Did you know that music can positively affect your health? Because it can!
A lot of times, music is viewed as nothing more than a form of media that is only for pleasure. However, that is not the case, as it is greatly underestimating what music can do. It has been scientifically proven that music can benefit your health! Here we have picked 9 of the craziest ways that music can improve your health!
While there are 9 ways that music can actually improve your health, we’ve broken them down into three main categories for you:
1. Listening to Music Can Enhance Your Immune System
This is something that is particularly noticeable in more soothing music, rather than just putting on your favorite song. By putting on soothing music, it reduces the cortisol levels in your brain, which are associated with stress. With the reduction of these levels, you are less stressed, which leads to an enhanced immune system! This is particularly beneficial for recovering from an illness, like the common cold!
2. Music Can Help Prevent Seizures
While there are scientific studies to back this claim, the science is rather new and is still being studied. However, studies have shown that playing music by Mozart for coma patients created a dramatic decrease in seizure activity. As new information comes out about how music can help prevent seizures, it would not hurt to put on some Mozart!
3. Music is Good for the Heart
Listening to music also has a physical effect on your body. When you listen to more upbeat songs, your body responds differently than it would if listening to slow, mellow music. This physical effect is particular to your heart rate. If you listen to music that is slower, your heart beat will mimic it, and speed up with upbeat music. Therefore, listening to music can help circulate blood flow throughout your body.
4. Music Helps with Your Physical Performance
You’ve probably seen professional athletes and Olympians have their headphones in before a big game or event. This is not a coincidence, as music can actually have a great impact on your performance!
Even if you are not a professional athlete, listening to music during a run or a work out can enhance your performance. Listening to music during a workout can lead you into a state of dissociation where you forget what you are doing, allowing your body to take over. This leads to an increase in stamina, so that you have the endurance needed to get through a workout.
5. Music Is Able to Ease and Manage Pain
Believe it or not, music is actually able to manage and ease pain. This is a benefit that is typically seen within geriatric care. By providing an additional stimulus to the brain with music, it draws attention away from the pain being experienced. This mental distraction allows the patient to have something else other than the pain to focus on. While it may not be able to completely eliminate the pain, it is still able to lessen the pain.
6. One Benefit of Music is How it Can Help to Stimulate Your Memory
There is a really strong relationship between music and memory. Not only does your brain have an easier time formulating memories when associated with music, but it can help you with memorization as well. You have probably experienced a flashback when a song you haven’t heard in a while comes on, taking you back in time to remember something you may not have thought about in a while!
Music has also been a key component in helping patients struggling with memory loss from diseases such as Alzheimer’s and dementia. By playing songs that are prominent for the patients, it can offset memory loss and actually help them recall specific moments of time.
7. Music Can Elevate Your Mood
When listening to music that you particularly like, your brain can release dopamine, which is a feel good neurotransmitter. When your brain releases dopamine, you experience a feeling of joy, and it is also associated with decreasing feelings of anxiety and depression. So, listening to your favorite music has the power to change your mood or increase the mood you are already in.
8. Music Is Able to Reduce Stress
Similarly to how listening to music can lower cortisol levels to boost your immune system, the lowering of cortisol levels is also beneficial to lowering your levels of stress. By putting on music that you enjoy, you are able to lower the levels of cortisol and can feel your levels of stress decreasing.
9. Music Relieves Some Symptoms of Depression
For those that may be experiencing feelings of depression or have been clinically diagnosed, listening to your favorite music can be a great way to get your brain to produce more dopamine.
There you have it! From boosting your immune system to an almost instant mood booster, there are plenty of ways that music can improve your health. And this was just the beginning!
