The Impact of Music: How Music Can Heal Your Heart
“Music is therapy. Music moves people.
It connects people in ways that no other medium can.
It pulls heartstrings. It acts as medicine.”
— Maklemore
Music has long been recognized as a powerful tool for stress reduction, relaxation, improved sleep, and effective pain management without the use of drugs. In addition, new research continues to provide evidence for the healing power of music as Heart medicine. Research suggests that music can heal the Heart.
Music can alter your brain chemistry, and these changes may produce cardiovascular benefits, as evidenced by numerous studies. For example, studies have found that listening to music may:
Enable people to exercise longer during cardiac stress testing on a treadmill or stationary bike.
Improve blood vessel function by relaxing arteries.
Help heart rate and blood pressure levels return to baseline more quickly after physical exertion.
Ease anxiety in heart attack survivors.
Help people recovering from heart surgery to feel less pain and anxiety and sleep better.
Music alters our heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure, and affects our heart rate variability, which are key indicators of cardiac and mental health.
Did you know that the human heartbeat provided the standard measure for "musical timing" until the mid-19th century? After that, it was replaced by a mechanical metronome. A metronome is a device that produces an audible click at an interval set by the user. Set to "BPM" or beats per minute, musicians use this device to practice playing music to a regular pulse or rhythm.
Music moves us. It does so because music is part of our deep primal intuition related to our heartbeat.
The very distinctive rhythms in Beethoven's music closely resemble those of heart rhythm disorders. Cardiologists speculated that these rhythms might be transcriptions of Beethoven's possible heart arrhythmia, perhaps a result of the awareness of his heartbeat, enhanced by his deafness.
For cardiac patients, music-based interventions can modulate cerebral blood flow, reduce preoperative anxiety and postoperative stress, improve surgical outcomes, and lower cortisol levels. Additionally, music interventions had a significant impact on heart rate and blood pressure in patients with coronary heart disease.
And sound processing begins in the brainstem, which controls the rate of your heartbeat and respiration. This connection explains why relaxing music may lower heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure, and also appears to ease pain, stress, and anxiety.
Physiological feedback studies and our responses to music can also help us shape the music to influence listeners' heart rates and breathing, such as increasing or slowing it down.
With the widespread adoption of biofeedback devices, tailoring music interventions to individual cognitive or neural-cardiac states is now well within reach, enabling a "musical prescription" for enhanced mental and physical well-being.
Music should be part of every physician's toolkit, as evidenced by all this research. So maybe next time you visit your doctor, he will ask if you are ready to take music lessons!