How Music Can Help Depression
We have all had that moment when a song made your eyes sparkle with emotion and tears or filled you with joy. You may listen to a melody from decades ago, and just like that, time travel back to your childhood.
Music is a powerful tool that affects all of us. Even if you are not a music lover, you still have selected playlists that stir that heart. So how do we use this to our advantage to help us heal?
Music Therapy
Music therapy has been used since ancient times in one way or another. Even today surgeons listen to music to alleviate their anxiety during surgeries; students may put on their headphones and play tunes to help them study better. As you head to the treadmill, you put on your favourite beats to pump you up through your work-out sessions.
Professionally, music therapy is of an active and passive nature. In active music therapy, you play an instrument or create lyrics and tunes to express your feelings guided by your therapist. When it is passive therapy, you listen to music in the background as you doodle, meditate or participate in any self-reflective activity and then talk about the surfacing emotions that the music evicted in you.
How Does This Work?
Music has an impact on you in many ways. Listening to music affects your breathing – for instance, a peppy dance number may have you tapping your feet with a rapid heart rate while a classical tune will relax your heartbeat and respiration, allowing you to relax completely. These studies have resulted in spas and luxury hotels having soft music to enhance the experience of a soothing massage or relaxing vacation.
Studies prove that music has a positive impact on the brain, especially the regions that are in charge of anxiety and depression. An increase in dopamine releases the feel-good factor that is used in treating depression.
Some of the universal benefits of music are:
• Muscle relaxation
• Reduced blood pressure
• Increased motivation
• Boost in self-esteem
• Mood Enhancer
Some of these directly help someone who is going through mood disorders. Anxiety and depression usually go hand-in-hand where a person may go through a roller-coaster of emotions from guilt, shame, anger, fear, and sadness. When this low feeling and negativity do not go away for two weeks, it falls under depression. While music may not be a cure, it helps direly in the healing process.
Music not only helps depression but is a low-cost intervention that often reduces surgical, procedural, acute, and chronic pain.
Another review spoke about how the anxiety-reducing effects appear to be greatest when people are given a choice of which music to listen to.[3] The genre of music that you love or the tunes that hold memories for you can have a more significant impact than others. This works for everyone, whether you are feeling stuck, suffering from ailments or just need to feel better about life – turn up the music and maybe even dance to it!

A full-time reader and consequential writer, Riya Mehta is a blogger with a Master’s Degree in English Literature. She loves fiction and desserts, precisely in that order, and currently works as a content writer in the travel industry. Reading up on mental health ever since she was a teen, she cares about the subject deeply and hopes to break the stigma attached to it through her words.
You can reach her at https://www.linkedin.com/

A full-time reader and consequential writer, Riya Mehta is a blogger with a Master’s Degree in English Literature. She loves fiction and desserts, precisely in that order, and currently works as a content writer in the travel industry. Reading up on mental health ever since she was a teen, she cares about the subject deeply and hopes to break the stigma attached to it through her words.
You can reach her at https://www.linkedin.com/
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