatic, meaning they work without you having to think about them.

Doctors may refer to the parasympathetic side as “rest and digest,” since it takes care of things when the body is at rest, while sympathetic is “fight or flight,” in charge of the body in motion.

When we are thrown into a stressful situation, it’s hard to calm back down and stay grounded. Deep breathing is one way to activate the parasympathetic nervous system to move back into “rest and digest.”

One study shows that some types of music may also be a way to reactivate the parasympathetic nervous system quicker following a period of increased heart rate, like after exercising.

Certain genres of lyric-less music, like classical and ambient, are historically the subject of most research studies into music and stress. While there’s evidence that they can reduce stress and anxiety, that doesn’t mean they’re “better” than other genres of music.

For many of the studies mentioned in this article, music listening involved multiple genres or songs chosen by both the participants and the researchers. In fact, the American Music Therapy Association states that “All styles of music can be useful in effecting change in a client or patient’s life.”

We also use different kinds of music for different purposes. Since we all have special relationships with our favorite songs and genres, we can use those to invoke certain emotions and feelings unique to that relationship. For example:

Classical music is associated with a soothing, calming effect.
Rap music can be inspiring and motivating when in a low mood or dealing with difficult life circumstances.
Heavy metal music can “enhance identity development” and help you become better-adjusted.

Musicians, researchers, and music therapists have actually claimed to create “the most relaxing” song ever, called “Weightless. ” But you’ll have to decide for yourself.

Listening to your favorite music has more benefits than you realize. It’s also safe, cost-effective, and widely available.

Music is certainly not a magical cure, nor is it a substitute for therapy, medication, surgery, or any other medical treatments. But music can be an important element of your well-being and self-care on a daily basis, as well as a helpful partner in dealing with more acute health conditions.

Music listening, therapy, and interventions have many benefits like:

lowered stress and anxiety
better mood
reduced pain
improved sleep
sharpened focus or memory
relaxing your body and helping with meditation
assistance with speech or physical therapy
fostering community and a sense of togetherness

Research into music’s healing and stress-relieving properties is ongoing and sometimes with mixed results. But ultimately, perhaps the most important takeaway is: keep listening!

How music affects a person: 7 beneficial psychological effects

Why do people listen to music? It not only brings pleasure, but also inspires or sets in a thoughtful way. Scientists have long been interested in this powerful means of influencing consciousness. They discovered many advantages of harmonious sounds, sometimes quite unexpected. How about music-painkiller or stimulant? We've compiled a selection of studies that reveal the beneficial psychological effects of music on your brain. Read and put on your headphones.

The Self-Knowledge online program will help you get to know yourself better and learn about other things that affect the human psyche. You will learn to understand yourself, find out your strengths and weaknesses, understand what you want from life.

Music helps reduce stress

It has long been believed that calm, meditative music helps fight stress. This is confirmed by scientific studies.

In 2013, scientists conducted an experiment [Myriam V. Thoma, 2013], in which participants had to get into a stressful situation after listening to certain sounds. For one group it was soothing melodies, for another it was the murmur of water, and for the third it was just silence. It turned out that relaxing music is the best way to recover from stress.

Music helps to learn

This statement is true, but not for all people. For some it really helps, but for others it just distracts.

Style of music and (unexpectedly!) music education influence. In one experiment [Benjamin P. Gold, 2013], students with musical experience performed better in the presence of neutral music that did not distract them. On the contrary, students without relevant skills were helped by positive tracks. Scientists believe that such melodies evoked pleasant emotions, which improves the memorization of the material.

Psychologists have also found out [Karen M. Ludke, 2014] that if you are learning foreign words or phrases, it is better to sing along. So you will remember them faster and better than if you just spoke out loud.

Thus, although music affects concentration and memory, its effect can be different for different people. Observe yourself and find what works for you. If you're heavily distracted by music, you'll want something that's neutral and backgroundy, with a simple structure. Otherwise, you can use any pleasant melodies.

Music relieves pain

There are many confirmations of this fact. One study [María Dolores Onieva-Zafra, 2013] of patients with fibromyalgia (a disease characterized by pain in different parts of the body) found that those who regularly listened to music for 60 minutes every day experienced less pain than control participants. A side, but beneficial effect was also a decrease in depression.

A large analysis of studies on the effects of music on pain relief [Jenny Hole, MBBS, 2015] showed that patients who listened to music before, during, or even after surgery felt less pain and anxiety than those who listened to nothing. At the same time, it turned out that music therapy was most effective before surgery, and not after it (it is also interesting that patients needed significantly less painkillers).

Music improves sleep

Calm, relaxing music is a very good sleeping pill that does not cost any money and is very effective.

In a related study [László Harmat, 2008], subjects were divided into three groups. One part listened to relaxing classical music before going to bed, another listened to an audiobook, and the third was a control group and did not listen to anything. The study continued for 3 weeks; the researchers assessed sleep quality both before and after the experiment.

