Waterfall Relaxation

This signal helps us to use our energy more efficiently, so we’re not exhausting ourselves too soon. The benefits of musical study and training were still apparent even in participants who no longer played an instrument. Listening to music has been shown to improve memory functioning, increase rate of healing, improve your workouts and more. Music therapy can calm anxiety, ease pain, and provide a pleasant diversion during chemotherapy or a hospital stay. The mental and physical benefits of nature, especially right now.

David Barlow, Ph.D., founder and director emeritus of the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University, believes that anxiety and depression are intertwined. “Anxiety is a kind of looking to the future, seeing dangerous things that might happen in the next hour, day or weeks. Depression is all that with the addition of ‘I really don’t think I’m going to be able to cope with this, maybe I’ll just give up.’ It’s shutdown marked by mental, cognitive or behavioral slowing,” explained Barlow.

By causing these physical reactions, peaceful music helps to calm the listener. Classical music has even been shown to increase the production of serotonin which can help fight depression, anxiety, panic, and anger. The main reason for this divergence in the literature might be that many studies have been conducted in a clinical context, introducing heterogeneity by studying various different medical settings and patient samples. From the perspective of biopsychological stress research, a major shortcoming is the vast neglect of the control of confounding variables [25–27]. Although acute stress responses occur rather uniformly across individuals , they may be modified by previous individual experiences, such as chronic stress .

“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 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.

It may seem like we are living in an age of anxiety, where feeling worried, upset and stressed has become mind relaxation the norm. But we should remember that anxiety is a natural human response to situations. Pick a piece of music that matches your heartbeat, your breathing and how fast you feel you are moving. Music has definite affects on your brain - and it can be harnessed as therapy for your anxiety. While it might not be a physical treatment, it brings comfort to those in distress. Huffman says the benefit from music is due to its enormous presence in our lives.

Classical and meditation music offer the greatest mood-boosting benefits, while heavy metal and techno music are ineffective and even detrimental. The researchers suggest that music and lighting help create a more relaxed setting. Since the participants were more relaxed and comfortable, they may have consumed their food more slowly and have been more aware of when they began to feel full. One of the most surprising psychological benefits of music is that it might be a helpful weight-loss tool. If you are trying to lose weight, listening to mellow music and dimming the lights might help you achieve your goals.

Music therapy also had significant benefit in preventing burnout in operating room staff. A 6-week study showed that after having access to 30-minute music listening sessions each day at work for a month, staff reported decreased stress levels and less emotional exhaustion. Ongoing or chronic stress can lead to developing an anxiety disorder, depression, chronic pain, and more.

Consider the trend centered on meditative music created to soothe the mind and inducing relaxation. According to one study conducted by Harmat, Takács and Bódizs, 94 students with sleep complaints were brought into the lab. The first group listened to classical music at bedtime for 45 minutes for 3 weeks. The second group listened to an audiobook at bedtime for 45 minutes for 3 weeks. A study from Austria’s General Hospital of Salzburg found that patients recovering from back surgery had increased rates of healing and reported less pain when music was incorporated into the standard rehabilitation process.

This form of treatment may be helpful for people with depression and anxiety, and it may help improve the quality of life for people with physical health problems. The results suggested that listening to music had an impact on the human stress response, particularly the autonomic nervous system. Those who had listened to music tended to recover more quickly following a stressor. It can be difficult in our society to talk about mental illness. It can also feel embarrassing for people who suffer to ask for help, but many solutions are available.