This month is Black Music Month giving us an opportunity to highlight the contribution that black people have made to the music industry.  As I think about all the great music out there, I wonder, can music have a serious role in improving our health and well-being?

We know that music has a huge impact on our emotions. The right song at the right time can be inspiring, make us happy, motivate us to take action and cause us to reflect

So, by extrapolation we could say music must be good for our health because it can make us feel good. But, what does research tell us about the effect of music on our health?

There have been a number of studies exploring the effect of music on our health and they have found that music has a beneficial effect on both our physical and mental health.

Stress and Music

One of the most obvious benefits of music is its effect on anxiety and stress. We’ve all turned to music when we’ve had a particularly stressful day and have needed to create a peaceful calming environment.   Research has shown that the calming effect of music is real with scientists demonstrating that music prevents stress-induced increases in subjective anxiety.

Researchers looked at measures of anxiety (heart rate, blood pressure and cortisol levels) and found that in a stressful situation these measures were increased in people not exposed to music but not so for those people exposed to music; subjects exposed to music were not anxious and were better able to deal with the stressful situation.

Other studies have confirmed this showing that music can relieve anxiety in a number of situations. These include:

• Improving anxiety levels in cancer patients
• A reduction in pain and anxiety in children undergoing medical and dental procedures
• A reduction in psychological distress during gastrocopic examination

 Mental Health and Music

As well as music being beneficial in alleviating stress and anxiety, music has a role to play in treating mental health conditions.  It can help with the symptoms of depression, improves a person’s ability to carry out cognitive tasks and helps people express emotions.

Furthermore an interesting study looking at the effect of religious music found that listening to religious music regularly was associated with a reduction in death anxiety and an increase in life satisfaction, self-esteem and a sense of control, leading scientists to conclude that listening to religious music promotes psychological well-being

The video below provides a great example of the power of music in improving our mental health

Physical Health and Music

Music also improves our physical health with studies showing that music can help patients with conditions such as heart disease, stroke, cancer and dementia, and can  help us cope better with pain.

When it comes to heart disease researchers found that joyful music improved blood vessel function and can therefore improve the health of our heart. In addition, music has also been shown to improve stroke recovery helping with memory and attention and as mentioned previously music has been shown to be beneficial to cancer patients by reducing anxiety levels but it also has been shown to alleviate pain and improve the quality of life of patients.

So, music is not just about entertaining it can be good for our health and well-being meaning we have a very easy way to improve the quality of our life at our finger tips.  Happy listening!