A new study has found that listening to music when you’re stressed can 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 the memory. People who listened to happier music during the curfew reported feeling less anxious afterwards.
Previous studies have shown that music can temporarily reduce stress, but most of them are cross-sectional or retrospective studies, which could lead to unintentional bias. This study is meaningful in terms of finding clearer evidence of 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 ‘Perceptions of Stress and Mood Related to Music Listening in Daily Life during the COVID-19 Lockdown’ .
