Music’s Amazing Pain Relieving, Stress Busting Abilities
I love music. Music can make me feel just about anything, more powerfully than watching a movie, reading a book or doing anything else that is designed to help you feel something or alter the way you feel about something. It can be inspiring, melancholy, uplifting, romantic, reminiscent, or thrilling.
Whatever type of music you usually prefer to listen to, it usually depends on how you tend to look at things in life. I personally love listening to classical music. The older I get, the more I find myself putting this type of music in my iPod or on the station selector.
I consider this funny since in my younger days I loved heavy metal and hard rock. Now, I still have an affinity for that type of music and it inspires a sort of nostalgia in me for my youthful, rebellious days, but I find that I can’t really think when I’m listening to all the “noise”.
Music has been proven to be a very powerful medium for helping us control our feelings, time and time again. Now there is even more evidence that music can impact our very biological responses and our health. It can make us feel much less stressed, and it can also help with pain relief for those that are most in pain, such as cancer patients.
Music therapy has even been used to make infants “smarter” and to help them learn at a more accelerated pace. It has been hypothesized, for instance, that infants that listen to a certain popular classical composer tend to learn at faster speeds than infants who do not have any music on.
Recently, studies have shown that patients who listen to music that are being treated for cancer reported higher quality of life and also reported much less feelings of stress. The patients also reported that they felt much less pain and were in better moods than the counterparts who had not participated in listening to pre-recorded music.
Music may be able to really help you through things like depression and anxiety, and can help relieve blue moods. In addition, it can definitely help boost your focus and zero you in on your work (that’s my own personal anecdotal evidence).