From Beats to Behavior- How Does Music Affect Your Mood?

I love music, don’t you? In fact, listening to music is a part of daily life. Whether I am happy, excited, a bit low, or romantic, I need music every time. And it helps me refresh my mood.

I think listening to music is something that literally everyone loves. Be it toddlers with their rhymes, teenagers with their raps, adults with party music, or elders with nostalgia tracks. It is a part and parcel of everyone’s lives nowadays and with the ease in accessibility, we have more and more people engaged in it. Now we can get any and all types of music from any timeline with just a click.

So, if so many people are listening to music there must be something rewarding about it. Have you ever tried to find out the reason behind it? For the last few months, I was very curious to know the reasons, so I researched and studied a lot about it. And, you won’t believe that many scientific aspects relate us to music. So. in this blog I’ll talk about that.

Music and Hormones

As I am talking about how music affects our mood, let’s get into the science of it. I’ll tell you how our hormones get affected by music.

Let’s consider the act of music-making for this part. When you are producing music in any form like singing or creating music electronically or on an instrument it is called active music making.

Active music-making affects neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin. They are regulators of concentration, sleep, mood, memory, concentration and anxiety, pain, mood, and sleep patterns respectively.

When you are singing it helps in the production of oxytocin, which is because you feel connected with other people. It also reduces the stress hormone cortisol, thus bringing a relaxing feeling.

Music and Iso-principle

Iso-principle is basically a tool that matches the mood with music. So, according to this when you listen to music that is similar to your present mood and then gradually shift to the music of another mood (the one that you are trying to achieve).

How this helps is, suppose you are feeling sad or gloomy now, but when you start listening to a sad song and maybe a few of them, and then slowly move towards more happy or energized music you feel the energy shift.

The uncomfortable or unwanted emotions will actually evade and you will move towards feeling better and experience a positive mood change. The whole idea behind the process is ‘feeling your feelings’. It is like music therapy for mood elevation explaining how music affects your mood.

Music and Memory

So, one aspect of music and memory is essentially how we remember some music, or some songs which can be related to an event in the past like a particular celebration, and it basically becomes nostalgic. This happens to me most of the time. Listening to that music again makes me feel a certain emotion like happiness or sadness, sometimes basically it acts as a strong recall for any emotion or incident. Have you also experienced the same?

The second aspect is more scientific it involves using music to improve memory. Some certain techniques and therapies involve music that is given to individuals to improve memory retention.

The idea is that you tend to remember the music, and some things or information is fed to you in the form of music to increase its recall value. So, when you listen to a song repeatedly, you know what the lyrics are. Now when that song is played and stopped in between you automatically fill in the blanks with the lyrics that are muted. Thus, proving the relation between music and memory.

Moreover, several studies have shown listening to music reactivates the parts of the brain that are associated with speech, emotion, memory, and reasoning. additionally, singing has helped children and people learn phrases and vocabulary faster.

I’ll Tell You How Music Affects Behavior

We are talking about how music affects your mood, so we also have to consider the effect of music on our behavior. It affects us in various ways.

• It can alleviate the feeling of stress and enhance your mood as we saw above.
• It can also help in completing a given job or work by acting as a motivator.
• Music affects a lot of our habits too, it builds familiarity in our heads slowly so we start connecting to it more.

This is what is used by brands when they make video or audio advertisements and the association created by their parody makes us feel more connected to their product.

Different age groups are targeted with different kinds of music for the very same reason. Younger people connect more to instrumental music, and older shoppers connect to more lyrical music as they find meaning.

It also affects in a way that repetition of the same kind of music sometimes works in favor and is sometimes advised against, to get different performance goals. All these examples tell how music affects your mood.

Social Life and Music

Music is a very social activity and it helps you connect more and better. For instance, you can listen to music in a concert with maybe a thousand people or go to parties and dance to certain songs with your close friends. You can even have a certain playlist for shopping or having coffee with a friend and it basically is an activity that connects you to different people in different spaces.

Even singing it with other people, making music with people, or doing any such activity is stimulating to the soul. Music even helps you feel better about yourself in general. If somebody is anxious or depressed and they listen to music they feel a little better about things and in life generally.

Music just doesn’t affect our mood but it can even change our perception of the world and can have wide-ranging effects. The beats of a song can affect our heart rate, and synchronization can change emotions.

It gets us involved and moving, we tend to clap our hands or nod our head and even snap our fingers. Overall, it helps to elevate your mental state and relieve stress.

Last Updated on May 2, 2024 by Pragya