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With all the ways music affects your body, you can probably already clearly see how music can be used as an effective relaxation and stress management tool. In addition to the many physical changes that music can bring (which I list in this article on music and music therapy), music is especially helpful in relaxation and stress management because it can be used in the so many ways. Here are some of the most important ways that music can help with stress management.

Music can promote relaxation of tense muscles, enabling you to easily release some of the tension you carry from a stressful day (or week). When you relax your muscles and loosen your body, your mind also relaxes, which can help you to reduce plenty of tension and stress that you may not have realized you were carrying. Music is a simple and fun way to let all the tension just drain away.

As mentioned before, music can help your brain get into a meditative state, which carries wonderful stress relief benefits with it. For those who find meditation intimidating, listening to music can be an easier alternative. Music is easy for kids to enjoy, too, so while meditation may be challenging to teach to your kids, putting on the right music can be a way to ease them into a more meditative state without their completely realizing it.

Music, especially upbeat tunes, can take your mind off what stresses you, and help you feel more optimistic and positive. This helps release stress and can even help you keep from getting as stressed over life's little frustrations in the future. An uplifting song can also bring the benefits of positive affect, which can empower you to notice more opportunities and seize them when you can, which can also help with stress relief. (And while we're on the topic of uplifting music, some happy songs practically force you to dance to them, and this type of exercise can be great for stress management, too!)

These are some of the reasons that music is one of the easiest and most effective relaxation tools available, and music is such a great stress management tool to add to your everyday life.

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Why The Right Music Can Really Relieve Stress

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With all the ways music affects your body, you can probably already clearly see how music can be used as an effective relaxation and stress management tool. In addition to the many physical changes that music can bring (which I list in this article on music and music therapy), music is especially helpful in relaxation and stress management because it can be used in the so many ways.

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The Science Behind the Relaxing Effects of Music | Relaxation Medthods

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The Science Behind the Relaxing Effects of Music | Relaxation Medthods

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Have you ever wondered why you feel so great when listening to your favorite track or tuning in to your favorite radio station?

Music can trigger a variety of chemical reactions in your brain that contribute to relaxation. From reducing stress hormones to stimulating feelings of happiness, music can almost instantly translate to a good mood. These feel-good effects also produce a number of positive long-term benefits for your body, such as lower stress and anxiety levels, better sleep patterns, and improved overall health and well-being.

So, it's not just in your head - the tunes you listen to greatly impact your mood. Read on to find out the science behind the relaxing effects of music.

3 Ways Music Aids in Relaxation
Music Reduces Stress-Related Hormones
Studies have found that listening to music can lower your body's levels of cortisol, a hormone that can contribute to feelings of stress and anxiety.

As a result of stress and anxiety reduction, music can also contribute to better sleep habits. Listening to music before going to bed has been shown to improve sleeping patterns and can be used to treat insomnia. Since sleeping is another natural stress-reducer , the cycle of listening to music to reduce stress will also result in lower stress levels experienced as a result of better sleep habits.
Music Has Therapeutic Effects on Your Brain
Similar to meditation and even hypnotism, slow rhythmic music alters brain activity in a way that induces a trance-like state similar to that of meditation, which encourages relaxation.

As a result, music's ability to alter brainwave speed can also help ease symptoms of migraines, PMS, depression and certain behavioral issues including attention deficit disorder.
Music Stimulates Feelings of Happiness
Listening to your favorite music can also trigger hormones in your body that translate to an instant good mood.

The Best Type of Music for Relaxation

As mentioned above, the type of music you listen to affects your body in different ways, which can result in different moods.

The Best Audio Equipment to Help You Relax

We feel the best way to enjoy and really benefit from the scientific effects that music has on your body is by listening to your favorite songs on high-quality, noise-cancelling headphones from Audio-Technica.

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The Science Behind the Relaxing Effects of Music | Relaxation Medthods

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Have you ever wondered why you feel so great when listening to your favorite track or tuning in to your favorite radio station? Music can trigger a variety of chemical reactions in your brain that contribute to relaxation. From reducing stress hormones to stimulating feelings of happiness, music can almost instantly translate to a good mood.

