By Emi Berry, University of New South Wales Canberra — MedicalXPress, 13 April 2022
Listening to the music you like can help improve your mood and decrease anxiety. But a new study published in JAMA Network Open shows that engaging with music — which includes listening to music, playing an instrument, or singing — has a real, tangible positive impact on our overall health. Dr Matt McCrary, Adjunct Lecturer at The Prince of Wales Clinical School, UNSW Sydney, says engaging with music elicits an emotional response which also has a physiologic component. This emotional response broadly activates many brain regions and autonomic nervous system activation — specifically, of the “fight or flight” sympathetic response during most music engagement, followed by increased “rest and digest” parasympathetic activity after the music stops.
“My working hypothesis is that repeatedly engaging with music and eliciting these autonomic nervous system activation patterns increases our ability to respond effectively to stress, which in turn improves our overall health and well-being,” Dr McCrary says. Interestingly, engaging with music elicits similar autonomic nervous system activation patterns to those experienced when participating in exercise, though the magnitude of responses to music is of a lower amplitude than exercise. The study found the tangible positive impact of music on health is about half the impact of the positive health effects of regular exercise.
When it comes to the most impactful music in terms of health and well-being, genre does not really matter — the most impactful music appears to be the music that you like the most, as playing and listening to it corresponds to the strongest emotional and physiologic response. “If music can have half the impact of exercise, and if exercise is associated with the prevention of 1.6 million annual deaths, we’re looking at the potential prevention of 800,000 annual avoidable deaths. The potential here is exciting if we can figure out how to target and maximize music’s effects,” explains Dr McCrary.