The Surprising Psychological Benefits Of Music

One of the most important skills to have when it comes to communication is emotional intelligence. This gives you the ability to be aware of the emotions that you and the people you are communicating with have, and to empathize with the emotions of others. Working through your own emotions is a great way to increase emotional awareness. During a therapy session, your music therapist may use different techniques in order to help you work through your emotions. One of the ways to do so is by listening to music and then discussing the memories or emotions that the song brings up. More active approaches to releasing emotion include writing song lyrics or singing; both of these methods can allow a patient to process emotions in a less direct way if needed.

It makes my home a refuge rather than a prison, and my son has mentioned he likes it, too. In the first few minutes of playing I feel a Great since of wellbeing, could be endorphins release, it is significant. I sleep with a CPAP that has diagnostics on it for Sleep time, Sleep depth, and Length of depth of sleep. I have noticed all three have Improved by just playing Kalimba for an Hour or so before bed, it is like taking a sleeping pill The shift in the nervous system is very apparent. I have several other instruments I play Saxophone, clarinet, Harmonica, Recorder Flute, NONE of these other instruments react the same way as the Kalimba does. I think the Kalimba is a Great tool for Sleep and manipulation of the Autonomic Nervous system.

Salivary free cortisol was determined by using a commercial chemiluminescence immunoassay . All samples of one subject were analyzed in the same run to reduce error variance caused by imprecision of the intraassay. Activity in sAA was analyzed using the microplate reader Synergy HT Multi-Mode and adapted assay kits obtained from Roche. When it comes to lowering anxiety, the stakes couldn't be higher.

“Music is an incredibly complex stimulus—the most multifaceted in nature for the brain to process,” says music therapist Tim Ringgold, MT-BC, director of Sonic Divinity Music Therapy Services in Orange, California. Listening to music involves several regions of the brain, including those that affect emotion, cognition, sensation and movement. So it stands to reason that it could also help treat issues in all those areas. Apart from helping you recover from stress physically, playing music can actually help take your mind off of your triggers. Many people who play music find it takes them to a meditative state, helping them forget their troubles for a while while they focus entirely on what they’re playing. Getting away from what stresses you, even if you’re only putting it out of your mind temporarily, can be a huge help in lowering the amount of stress and anxiety you’re coping with.



Children or adults with anxiety may have difficulty falling asleep at meditation sounds night, especially when worry and fear engulf them in the darkness. The links below each open relaxing musical selections in YouTube. If you have an anxiety disorder or just the occasional feeling of anxiety, consider deep breathing to help soothe your worries. Listening to your favorite music has more benefits than you realize. Doctors may refer to the parasympathetic side as “rest and digest,” since it takes care of things when the body is at rest, while sympathetic is “fight or flight,” in charge of the body in motion. Music may be one way to help manage them and their troublemaking.

This involves making music up on the spot in response to a mood or a theme, such as making the sound of a storm using drums and a rainstick. Live musical interaction between a person and their therapist is important during music therapy. Many of the pathways the brain uses to process music are the same as the ones that process pain. So if the brain is focused, for instance, on the melody of a Mozart concerto, there won’t be much room left to relay the pain messages coming from a needle stick. Given below is a list of the ways in which music therapy affects the body as well as the brain. You'll also want to check your health insurance benefits prior to starting music therapy.

Surgeons have long played their favorite music to relieve stress in the operating room, and extending music to patients has been linked to improved surgical outcomes. In the past few decades, music therapy has played an increasing role in all facets of healing. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, social anxiety affects more than 15 million adults in the United States alone.

A music therapy session has a combination of the joy of music and the positive impact of therapy. A major factor that can increase a person’s social anxiety is having to communicate with others, and having social anxiety can only make it harder to communicate. Discussing your emotions with a music therapist will not only help you to work through your emotions, but help you to improve your communication skills as well.

There are a variety of coping strategies that people use to manage social anxiety. Many people also seek professional help and treatment; one option for treatment is music therapy. Prolonged experiences of stress are related to poor individual health and associated with substantial financial costs for the society . As a result, the development of cost effective stress prevention or stress management approaches has become an important endeavor of current research efforts. Music has been shown to beneficially affect stress-related physiological [4–6], as well as cognitive , and emotional processes .

The State and Trait Anxiety Inventory was used to assess anxiety. The STAI consists of two 20-items questionnaires which assess state respectively trait levels of anxiety in clinical and non-clinical populations. The STAI-state was used as a continuous measurement for possible changes in anxiety during the experiment. The STAI-trait was used to control for the effect of anxiety as a personality trait in our sample . Demographic information such as age, education, medication intake, nicotine use and illnesses were collected using a demographic questionnaire.

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