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Listening to Music while Studying: A Good or a Bad Idea? — The Learning Scientists

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Listening to Music while Studying: A Good or a Bad Idea? — The Learning Scientists

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This article said it was good Idea to listen to music while studying;.

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I rush into the library to drop off some books. When I turn around I see students sitting at tables going over their notes and reading their textbooks; studying. It's that time of the year again: Exam season is underway. I notice that many of them are wearing headphones and I start to wonder: What are they listening to? Their favourite songs, relaxing lounge tunes, or white noise that cancels out disturbing noise from the outside? Does it make a difference at all what they are listening to while studying?

Before reviewing research that has looked into this question, let me first bust a myth about music and human cognitive skills. You have probably heard about the Mozart Effect. If you ask people in the general public about this effect, they will probably say something along the lines: Oh yes, listening to music by Mozart makes you smarter. However, this statement is not only completely false, but is also a misinterpretation of the Mozart Effect. The Mozart Effect is a brief enhancement of spatial-temporal abilities in college students after listening to a Mozart piano sonata. The finding was reported by Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky (1) in an experiment where they had students listen to Mozart's piano sonata, to a relaxation music, or to nothing (silence condition) before performing a spatial reasoning task (a subtest from the Stanford-Binet intelligence scale). The researchers found that participants' performance on the spatial reasoning task improved after they had listened to the Mozart sonata compared to the other conditions. However, there are a couple of points that are important to know:

1. the effect is extremely short-lived with the positive enhancement in spatial reasoning only lasting for 10-15 minutes,

2. the improvement is restricted to a quite abstract mental rotation task that is only a small part of the equation when assessing intelligence, and

3. other studies were not able to replicate this finding (2).

Taken together, the Mozart Effect has no relevance for educational practice and, unfortunately, listening to Mozart music will not make you smarter.

Now that this is out of the way, let's turn to studies that have investigated the effects of background music on learning. One idea why listening to background music while studying or performing a task may be potentially beneficial has been put forward by Schellenberg and colleagues (3) in their arousal-emotion/mood-activation hypothesis. It assumes that music that puts you in a positive mood has a positive effect on your performance. Another idea is the changing state hypothesis, which states that rapidly changing music will distract learning and lead to poor performance (4).

What evidence is there for either of the explanations and can we find an answer to the question whether listening to music while learning is a good or bad thing? In one study, for example, participants studied vocabulary pairs either under a silence condition or music condition with classical music playing in the background (5). Participants underwent three learning sessions and were tested one week later. The results show that participants tend to perform better on the final test when they had listened to music while studying vocabulary. However, the author of that study acknowledges that not all participants seemed to have benefitted to the same extent from listening to background music during studying. Another study looked into this more closely and investigated the role of personality traits for the effects of background music on different cognitive tasks (6). The results of this study are quite mixed. For instance, whether performance was hindered or helped by background music depended on the type of task. For instance, verbal reasoning was better under the music condition compared to the silence condition, but abstract perceptual reasoning was hurt by simultaneously listening to music. After controlling for general IQ, background music showed a negative effect on introverted people for abstract reasoning, but no effect on extraverted people. For verbal reasoning, however, introverts and extraverts were not affected differently by listening to music while performing the task. One explanation for this finding is that the abstract reasoning task is more complex than the verbal reasoning task. Thus, task complexity seems to play a moderating role when deciding whether to listen to music while studying. If the task at hand is quite complex and you are more on the introverted spectrum you may be better off studying without music.

