Music and Aging: How Good Tunes Can Boost Your Health

When you think about exercises for healthy aging, ones that boost your physical strength, flexibility and stamina might come to mind.

While these are important, it’s also crucial to exercise your brain, and one of the best ways to give your brain a workout is to simply listen to music!

That’s right, according to John Hopkins Medicine, “There are few things that stimulate the brain the way music does. If you want to keep your brain engaged throughout the aging process, listening to or playing music is a great tool. It provides a total brain workout.”

Scientists are still trying to understand the brain-music connection. Musical vibrations travel through the air, enter the ear canal, and tickle the eardrum. They’re then transmitted into an electrical signal that moves through the auditory nerve to the brain stem, where they’re formed into what we perceive as music. Amazing, right?

Science shows that listening to music can help support healthy aging in several ways.

• Reducing anxiety: Listening to music can lower cortisol levels, a biological marker of stress, by up to 61%.
• Lowering blood pressure: Soothing music can induce a relaxation response that lowers your heart rate and reduces your blood pressure.
• Reducing pain: When people undergoing surgery hear calming music, they need less pain medication.
• Improving sleep quality:  Listening to music before bed may decrease the time it takes to fall asleep and improve sleep quality.
• Boosting mood: Music triggers the release of feel-good hormone dopamine, which helps improve mood.
• Enhancing mental alertness and memory: Dementia patients often retain musical memory, and music from their past can help unlock forgotten memories.  

Related: 30 Days of Heart Health Activities to Help You Thrive!

The type of music you listen to matters. For example, research shows that listening to negative music can put you in a negative emotional state, and violent song lyrics can result in aggressive thoughts and behavior.

If you want to experience the best health benefits of music, here are some genes to hit play on:

• If you want to relax, listen to instrumental, classical, ambient, chill-out, meditation and new age music.
• If you’re exercising, listen to songs that you enjoy and make you feel good, because they’ll motivate you to move more.
• If you need to focus, listen to minimalist, classical, piano and low-fi music.
• If you want to be creative, listen to something new and unfamiliar that will challenge and energize your brain.

So, what are you waiting for? Create some playlists, check out some CDs from the library, or dust off your old boom box or record player, and enjoy the health benefits of your favorite tunes.

Want more? Check out our blog, Memory Games for Adults: What to Play and Why.

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