Can music make you feel better?

Picture the scene: You’ve just gotten home from a long day of work, and you really, really should go to the gym… but you just don’t want to. So you turn to your favourite high BPM playlist, to help get your energy levels up.

Or you’re struggling to get motivated to finish a tedious work task. Naturally, your first step is to put on some peppy background music, to shift your mind into gear.

Whether we’re aware of it or not, many of us spend our days self-regulating our emotions through music — turning to our headphones when we want something to cheer us up, or calm us down, or help us feel energised.

Despite this, it’s really easy to downplay the impact of music. From advert jingles to piped music in hotel lobbies, we’re constantly surrounded by music. But as Dr Tara Venkatesan, Director of Cognitive Science at Sollos notes, music is a powerful cognitive tool:

“Science shows us that music has a profound effect on our physiology and our mental state. It can affect everything from our hormones, our neurotransmitter levels, our heart rate, our skin conductance levels, even our memory.”

In fact, the human brain may even be uniquely designed to process music. A 2019 study compared human brains to those of macaque monkeys, and found that human brains are uniquely fine-tuned to listen out for and respond to musical pitches. This suggests that our ability to appreciate and respond to music is an integral part of what makes us human, hard-coded into our physiology.

Considering the powerful impact that music can have on our bodies and minds, it’s worth taking a closer look at the music we consume. How is the music we listen to influencing us? And could we use the power of music to improve our health and happiness?

How does music influence our wellbeing?

Considering how ubiquitous it is, we may think of listening to music as a passive activity. But as Dr Tara explains, this is far from the case. Listening to music sets off a complex series of reactions within the human brain — if you were to look at someone listening to music while in an MRI machine, you’d see almost every region in their brain light up, from the hippocampus and amygdala, to the limbic system. As Dr Venkatesan explains, this “wide network of neural circuitry” is experienced by us as a rich, full body experience, a veritable symphony of brain activity.

Music is a vital tool in our emotional lives. It helps us process our emotions, connect with each other socially, and reinforces our individual identities. When we listen to music, we often naturally choose songs that reflect our current emotional state. We’ve all experienced the cathartic pleasure of listening to an angsty album while going through a breakup, or intensifying a sunny mood with a euphoric pop song.

But music can also be used to achieve a desired mood state, as well as reinforcing our current one. The iso principle is an effective musical therapy technique in which a therapist plays a song which matches the patient’s current mood state, then gradually uses music to guide them to their desired mood state — for example, a therapist might start off playing a sad ballad, then move onto playing increasingly upbeat music.

And while music is an incredibly rich standalone experience when given the full force of our attention, it also has the magical ability to work away in the background, easing us through our daily lives. Playing background music has been linked to improved attention span and increased performance when carrying out mundane tasks. Music can also help with memory formation — studies on patients with Alzheimer’s disease have shown that patients were able to remember text much easier when it was sung rather than spoken, suggesting that musicality is a strong memory enhancer.

Incredibly, music can also decrease our experience of pain. Several studies have been carried out which show that playing music during painful medical procedures decreases the pain intensity reported and the level of emotional distress experienced by the patient — it even reduces the usage of painkillers and other analgesics.

What sort of music promotes wellbeing?

So what music should you choose to listen to, to ensure you’re getting all of this good stuff?

Music produced for wellness purposes is often confined to a narrow range of genres and musical styles. We’re all familiar with AI-generated beats or bland, new agey spa music. Many of us can be forgiven for not finding this style of music particularly appealing.

There are specific pitches, rhythms and tempos that have been proven to support focus, relaxation and sleep. But as Dr Venkatesan argues, these sonic features can be found in a variety of musical styles and genres: “Personal preference plays a central role in how music influences your cognitive state and physiology. The music that I find relaxing may not be what someone else finds relaxing. You have to find what works for you.”

At Sollos, we strongly believe in the power of music to enhance and bolster our wellbeing. We’re also a team of music lovers, artists and obsessives. We don’t want to listen to bland music any more than you do!

We specialise in producing music for wellness across a range of genres, using the full breadth and quality of Universal Music Group’s world class catalog, to ensure that music fans can access audio wellness that’s as unique as they are.