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The Impact of Music on Mental Health
Music is one of many activities and behaviors people engage in to improve their emotional well-being and mental health. Initially, researchers believed that music and other pleasurable activities and behaviors were simply distractions. This view has changed because of the belief that music has a more direct and positive effect on mood and emotions than other pleasurable activities, such as watching a film. It has the potential to prevent and reduce lifetime health disparities.
There are also some suggestions that happy music heightens feelings of happiness and activates a part of the brain associated with reward: the nucleus accumbens. Perhaps due to this greater activation of areas related to the experience of pleasure and reward compared with other nondrug-based therapeutic modalities, some experts describe music as “pleasant, powerful, penetrative, and permanent” and “a drug to which the body has some resistance”—despite being associated with limited side effects and being noninvasive and inexpensive.
The Influence of Music on Emotional Well-being
Music is a relatively unexplored aspect of well-being in the mental health literature. A vast body of research shows that music positively impacts our mental and emotional well-being in many ways, making it an essential topic for researchers in the social sciences and public health. However, its positive effects could be more fully unleashed when considered as an alternative or complementary therapy within conventional mental health care settings. In addition, knowledge is also lacking concerning how music could promote prevention in the sense of being used to enhance positive affect and mood. Music is also one of the vehicles of culture, and it has been underutilized in the flourishing field of cross-cultural psychiatry (Rodwin 538)
Music as a Mood Regulator
Whether it is because community music is a social event (e.g., a concert or dancing) or because one is feeling lousy and thus listening to sad or even depressive music, all such activities include, or more often, numerous interactions with music. Listening to sad music when feeling depressed, annoyed, grieved, or worried could work for effortful regulation of the listeners’ current mood (e.g., by involving the Cialis scales of emotional responses series). Music does have the potential to lighten our moods, and there is evidence that music can enhance one’s mood while driving.
However, mood enhancement during silence is significantly more significant because silence offers a pause from the continuous organic load. And so, speaking for the driving cases, perhaps misery adores quiet, confused, or perplexed moods, like the latter (the driving cases; also see the bow tie work of fifty and north), and ponders serious music therapy.
Listening to music is the most prevalent form of leisure. Therefore, many different functions of music have been subject to research. One of the suggested functions of music is its ability to regulate listeners’ emotions or moods. It is assumed that when an individual is in a good mood or scraps through to a joyful event, the music is played to emphasize this positive emotional state. However, music can be played to chase away negativism when someone is in a less positive emotional state. It is not surprising, moreover, that the influence music has on our mood is one of the most widely pointed out characteristics of music (Bostic 193).
Music as a Source of Comfort
In addition to being a source of comfort, music could also help those with mental disorders by offering a sense of self-support, personal comfort, acceptance, fulfillment, and identity. Among others, Thoma et al. conceptualize several of these functions for instances of self-directed mental health function in patients with severe stress from burned injuries. Similarly, the widespread use of portable music allows for music listening in any situation. Given the low resources required, music as an environmental resource betokens a mainline adaptive use. Specific individuals often seek out music in periods of no help (Sachdeva 742).
The use of music as stress relief and comfort has also been applied to those with mental disorders. A study of 100 patients with mental disorders showed that people who listened to music reported less anxiety than those who did not. In 92 psychiatric patients, symptoms of distress were reduced in those who listened to Hz of music while hospitalized, compared to those who used Hz or did not listen to music. Choa et al. found that the easing music led to a decrease in anxiety in a sample of patients with dementia. In a randomized study of 75 participants diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, researchers found that 24 weekly sessions of music therapy reduced somatosensory amplification and psychological distress.
A recent cross-sectional Slovenian study also showed that music functioned as a survival strategy for stressed individuals, specifically those who scored high on the Patient Health Questionnaire scale of depression and the Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale, the latter of whom scored poorly. Other work supports music and comfort for those with depression, suggesting that people with low moods exhibit repeated listening behaviors and that such behavior could risk further depression development. Music has gained popularity as a source of comfort.
Music as a Tool for Self-expression
Although music therapy has been used to care for individuals with mental health issues, the focus remains on the therapeutic properties of music as a nonverbal means of communication and not on the possibility that the person concerned can benefit from gaining control over music production during musical therapy. People use music to express what words do not; enabling individuals to tap into their internal songwriting processes could diminish the need to develop sophisticated language to explore or communicate emotions.
Moreover, knowing how to write songs does not necessitate a particular piece of knowledge other than understanding the musical context of major song components. With a different song structure or sound patterns, slight differences in melody may transmit various meanings or emotions. Introducing music into everyday health care is not a piece of cake. It requires profound understanding and knowledge, but recent behavioral procedures to help music controls for emotional interpretation can circumvent such restrictions (Gustavson 370).
The Role of Music in Mental Health Treatment
Music as a Stress Reliever
Listening to music is one of the most popular ways to relieve stress. Over the past several decades, much scientific research has been conducted on the effects of music on stress, with much of this research focusing on psychological outcomes such as reductions in anxiety and improvements in mood.
In total, nine studies have been conducted with this population, with no adverse outcomes documented in any of the studies. Potential Mechanisms of Music Benefits Arousal Level. Suggested that music’s beat, rhythm, and timbre could all help “dissipate arousal” and reduce stress. Music affects the ABAS-C+ mood states associated with stress.
PMS disorders are typically filled with more extraordinary sober emotions and feelings, particularly for those diagnosed with Endogenous Depression, when individuals typically suffer from more pronounced and persistent problems in mood over more extended periods. This could be of importance particularly to patients with anorexia and bulimia nervosa types, as self-reported stress/anxiety symptoms are often comorbid among these disorder cases. Stress accompanying PMS can influence interpersonal and familial relationships—uniform PMS stress management principles.
