A new study has found that listening to music when you’re stressed can actually lift your mood and help you calm down.
Researchers at the University of Vienna in Austria recruited 711 participants living in Austria or Italy and asked them to record their mood and music listening habits five times a day for a week using a smartphone app.
For each question, participants selected their current stress level from the app’s menu and rated their mood at that moment. The study was conducted in the early days of the pandemic when containment measures were in place. At this time, the world was in great fear, tension and stress.
The researchers found a correlation between stress levels and listening to music, especially when listening to euphoric music. In addition, the effect of listening to music for a certain period of time also affected memory. People who listened to happier music during lockdown reported feeling less anxious afterwards.
There have been previous studies showing that music can temporarily reduce stress, but most of them are cross-sectional or retrospective studies, which could lead to unintended bias. This study is meaningful in finding clearer evidence for the benefits of listening to music on mental health.
The results of this study were published in the JAMA Network Open, a journal of the American Medical Association, under the title of ‘Perceptions of Stress and Mood Associated With Listening to Music in Daily Life During the COVID-19 Lockdown’.