Recently, while I was folding a week's worth of laundry, my thoughts began to race about the myriad tasks I didn't want to tackle. Instead of making a list, I started to cry, tears spilling onto the heaps of my family's underwear, sweatpants and T-shirts piled on my bed.
So I did what I often do when I need to calm down and perk up: I popped on my latest, greatest playlist. I'm hardly the first person to turn to music to lift my mood.
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Research into the mental health benefits of music has been steadily growing. Studies have linked music with the production of endorphins — neurotransmitters released during sex and exercise that reduce pain and improve wellbeing — and dopamine, which is known as the "feel good" hormone.
These findings suggest music therapy can help treat some neurological and psychiatric disorders. Music therapy helps decrease anxiety and improve functioning in people with depression, according to a 2017 study. And when music therapy combined with talk therapy and medication helps ease depression more than talk therapy and medication alone.
A 2020 study concluded that one type of music therapy had cognitive, psychosocial, behavioral and motor benefits, offering a possible alternative to medication when treating autism spectrum disorder, Parkinson's disease, dementia and stroke. Relaxing music has been shown to help with insomnia and post traumatic stress disorder. A recent study even indicated that listening to music while under anesthesia during surgery "significantly" reduced cortisol levels and anxiety.
But the precise mechanisms that give music so much power over emotions are still unclear.
"We don't know really, still, why music has this hold on us, or why it can reach us so deeply in so many ways," said James Lavino, a Philadelphia-area music therapist. "Clearly, it (music) can get to places that regular talking and thinking can't."
Sometimes in his practice, Lavino uses music to facilitate conversation. For instance, he might ask a patient to bring in a song that would tell him something essential about the person if they had never met before, Lavino said.
Much of the time, however, "the music is the therapy," Lavino said. "There can't really be a conversation about what it means ... There can be a kind of peak experience that really isn't about talking, and you don't need to describe it for it to be therapeutic."
Research also has shown that different genres of music and different rhythms affect our physiology in varied ways. The iso principle in music therapy is the idea that people can use music to shift mood. For instance, a patient dealing with anxiety might develop a playlist that goes from more excitable music to calmer music, so that by the time the person reaches the end, they are more relaxed, Lavino said.
Talking to Lavino, I realized I use a version of the iso principle, such as when I feel like sadness is stuck in my chest, and I induce my tears with Ray LaMontagne's "Empty." Other songs, like the Icelandic singer Daði Freyr's "10 Years" work like my personal hype man when I need to jumpstart my motivation.
The Welsh rapper, singer-songwriter Ren's mashup of the Jungle's "Back on 74" and The Police's "Message in a Bottle" slides me right into an easy mood. Pomplamoose's mashup of The White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army" and Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams" fills me with almost as much joy as the cover band looks like they're feeling as they play together.