The Effects of Relaxing Music on Anxiety
In other words, as feelings of anxiety rise, the emotional resonances become more readily stirred, and disquieting music elicits more impassioned reactions. On the one hand, passionate music fans may feel a profound connection to the tunes they love, diving into this emotional solid reaction and reaping the benefits. On the other hand, individuals disinterested in passionate music may not profit from such a connection; vehement music may merely stir anxious emotions without enabling the individual to experience a corresponding powerful emotional reaction.
The field of neuroscience can shed some more light on why music has this effect on stress and anxiety. When individuals listen to calming music, the brain starts to decrease its production of stress hormones, specifically cortisol. Other physiological changes occur when relaxing music is played, including a slowing of the heart rate, more profound and even respiration, and decreased blood pressure. All these changes in the body’s functioning oxidize stress and induce an overall sensation of relaxation and well-being.
The Dark Side of Music on Mental Health
Furthermore, individuals should rethink how to interpret the correlation between music listening and mental illness. It cannot be stated that listening to music increases the chance of developing mental illness, but rather, those who are already unwell listen to music frequently. This assumes that those who are suffering or experiencing a mental disorder tend to turn to music themselves, meant to help their emotional states.
When in an unwell state, music can serve several different purposes. For people who listen for emotion and arousal regulation, music can take them to the spots they need to be in at different times and can take them away from the emotional states they are trying to prevent. The effect may be worse for individuals with mental disorders as it is challenging for them to maintain mental and emotional balance. Thus, when using their favorite music to calm down, some individuals may have felt that their favorite music is inadequate. Therefore, they became disinterested in music.
Adverse Effects of Certain Music Genres
This substantial disturbance by some music concepts in matted intensive care patients has its justification. Technology such as volume and tempo music manipulation affects the auditory nerves. Though the mechanisms involved are under investigation beyond the scope of this chapter, the psychoacoustic principles are refined and control the way through commercial music preparations of heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure conducted without medical supervision.
Music therapists often feel powerless when “technically unambitious lay people” cause intravenous music injections, as their therapy or medicine is far superior. However, multiple case studies show that intravenous “noise injections” actually have side effects. In the previous section, I discussed music preferences and aversions in various groups of healthy people.
Aggressive and Violent Music
Results have shown that the main effect of watching aggressive music videos was found. However, post hoc analyses indicated significantly increased feelings of aggression only among those who watched them with the “instructions” condition. Findings also showed a significant interaction with personality type; feelings of aggression only increased among those in the condition of the instruction who scored high on encoding-specific personality.
Finally, subjects’ scores on attitudes toward women had a significant positive relationship with encoding-specific personality type and with feelings of aggression towards women. This was unexpected, as it was hypothesized that attitudes towards women would be negatively related to personality type or aggression outcome, based on previous research and theory on other forms of encoding-specific music-induced aggression.
Depressive and Sad Music
In an extensive survey conducted in several student communities in Brazil and Portugal, focus groups were formed, and participants were asked to share the song that was most significant to them when they were in love or feeling this way. It was found that there is a strong correlation between the sounds and messages present in their favorite songs and the anguish of the emotions they experienced. Participants who reported episodes of love or being passionately in love preferred songs with a high rhythm and strong connection. On the other hand, the survey showed that nearly 60% of participants who reported depressive symptoms preferred slow, melancholic songs with painful lyrics.
Depression is a mental disorder with a symptomatological profile rich in sadness, hopelessness, helplessness, guilt, irritability, fatigue, difficulties in thinking, attention, and perception, hypersensitivity to suffering, inability to enjoy or find pleasure in things previously appreciated, changes in appetite and weight, sleep disturbances, decreased motivation, changes in self-concept, worsening mood in the early morning, among others.
Explicit and Offensive Music
Overall, very few papers test whether listening to certain songs logs an overall level of a mental health test. The literature suggests that there are no 0-link hypotheses (serious music helping to cope with severe mental health issues). Instead, it displays that music significantly affects mental health measures. Due to the lyrics ‘ intricacy, priming and lyric content do not have the expected effect. Another future direction in this topic might be to design a test with more power than ours. An important conclusion that we need to underline is that if you come drawn but not broken to the Jasmine Revolution, hip-hop is probably the best music you should be listening to help yourself cope with the stress of a civil war.
There is the belief that music influences people in ways other than psychological, even on a subconscious level (and they have privilege that affects our perception of music). However, they mainly focus on the psychology of the listener. If these last two sentences do not make any sense to you, fear not; they will get a qualified speech therapist to sort our ideas out shortly. However, back to our context of interest – a very contemporary application of the impact of music (only four sentences is an appropriate length time window for an average blog reader).
Work Cited
Bostic, Jeff Q., Kristine Goins, and Basie Bostic. “The Impacts of Music, Concerts, and Dance on Mental Health.” The WASP Textbook on Social Psychiatry: Historical, Developmental, Cultural, and Clinical Perspectives 2023: 193.
Gustavson, Daniel E., et al. “Mental health and music engagement: review, framework, and guidelines for future studies.” Translational psychiatry 11.1 2021: 370.
Rodwin, Aaron H., et al. “A systematic review of music-based interventions to improve treatment engagement and mental health outcomes for adolescents and young adults.” Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal 40.4 2023: 537–566.
Sachdeva, Sean, et al. “Effects of sound interventions on the permeability of the blood–brain barrier and meningeal lymphatic clearance.” Brain Sciences 12.6 2022: 742. E.