As a result of the experiment, psychologists found that subjects who listened to music slept significantly better than those who listened to an audiobook or nothing at all.

Music improves productivity

Have you ever noticed that playing sports with music is much easier than in silence? Scientists became interested in this issue and conducted a series of experiments. They found that upbeat, uptempo music motivated people to work more efficiently.

In a special experiment [Waterhouse J., 2010], 12 healthy male students were given the task of riding an exercise bike at their usual speed. The participants worked out on the machines for 25 minutes at a time, listening to a playlist of six popular tracks at different tempos.

Researchers changed the speed of music playback by 10% (increased, decreased or kept the same) without informing the participants. As a result, performance increased for those cyclists who listened to fast-paced music. Increased speed, power and distance covered by athletes. Conversely, lowering the tempo of the music worsened these performances.

Music improves your mood

Another proven benefit of music is that it can make you happier.

In a specific study [Thomas Schäfer, 2013], scientists studied the reasons why people listen to music. They found that people value music for its ability to improve mood and make them more conscious.

Another study [Yuna L. Ferguson, 2012] showed that intentionally listening to positive music to lift your mood has a better effect than listening to it aimlessly.

Music reduces symptoms of depression

Researchers have also found that music therapy can be a safe and effective treatment for a variety of disorders, including depression.

Finnish researchers [Jaakko Erkkilä, 2011] evaluated 79 people aged 18 to 50 with depression. 46 participants received standard medical care, while the remaining 33 received an additional 20 sessions of music therapy over 2 weeks. Already after 3 months, the condition of patients who listened to music was significantly better than those who received standard treatment.

Consider the type of music if you want to reduce depression. Research [Trappe HJ., 2009] showed that classical and meditative music helped the most, while heavy metal and techno music proved to be ineffective and even harmful.

Music is a simple, cheap and effective tool that can increase the capacity of your brain. It improves sleep, memory, productivity and improves mood. It is also a good medicine that reduces stress, relieves symptoms of depression and even relieves pain.

But don't forget that different functions require different music. Something light and pleasant will help to cheer you up, and fast dance or rock tracks are well suited for training in the gym. So expand your playlist and get not only pleasure from music, but also real practical benefits. We wish you success!

Key words:1Self-knowledge

Does music really help to relax?

Many people sincerely believe that music can heal the body, mind and soul. You may agree with this opinion, you may not share it, but there is one undoubted fact - music has power over what surrounds us. Read more about this below.

In 2011 the Manchester band Marconi Union together with the British Academy of Sound Therapy recorded the song Weightless (ambient). The recording soon became known as the most soothing and relaxing song in human history. Scientific studies of this phenomenon have shown that the slow and tremulous "flow" of sound, achieved through a combination of a number of musical principles, does indeed have a calming effect.

Of course, it is difficult to prove for sure that this song is really the best, but its soothing and relaxing properties are undeniable. Modern science has proven what mankind has known for thousands of years: music has the most significant effect on our mood and well-being.

Oliver Sachs, author of numerous books on the amazing phenomenon of human consciousness, states in his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain that music is as natural to humans as language. He also states that humans' hearing organs and nervous systems are just perfect for listening to music, and the emotional response it evokes can be incredibly complex, mysterious, and profound.

Sachs and other experts cite the many amazing effects that music has on the human brain as examples. MRI technology and similar methods of studying the brain have allowed scientists to find the area responsible for the perception of music. More precisely, there were quite a lot of them. Music does not affect any one central area, instead it activates several areas of the brain at the same time.

This phenomenon is discussed in more detail in the bestselling book This is Your Brain on Music by neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, who once headed the Music Perception and Analysis Laboratory at McGill University and is now post of Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Minerva Schools at KGI.

As Levitin writes in his book, when listening to music, a whole orchestra seems to start playing in the brain, in which both the most ancient and the most evolutionarily new parts of the brain are involved, as well as both the occipital and frontal lobes.

For example, areas of the mesolimbic system responsible for arousal, pleasure, opioid transmission, and dopamine production respond to the sounds of music. The cerebellum and basal ganglia are also activated when listening to music—in fact, for many years, scientists believed that these areas of the brain were only associated with processing musical rhythm and time signature. Recent studies have shown that the cerebellum is also involved in controlling emotions through connections to the frontal lobes and the limbic system of the brain.

A meta-analysis of 400 studies, published recently in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, showed that music can significantly reduce cortisol (stress hormone) levels and significantly reduce anxiety in patients. Surprisingly, music can even lower your heart rate.

Normal for a person at rest is a pulse of 60 to 100 beats per minute. Weightless starts at 60 beats per minute and gradually slows down to 50. During the five minutes that this song plays, the listener's nervous system begins to adapt to its pace - just like in small children, whose pulse often coincides with the mother's pulse.

As Aldous Huxley once said, "Music is second only to silence when it comes to expressing the inexpressible.

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