By Frank Bublitz
Since the days of the ancient Greeks, we have known that music has a positive effect on our mental and physical health. Long before the advent of medications, musical vibrations were used to help people deal with emotional and mental problems.
One reason why music is so helpful is that music reaches, in ways major and minor, all of the areas of the brain. Even the analytical areas of the brain light up when receiving stimulation of musical tones!
So how does this benefit a person’s mental health?
Recently information published in local and national media can shed some light on this. Our own local radio station 102.3 reported on a study that claimed listening to music for ten minutes after taking medication helps that medication work more effectively.
Maria Menounos, journalist and host on GSTV, recently reported on a study that claimed music helps reactivate the autonomous nervous system more quickly after a stressor of any kind. Maybe that’s why your teenage daughter runs into her room crying when she can’t get Taylor Swift concert tickets, but you then hear her chatting happily with friends ten minutes later? Just a thought.
Actors and writers such as myself are very aware of music’s effect on thoughts and emotions. We plan for bright, lighthearted music during Rom Com’s or comic relief during action or drama flicks. But when Michael Myers is ready to chop us his latest victim the music turns into minor keys, that stimulate the dark centers of the brain and heighten the feeling of drama and fear.
Which leads me to sharing the fact that music can have NEGATIVE effects as well. Practical experience taught me this years before the first National Institute of Health study documented this in people with substance use disorders. I was tasked for over a year calling people who were waiting for admission to residential treatment. I got a LOT of voice mails and left a lot of messages after listening to snippets of music like Gretchen Wilson’s All Jacked Up.
I noticed that I hardly ever got a call back from those numbers. When I did, some of those people ether outright refused to go to treatment or left AMA. Perhaps it’s not just true for computers that garbage in, garbage out applies? Since mental illness often drives people to medicate with alcohol and other drugs, the use of music that reinforces the drive to use can be a big problem.
On the whole, however, music is of great benefit to people’s mental and physical health. A person with almost no lucid periods who puts on a headset and listens to his favorite old jazz will soon be-bop, sing, and talk plainly while doing so. I’ve seen it. Sadly, the effect only lasts for a few moments once the headset comes off. Elderly Christians who are non-verbal near death will often be able to hum along to or softly mutter lyrics while you sing their favorite hymns. My mother did. So next time you feel blue…try the blues. “For when you take the blues and make a song, you sing them out again…you sing them out again!” (Neil Diamond, Song Sung Blue 1972)
