Effect of Music on Mental Health
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Problem Solved
Mental Health
Music therapy is the clinical and therapeutic evidence-based use of music to reduce stress, enhance mood, encourage self-expression, and facilitate deeper processing of emotion.
Music therapy can be used to help alleviate the symptoms of a variety of mental illnesses. Research shows that weekly music therapy sessions over time can significantly reduce the severity of depression. Group music therapy has been found to reduce negative emotions and improve interpersonal contact in people with schizophrenia. Therapeutic use of music has proven to reduce anxiety and stress, and to improve sleep quality.
There are a variety of ways to conduct music therapy including lyric analysis and active listening. With lyric analysis, participants offer their opinions, interpretations, and react to the specific lyrics presented in a song. By identifying and reflecting over the many ways that their own experience may correlate or diverge from the song lyrics, they can gain valuable insights about their emotional state. Active music listening enhances quality of life by facilitating neuroplasticity and stimulating neural activity in the various areas of the brain that regulate mood, emotion, and cognition.
What Are the Main Effects of Music on Mental Health?
If you instinctively gravitate towards your favorite relaxing song at the end of a stressful day at work, it is not a coincidence. Studies have shown that pleasant music can decrease levels of stress and anxiety inducing hormones, including cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine while intense, highly stimulating music can increase levels. The effectiveness of a particular genre of music for stress management depends on the individual. If for example, an individual has a negative association with tranquil music, then tranquil music is less likely to calm them. Like most treatments for mental illness, music intervention works best when the regimen is customized for the individual.
Music has been associated with increased release of dopamine. Dopamine is one of the classic ‘happy’ hormones. It helps to stimulate hedonic hotspots in the brain by decreasing feelings of anxiety and depression and increasing feelings of well-being, pleasure, and satisfaction.
Emotion is an important facilitator of the memory building processes. Music is a strong evoker of emotion, which makes it a highly effective stimulus for memory. Associations to music and other auditory stimuli are often preserved in neuropathways, the stronger your emotional response to the music the stronger the association. Revisiting music that is associated with a happy memory can stimulate neuropathways that were constructed during the original event, leading to warm, positive feelings.
The highly arousing and emotional music we hear throughout our lives becomes strongly connected to our autobiographical memory and sense of self. Music can therefore be used as a tool to stimulate memory recall in patients with cognitive impairments, helping patients to feel like themselves again and reclaim meaning in their lives.
Music can encourage open reflection and processing of feelings, particularly in individuals who are avoiding processing difficult emotions. People dealing with loss prefer to listen to sad music, as it reduces their feelings of loneliness and provides a substitute for emotional support and comfort akin to that provided in empathic friendships. Group music interventions such as group singing, listening, or instrument playing have been shown to foster social closeness and increase feelings of belonging and social inclusion.
