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1. Listening to music calms even the savage beast
2. If you have diverse taste then you can probably figure out how to manage your time based on what you're listening to
3. Knowing about all sub-genres of ambient music and IDM is the best way of listening to music studying
4. If you're familiar with the music it's a serious help to your performance
5. Trying to find more instrumental music is essential to getting your life in order

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1. If you only listen to one genre that is more involved than instrumental music then it won't help you at all
2. Most people don't know what ambient music is
3. A lot of people distract themselves with music they don't realize isn't good for studying or working

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Ultimately, you’d have to experiment with different types of music in different conditions, to find what works best for your productivity.

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The late philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, once said, "without music, life would be a mistake." This rings true for most of us.

Whether we listened to sad music after a painful breakup or upbeat music on our graduation day, music has played a significant role in our most memorable life events.

Memories aside, music also influences our mental performance and ability to get things done.

Here's the science of how music affects your productivity, and how to use it to your advantage.

Music Improves Your Mood

When you listen to music you enjoy, the brain releases the neurotransmitter dopamine, which makes you feel good, and reduces stress and anxiety. 1

For example, in one study within the meta-analysis of 400 studies in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, researchers studied the effects of music on patients who were due to undergo surgery.

Patients were told to either listen to music or take anti-anxiety drugs, and then the researchers tracked the changes in levels of the stress hormone, cortisol.

At the end of the study, the researchers discovered that the patients who listened to music experienced less anxiety and lower cortisol levels than patients who took anti-anxiety drugs.

Music has the power to improve our mood, which in turn could improve our ability to focus and concentrate on the task at hand.

Lyrics Reduce Mental Performance

Not all music is equal. Studies on background music in the work environment have shown that music with lyrics reduce our mental performance at work, whilst instrumental music could boost our productivity.

In addition, research from Applied Acoustics has shown that performance is reduced with increased speech intelligibility. In layman's terms, the more voices we can hear whilst working-including lyrics-the lower our productivity.

Music Improves Physical Performance

Listening to motivational music whilst exercising can help to reduce boredom and improve the quality of your workouts.

According to a study led by sports psychologist, Karageorghis, music improves physical performance by increasing capacity to exercise longer and harder, and delaying fatigue.

During my personal experiments, I've discovered that music helps to significantly increase the intensity, speed and duration of my workouts.

It alters my mood on the days when I don't feel like exercising, and has helped me to stick my exercise habit of working out five days a week.

Music Makes Repetitive Tasks More Pleasurable

According to Daniel Levitin, neuroscientist and the author of This Is Your Brain on Music, music can make repetitive tasks more pleasurable, and increase your concentration with the task.

For example, one study discovered that music could improve the performance of surgeons who take on repetitive nonsurgical laboratory tasks.

Music Familiarity Is Best for Focus

Various studies have discovered that certain regions in our brain-which evoke strong emotions and improve concentration-are more active when we listen to familiar rather than unfamiliar music.

Plus, when we listen to unfamiliar music we're more likely to lose focus, whilst adjusting to the new sound.

Music Affects Introverts and Extroverts Differently

A study published in the Applied Cognitive Psychology Journal looked at the distracting effects of music on introverts' and extraverts' performance on various cognitive tasks.

During the study, 10 introverts and extraverts were given two tests-a memory test that required immediate and delayed recall, and a reading comprehension test.The participants were required to complete the tests whilst either being exposed to pop music, or in silence.

At the end of the study, the researchers discovered that there was a detrimental effect on immediate recall on the memory test for both groups, whilst music was played.

However, after a 6-minute interval the introverts who had memorized the objects performed significantly worse in recall than the extraverts in the same condition.

In addition, the introverts who completed a reading comprehension task when the music was played also performed significantly worse than the introverts.

Listening to Music Between Tasks Could Boost Productivity

Whilst there may be detrimental effects of listening to music whilst working, listening to music in-between tasks can boost your mental performance.

For example, a study published in the Psychology of Music, showed that music in-between tasks could boost student academic performance and the ability to concentrate on a task for long periods of time.

If you'd like to get the best of both worlds, you could work in silence and periodically step away to listen to music, before returning back to work.

What Type of Music Should You Listen To?

As we've discussed, the type of music you should listen to for improved productivity depends on a few factors, which include:

How many lyrics are in the song.

How familiar you are with the song.

How repetitive the task is that you're going to listen to music with.

Whether you are engaging in a mental or physical activity.

For example, if you're about to read a lengthy and comprehensive document, you're probably better off listening to ambient or classical music, than rock or pop music. And vice versa, if you're about to go for a run.

Personally, what works for me is a music mix of jazz, lofi hip hop and neo soul instrumentals. My top 5 favorite artists when it comes to music whilst reading, studying or writing are (in no particular order):

Chet baker (genre: Jazz)

Freddie Joachim (genre: Instrumental hip hop, jazz, and soul)

Tom Misch (genre: Alternative/Indie)

Nujabes (genre: Japanese hip hop)

J Dilla (genre: Instrumental hip hop)

Ultimately, you'd have to experiment with different types of music in different conditions, to find what works best for your productivity.
FOOTNOTES
1. Altenmüller, E., & Schlaug, G. (2012). Music, brain, and health: Exploring biological foundations of music's health effects

2. Shih YN et al (2012). Background music: effects on attention performance.

3. Chanda, Mona Lisa & J Levitin, Daniel. (2013). The neurochemistry of music. Trends in cognitive sciences. 17. 179-93. 10.1016/j.tics.2013.02.007.