Hallam, Price, and Katsarou (7) investigated the effects of background music on math learning and verbal memorisation in young children in primary school. For math learning, they had pupils solve arithmetic problems under music (mood-calming) or silence conditions. Although pupils performed equally well under both conditions in regard to accuracy, they solved the math problems quicker in the music condition. The verbal memorisation task required them to read sentences and remember a missing word in a sentence for later. Studying occurred under one of three conditions: silence, unpleasant/ aggressive music, or pleasant/calm music. Again, it was found that performance was best when pupils had studied with pleasant music playing in the background. Performance was worst in the unpleasant, aggressive music condition. Thus, it seems to be the case that music that puts you in a good mood and that is not interrupting because of rapid changes in tempi can be beneficial while studying. The studies presented so far did not test these two explanations against each other, but a study by Jäncke and Sandmann (8) did. Surprisingly, they did not find any substantial or consistent influence of background music on verbal learning. Thus, whether participants studied with or without pleasant/unpleasant/slow changing /fast changing instrumental music in the background did not matter.

So, should you listen to music while you are studying? As it is often the case when looking at evidence from research, the answer seems to boil down to: It depends! Certainly, features of the task seem to play a crucial role and studying complex material that requires you to engage all your focus on what you are trying to understand may be hindered by any kind of background music. Tasks that require you to keep track of several pieces of information at one time while processing them, too (i.e., tasks heavy on working memory demands), may be particularly affected by any kind of background music or noise (9) and are best done in complete silence. Your personality seems also to play a role on whether you will benefit at all from listening to your favourite tunes while studying. And only to complicate things even further, we have seen that an interaction of both factors, task complexity and personality, may be in place. Nevertheless, positive effects of background music have been found and it may certainly be worth trying it out.

I, personally, don't do anything without listening to music. So, while writing this blog post, I have been listening to soothing background music. However, in the past, I have caught myself turning the music down when trying to grasp a complex bit of information when reading a scientific article. So, there you go: It depends!

References

(1) Rauscher, F.H., Shaw, G.L., & Ky, K.N. (1993). Music and spatial task performance. Nature, 365, 611.

(2) McKelvie, P., & Law, J. (2002). Listening to Mozart does not improve children's spatial ability: Final curtains for the Mozart effect. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 20, 241-258.

(3) Schellenberg, E. G., Nakata, T., Hunter, P. G., & Tamoto, S. (2007). Exposure to music and cognitive performance: Tests of children and adults. Psychology of Music, 35, 5-19.

(4) Jones, D. M., Alford, D., Macken, W. J., Banbury, S. P., & Tremblay, S. (2000). Interference from degraded auditory stimuli: linear effects of changing-state in the irrelevant sequence. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 108, 1082-1088.

(5) de Groot, A. M. B. (2006). Effects of stimulus characteristics and background music on foreign language vocabulary learning and forgetting. Language Learning, 56, 463-506.

(6) Dobbs, S., Furnham, A., & McClelland, A. (2011). The effect of background music and noise on the cognitive test performance of introverts and extraverts. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25, 307-313.

(7) Hallam, S., Price, J., & Katsarou, G. (2002). The effects of background music on primary school pupils' task performance. Educational Studies, 28, 111-122.

(8) Jäncke, L., & Sandmann, P. (2010). Music listening while you learn: No influence of background music on verbal learning. Behavioral and Brain Functions, 6, 1-14.

(9) Alley, T. R., & Greene, M. E. (2008). The relative and perceived impact of irrelevant speech, vocal music and non-vocal music on working memory. Current Psychology, 27, 277-289.

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I rush into the library to drop off some books. When I turn around I see students sitting at tables going over their notes and reading their textbooks; studying. It's that time of the year again: Exam season is underway. I notice that many of them are wearing headphones ...

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Do Or Don't: Studying While Listening To Music | College News

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Do Or Don't: Studying While Listening To Music | College News

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Hard to Focus on the task at Hand

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Second semester is well underway, which means midterms and other tests are looming ahead in the not-too-distant future and that it's time to once again question how studying while listening to music can affect a student's studying efficiency.

Researchers and college students have often wondered whether listening to music has negative or positive effects on the student's studying habits and whether studying while listening to music is a "do" or "don't."

Studies have shown that listening to music before studying or performing a task can be beneficial as it improves attention, memory, and even your ability to do mental math as well as helping lessen depression and anxiety.

