Music Could Improve Your Mood and Reduce Stress

For instance, to calm down when you’re stressed out, Roth recommends listening to songs that match your current brain state. If you’re feeling depressed, he says, “how well does it work when someone tells you to cheer up? It’s laughable. It’s the same thing we’ve seen demonstrated many times when someone’s in a depressed mood state and someone suggests turning on happy music. It often doesn’t work, and it makes them feel worse.”

Roth said your response is related to your brain’s emotional response to the music. A June 2016 study from Durham University in the United Kingdom and the University of Jyväskylä in Finland found that sad music can be comforting.

Osbourne to Coltrane

Finding the right music to change a given mood is up to the individual. One person might may be better off listening to heavy metal, but another person may benefit from jazz, classic rock or fast-tempo swing music. Limb says the brain synchronizes to the auditory rhythms of music. Slower melodies can help you slow things down—or speed things up. “It’s no coincidence that people use music for all manner of behavioral tasks with very specific goals in mind,” he observes. The trick is to pick the kind of music you like.

Music can affect your brain in other ways, too. For instance, a February 2008 study authored by Limb and published in PLoS ONE showed that improvisational music can enhance your creativity. An Italian study found that listening to a Mozart piano sonata created a cognitive increase that activated memory and problem-solving abilities. And another study, published in November 2013 by Frontiers in Psychology, showed that older people who learned to play the piano over four months benefited from elevated moods and an improved sense of well-being.

As for using music to improve your mood, Roth recommends that you create your own playlist in advance. “If you know you get hyped up, anxious or angry every day when you leave work,” he says, “choose music that is similar to your mood state when you are in that situation.” Your song selections should reflect a gradual shift from the way you feel in the moment toward the way you want to feel.

“There’s always a piece of music that exactly encapsulates what I have felt,” Limb says, “whether it’s positive or negative.”

Learn more about the research in this article

• “Memorable Experiences with Sad Music—Reasons, Reactions and Mechanisms of Three Types of Experiences,” PLOS One, June 2016. For this study, 2,436 survey responses from Finnish and U.K. populations were analyzed to investigate the experience of listening to sad music. Researchers found that three types of sadness can be experienced: grief-stricken sorrow, comforting sorrow and sweet sorrow. Read the full study.

• “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation,” PLOS One, February 2008. In this study, researchers took functional MRI brain scans of six professional jazz players while they improvised on the piano. A distinct pattern of changes in prefrontal brain activity was observed that may offer insight into the cognitive function involved in creativity. Read the full study.

• “The Mozart Effect: A quantitative EEG study,” Consciousness and Cognition, September 2015. In this study, researchers measured electrical activity in the brains of 10 healthy adults, average age 33; 10 healthy people, average age 85; and 10 people, average age 77, with mild cognitive impairment while they listened to Mozart and Beethoven. While listening to Mozart, changes in brain waves associated with memory, cognition and problem solving were observed in the young adults and the healthy elderly. Read a summary of the study. (A fee is required to access the full study.)

• “Effects of music learning and piano practice on cognitive function, mood and quality of life in older adults,” Frontiers in Psychology, November 2013. For this study, 29 older adults (ages 60 to 84) were split into two groups. One group received daily piano lessons for four months while the second group participated in other leisure activities. Researchers measured the cognitive function, mood and quality of life of participants before and after intervention. Results showed that participants who took piano lessons had improved executive function, enhanced motor ability, decreased depression and increased quality of life. Read the full study