7 ways how listening to music helps us cope with the Covid19 lockdown
Created by: Jana Mitić, psychology of music and music cognition researcher
With today’s current COVID crisis, it’s essential to be able to control one’s mood and well-being. According to researchers, nearly one in three millennials suffer from some type of mental health condition due to the COVID lockdown. Anxiety, stress, ADHD, and depression are just several issues people are facing nowadays. Fear and isolation have become so usual people find socializing odd and uncomfortable.
Many people have reported feelings of loneliness, resentment, and sadness, which brings up the topic of thinking about ways people can influence their mindset and get themselves to brighten up. Here’s where music hops in.
1. Music can relieve stress and anxiety
Everyone is familiar with the moment when they play their favorite song in the morning while sipping their coffee giving them an energy boost that prepares them for the day to begin. Research has confirmed this really helps with setting one’s mood for the day.
Music has a special intrinsic power that energizes and relaxes and makes one more productive and mindful, influences one’s thoughts and productivity.
Music can expand one’s views, lift one’s spirit and bring comfort, but people often tend to forget this. This is something that has been very well known for a while and is especially apparent in times before exams, preparing to go out on a date or even before a job interview! Calming music can help with focus, relaxation and reminding oneself of good things and exciting moments that made you feel great in the past. That by itself creates a predisposition for a good outcome noticed in The Effect of Music on the Human Stress Response article you can find on the legitimate PLOS One journal. Put on a song bringing back memories of accomplishment, productivity, and positivity, and that will definitely help you hit the right chord.
2. Music can boost your memory
Did you know that by listening to a particular kind of music that suits your personality, you can memorize things better? You can find Music genre matching your personality type by Myers-Briggs type indicator. It also depends on your learning style — whether you are a person who likes to take long periods of time for studying or a person who likes to take breaks often, it can help you adjust the right atmosphere for absorbing knowledge and make it stick in your brain for much longer. As for memory, music does not only help you remember things for studying reasons, but also for cognitive reasons, such as retrieving lost memories and reminding yourself of some events that happened but are now in a blur. There is a great movie on this topic called “The Music Never Stopped”, which is about how music can help people recover from long–term memory loss.
3. Music can alleviate pain
As unusual as it may sound, this has actually been proven to be right. A study by the Pain Management Nursing journal is confirming that people who had a chronic condition such as fibromyalgia experienced less pain by listening to music for just one hour a day. Another interesting study by the British Journal of General Practice is confirming music helps relieve pain in chronic pain sufferers and that it helped them relax, distracted them, and helped with tension and anxiety relief. Not only can it aid physiological pain, but it can also help with emotional pain — especially when you feel heartbroken, beaten, or depressed, it can give you a glimpse of hope for a better day tomorrow. Many people feel lost and desperate at times, but oftentimes after listening to some heart-warming music, it can change the atmosphere and get them to do their usual daily work productively.
4. Music can make you see things from a different perspective
You must know the feeling when you feel discouraged and lost, lonely and purposeless — and you’ve listened to some sad songs and felt better. It’s paradoxical, but sometimes listening to sad music when you are sad can help you feel better and less lonely. Many people actually feel the same way, and those kinds of feelings are fleeting and transitory. There are interesting findings of how music and mental health go hand in hand. Researchers believe sorrowful music can increase the level of prolactin, a hormone that helps you fight grief. When listening to these kinds of songs, your body unconsciously starts preparing itself for a bad event, but after the song ends, this event doesn’t actually happen. After this experience, your body is left with a pleasurable feeling of relief. This also causes you to shift your perspective and look at things from a different angle because not everything is black and white. Things in life change very fast, and nothing sad lasts forever. A song ends, a new day comes, and something different is waiting for you just around the corner.
“Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears — it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more — it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.”
Oliver Wolf Sacks, neurology scientist
5. Music can improve your motivation
While you are preparing to do hard things, such as finishing your Ph.D. thesis, submitting a paper, or sending that important email, music can help you feel encouraged to finally get yourself up and do it. Who doesn’t feel pumped to beat all the hard things while listening to “Eye of the Tiger”? This was more of a joke, but it definitely puts you in the ring with all the obstacles causing you to procrastinate and postpone everything on your to-do list. You can make a playlist of songs that sound brave, tough, empowering, and fearless and turn it up every time you feel like you are about to fall into a long–time procrastinating episode. A few push-ups while listening would definitely help too. For those shaking their heads in disbelief, there is proof that music can help disabled people develop movement, start speaking, start moving, or even wake up from a coma. Music works by increasing arousal, affecting cognitive functions, and stimulating certain parts of the brain, which can be shown on EEG and PET scans. There is a great book by famous neuroscientist Oliver Sacks titled “Musicophilia” that describes this phenomenon in great detail.
6. Music can help you exercise and stimulate satisfaction
Remember those times when gyms were packed with people, loud electronic music pounding from the speakers and everyone felt like they needed just a few more rounds? Those were the days. There is a reason behind why gyms put exactly this kind of music on and have so many people push their limits each time. It really does help you boost your mental state while you are pushing hard and sweating, trying to level up and get instant results. Just imagine what gyms would look like if there were Tchaikovsky and Satie playing in the background: not much would get done. If you are someone who needs motivation to finally start exercising, high-energy music can definitely help.
Did you know that listening to music podcasts, not only music, can help you in overcoming stressful life situations? Music-educational podcasts such as Stellar Sound Podcast can help you relax your mind, as well as broaden your horizons.
7. Music can help you develop new friendships
Maybe the most important for surviving these challenging times is listening to the same music, as it can help you connect to a like-minded group of people you might enjoy talking to. Discovering fresh music is incredibly important, and if you just dig a little deeper on the web, you will find amazing new music every day. Joining discord channels about music can help. It’s often the case that you can start an informal conversation under a song on YT and get involved in some discussion which can also bring new people into your life. Making new connections is just one of many benefits of listening to music.
Bonus tip: Take up a musical instrument
Learning to play a new instrument can be a challenging hobby, but an incredibly fulfilling one. If you don’t already have an instrument you can play, you can imagine what playing something would feel like and choose the right one for you according to your preferences and personal style. Many people would pick a guitar because of its popularity and accessibility, but you might want to consider a wide array of other instruments that exist as there are so many. It is never too late to try. It can make you feel amused, happy, calm, or just get your mind off of your daily worries and work.