Many researchers, as well as students, who think listening to music helps memory have called the practice the " Mozart Effect." Of course, nowadays many students are not actually listening to Mozart, but pop or other music, so the effect may not be the same.

These studies and researchers seem to indicate that music can actually help you study and those who listen to music while studying may actually be better off for it.

However, there have also been several studies that have shown that music can actually have negative impacts on your studying effectiveness - particularly when it comes to memorizing something in order.

Dr. Nick Perham's 2010 study, "Can preference for background music mediate the irrelevant sound effect," explored how music can interfere with short-term memory potential.

"We found that listening to liked or disliked music was exactly the same, and both were worse than the quiet control condition," Perham discovered. "Both impaired performance on serial-recall tasks."

Listening to music may diminish your cognitive abilities in these situations because when you're trying to memorize things in order, you can get thrown off and confused by the various words and notes in the song playing in the background, Perham theorized.

Stanford University professor Clifford Nass had similar thoughts.

"Music with lyrics is very likely to have a problematic effect when you're writing or reading. Probably less of an effect on math, if you're not using the language parts of your brain," Nass said. "In my day, there was no way you could take music to the library. When [today's students] go to the library to study, they bring their noise, and music, with them."

Today, it's easier than ever to bring your music with you wherever you go as music has become inherently portable. We listen to music while we walk, cook, drive - when we want to feel happy or relaxed. Music has become a fundamental part of our lives, which is why students are so eager to know whether it will negatively or positively impact their studying.

Because music can impact and regulate your mood and the best mood to study in is a more relaxed mood, choosing music that helps you relax but also with enough beat or rhythm to ensure you don't zone out while studying is crucial. But music that's too loud or with too much of an upbeat tempo can also be distracting, so having a playlist or specific artist you turn to for studying music can really help.

If you're the type of person who has more difficulty multitasking and is easily distracted, listening to music while studying may just cause your attention to drift to the music rather than help you concentrate on your material.

If you're really set on listening to music while studying but know your focus will probably end up divided, choose classical music or more acoustic music with minimal words to distract you. Movie scores, which typically consist of a bunch of orchestral pieces, may also be good background music for you to study to.

So basically, the final decision about studying while listening to music is up to you - do you feel you concentrate better with Taylor Swift or Hozier singing in the background? Or do you find yourself thinking of the lyrics to the song rather than what you're supposed to be studying?

Music's effects on study habits will vary from person to person, and can also be affected by what you're listening to - the genre of the music, how loud it is, etc.

Personally, when I need some background music to study to, I'll usually make a more acoustic playlist consisting of songs by Joshua Radin, Cary Brothers, and Ed Sheeran, with some of The Fray and Goo Goo Dolls thrown in, too.

But in order for you to study the most productively, you need to figure out the effect music has on your studying ability, and then tailor your studying playlist - be it silence or music - to best suit your needs and efficiency.

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do or don't: studying while listening to music

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Do Or Don't: Studying While Listening To Music

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Second semester is well underway, which means midterms and other tests are looming ahead in the not-too-distant future and that it's time to once again question how studying while listening to music can affect a student's studying efficiency.

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The Effects of Music on a Student's Schoolwork | Education - Seattle PI

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The Effects of Music on a Student's Schoolwork | Education - Seattle PI

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Effects Some Pepole

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Written by Rudy Miller

Today's teens find it hard to resist listening to music while doing homework. Those who choose to listen while they study could see grades dip as a result. Teens need to choose wisely if they decide to listen to music and study at the same time. Soothing music can help some students focus, while any choice of music can be a distraction for other students.

Trend

Many teens listen to music while they study. In fact, many juggle their listening and studying with other tasks such as emailing, instant messaging and watching television. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 53 percent of teens 12 to 17 do something else while studying. At 87 percent, listening to music was the most popular side activity for those who balanced studying with another activity. This generation of teens is growing up multitaskers, and the lure of computers, televisions and iPods is too great for today's teens to ignore even while doing homework.