4. Jahncke, Helena & Hongisto, Valtteri & Virjonen, Petra. (2012). Cognitive performance during irrelevant speech: Effects of speech intelligibility and office-task characteristics. Applied Acoustics. 74. 10.1016/j.apacoust.2012.08.007.

5. Karageorghis, C.I., Priest, D.L., Williams, L.S., Hirani, R.M., Lannon, K.M., & Bates, B.J. (2010). Ergogenic and psychological effects of synchronous music during circuit-type exercise. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 11(6), 551-559.

6. Allen K, Blascovich J. Effects of Music on Cardiovascular Reactivity Among Surgeons. JAMA. 1994;272(11):882-884. doi:10.1001/jama.1994.03520110062030

7. Furnham, Adrian & Bradley, Anna. (1997). Music while You Work: The Differential Distraction of Background Music on the Cognitive Test Performance of Introverts and Extraverts. Applied Cognitive Psychology. 11. 445 - 455. 10.1002/(SICI)1099-0720(199710)11:5<445::AID-ACP472>3.0.CO;2-R.

8. Schellenberg, E & Nakata, Takayuki & Hunter, Patrick & Tamoto, Sachiko. (2007). Exposure to music and cognitive performance: Tests of children and adults. Psychology of Music. 35. 5-19. 10.1177/0305735607068885.
Mayo Oshin writes at Originally published on mayooshin.com. MayoOshin.com, where he shares practical self-improvement ideas backed by proven science, philosophy and art, for better habits. To get these ideas to think and live better, you can join his free weekly newsletter .

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Why Listening to Music Can Make You More Productive, According to Science

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The late philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, once said, "without music, life would be a mistake." This rings true for most of us. Whether we listened to sad music after a painful breakup or upbeat music on our graduation day, music has played a significant role in our most memorable life events.

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There is a wealth of psychology research that can help teachers to improve how they work with students, but academic studies of this kind aren't always easy to access or translate into the realities of classroom practice. This series seeks to redress that by taking a selection of studies and making sense of the important information for teachers, as we all seek to answer the question: how can we help our students do better at school? This time, we consider growth mindset.
Many students do their homework and revision while listening to music. Many of them will swear that listening to their favourite songs makes them study better. But does music help or hinder learning? And does it matter what type of music you listen to while revising?

Researchers from the applied psychology department of Cardiff Metropolitan University led a study to answer this question. The authors, Nick Perham and Harriet Currie, assigned students into one of four groups: the first revised in silence, the second revised while listening to music with lyrics they liked (which included songs from One Direction and Katy Perry), the third group revised to music with lyrics they did not like (which comprised of very heavy metal bands), and the fourth group revised listening to music without lyrics.

The participants then took a test on the passages they had been revising, rating how distracting their environment had been, as well as writing down their predictions for how well they thought they had done.

What are the main findings?

1. Students who revised in quiet environments performed more than 60% better in an exam than their peers who revised while listening to music that had lyrics.

2. Students who revised while listening to music without lyrics did better than those who had revised to music with lyrics.

3. It made no difference if students revised listening to songs they liked or disliked. Both led to a reduction in their test performance.

4. Students who revised in silence rated their environment as less distracting and accurately predicted that this would lead to better performances in subsequent tests.

Related research

There are some benefits to listening to music while performing certain tasks. It can be quite motivating and it can improve mood (listening to your favourite song tends to make people smile, for example). But it does not help people learn new or complex material.

The misconception that music does help us learn stems from a series of studies linked to the " Mozart effect ", which found that people performed better on a series of cognitive tasks after listening to 10 minutes of Mozart. Participants in these studies appeared to be getting smarter and performing better in tests.

However, further research has since revealed this is not the case. While listening to music before a task can make someone feel better, listening to it while trying to learn something new tends not to help. This is because music - especially tunes with lyrics - can take up processing space. This conflicts with the material you are trying to learn, effectively creating a bottleneck in your memory, as there is less space to process what you are revising.

What does this mean for the classroom?

It is important that students are made aware of the pitfalls of listening to music when revising. Perham and Currie's study found that students rated the quiet environment as less distracting and better for them, yet many students continue to listen to music during their homework. Why? Perhaps they're doing so out of habit, or they confuse what improves their mood with what leads to good revision, or it alleviates boredom. Perhaps it's simply because everyone else is doing it.

Students need to know how to revise well. There may well be a time and place to listen to music during the course of their revision, but not when they are learning new and complex material. After all, silence is golden.

Bradley Busch is a registered psychologist, director at InnerDrive and author of Release Your Inner Drive. Follow @Inner_Drive on Twitter, and get advice on improving memory and a visual summary of this research on his website
Follow us on Twitter via @GuardianTeach, like us on Facebook, and join the Guardian Teacher Network the latest articles direct to your inbox Looking for a teaching job? Or perhaps you need to recruit school staff? Take a look at Guardian Jobs, the education specialist

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Drowned in sound: how listening to music hinders learning

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There is a wealth of psychology research that can help teachers to improve how they work with students, but academic studies of this kind aren't always easy to access or translate into the realities of classroom practice.