Distraction

Trying to do more than one thing at a time means you're not entirely focused on anything. A University of Toronto study found that fast, loud music hinders reading comprehension. The music agitates rather than focuses the studier, and researcher Glenn Schellenberg likened it to trying to learn while riding a roller coaster. A University College London study found that both introverted and extroverted undergraduate students performed worse on a reading comprehension test when pop music was played. A memory test for adult participants at the University of Wales met with similar results: Listening to music hampered the test takers.

Mozart Effect

But not all music is bad for all students. Sometimes, soothing music or classical music can help a student focus. One British study claims listening to Mozart for 10 minutes produced a "Mozart effect" where test-takers' IQ scores went up 8 or 9 points. A Bulgarian psychologist employed the method of playing Baroque era music, which plays at a tempo of 60 beats per minute, to help students learn foreign languages. After the 30-day course, the average retention rate per student was 92 percent. Even four years later, when students had not reviewed the material, most remembered the foreign language lesson.

Individual Predispositions

The effect of music on students varies depending on the music and the student. The "Journal of Communication" studied whether listening to music affected eighth graders' homework performance. The results were inconclusive. The U.S. Department of Education has concluded that quiet background music can help some children focus, but tells parents to turn off loud music from CD players, radios and televisions when their children study. The potential for distraction is too great from these music sources, according to government experts.

About the Author

Rudy Miller has been writing professionally since 1996. Miller is a digital team leader for lehighvalleylive.com, a local news website and content provider to the Express-Times newspaper in Easton, Pa. Miller holds a Master of Arts in English from the University of Miami.

Photo Credits

Pixland/Pixland/Getty Images

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The Effects of Music on a Student's Schoolwork

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Today's teens find it hard to resist listening to music while doing homework. Those who choose to listen while they study could see grades dip as a result. Teens need to choose wisely if they decide to listen to music and study at the same time.

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Is it Good to Listen to Music While Studying? | Study.com

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Is it Good to Listen to Music While Studying? | Study.com

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This article gives pros and cons.

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Benefits of Studying with Music

More and more, students are bringing headphones with them to libraries and study halls. But does it actually help to listen to music when studying? While the so-called 'Mozart effect', a term coined from a study that suggested listening to music could actually enhance intelligence, has been widely refuted, there are still many benefits of listening to music while studying:

Music that is soothing and relaxing can help students to beat stress or anxiety while studying.

Background music may improve focus on a task by providing motivation and improving mood. During long study sessions, music can aid endurance.

In some cases, students have found that music helps them with memorization, likely by creating a positive mood, which indirectly boosts memory formation.

Drawbacks of Listening to Music while Studying

And still, despite these benefits, studies have shown that music is often times more distracting than it is helpful.

Students who listen to music with lyrics while completing reading or writing tasks tend to be less efficient and come away having absorbed less information.

Loud or agitated music can have adverse effects on reading comprehension and on mood, making focus more difficult.

Students who use music to help them memorize sometimes need to listen to music while taking the test in order to reap the benefits of this study method. In the silent test-taking environment, these students may find it more difficult to recall the information.

Ultimately, the effects of music on study habits are dependent on the student and their style of learning. If easily distracted, students should most likely avoid music so they can keep their focus on their work. Conversely, students who function better as multi-taskers may find that music helps them to better concentrate.

Building Better Study Habits

If you're wondering how to improve your memory and study skills, Study.com offers course materials on cognitive perspectives and cognition that include training on improving short- and long-term memory, retrieving memories and forming better study habits.

These resources feature fast and convenient video lessons that can be viewed in about five minutes, plus lesson quizzes to check your comprehension of the material. You'll also find a jump feature that lets you return to key points in each video or skip through info you already know about.

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is it good to listen to music while studying? | study.com

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Is it Good to Listen to Music While Studying? | Study.com

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More and more, students are bringing headphones with them to libraries and study halls. But does it actually help to listen to music when studying?

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Drowned in sound: how listening to music hinders learning | Teacher Network | The Guardian

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Drowned in sound: how listening to music hinders learning | Teacher Network | The Guardian

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This is article help said it's not helpful.

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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.