How music can boost your mental wellbeing

Music for pleasure or for wellbeing?

Music has the ability to evoke powerful emotional responses such as chills and thrills in listeners. The enjoyment of music appears to involve the same pleasure center in the brain as other forms of pleasure, such as food, sex, and drugs.
It’s rare to have absolute silence. Music is all around us, it is made up of vibrations of different frequencies, heard in the sounds of nature, the sea, the birds, even the electrical sound of the fridge has a frequency that hums.

Music plays a big part in our lives. Everyone has a special pieces of music, a song, or just a jingle that is part of their life.

Many researchs suggest that music can stimulate the body’s natural feel good chemicals (e.g. endorphins, oxytocin). It can help ENERGIZE your MOOD and provide an outlet for you to take control of your feelings. Music can even help you work through problems in your life and boost our happiness in these uncertain times.

For example music can help us to:

• Manage stress
• Express feelings
• Enhance memory
• Improve communication
• Promote wellness
• Promote physical rehabilitation
• Alleviate pain (Did you know that focusing on music reduces your brain’s perception of pain? Just thinking during labour, many women around the world use music as relief for pain during this stressful challenge)

Listening to music is a popular way to cope with difficult times. For example, it can sometimes express how we are feeling or vent difficult thoughts and emotions for us. You may be able to relate to the music and find comfort from the words in a song.

The Power of Music

Music can help us to identify and express emotions, it can help us feel alive and connected.
Music can be life changing. Music can move us and unite us, and sometimes music can help to change the world.
Throughout my life music has been having a massive influence on my mental health and on my emotions. Whether I am playing or listening to music, I always had a compelling association to it.
Music isolates you from the outside world especially when you are working or studying, it helps to keep you focused.
Pre-recorded music has associations to times and places. This can either distract us or make us focus. If we hear a song from a different time in our life it can bring back all those old feelings.
It isn’t just listening to music which in some sense saved my mind. Playing music has also helped me in more ways than anyone can ever imagine especially during my teen age. Playing the keyboard and have a music band created a lot of opportunity to stay with the others and improved my social skills.
Anxiety is linked to life pressures and stress. It creates negative and debilitating feelings, often around not feeling good enough. Rhythm can help to decrease anxiety. Listening to your favourite play list can help to settle your heart rate and distract you from disturbing external noises, especially if you focus on your breathing as you listen. In this way you can take stock of your surroundings.

 “Music speaks when words fail.” 

As it's a UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE!

Memories

Memories are one of the important ways in which musical events evoke emotions. As a resercher has noted, musical emotions and musical memory can survive long after other forms of memory have disappeared. Part of the reason for the durable power of music appears to be that listening to music engages many parts of the brain, triggering connections and creating associations.
Time Perception Music is a powerful emotional stimulus that changes our relationship with time. Time does indeed seem to fly when listening to pleasant music. Music is therefore used in waiting rooms to reduce the subjective duration of time spent waiting and in supermarkets to encourage people to stay for longer and buy more. Hearing pleasant music seems to divert attention away from time processing.

Exercise and Music for Tension Release

Music supports your mind and your body to work in harmony through joining physical and mental activity. Music underpins the movements and pace of events through the tempo, rhythms, mood and harmonies.

What does your music do for you?

To find out how music affects you, try and become aware of the effect certain songs, styles, artists have on you. Some music may allow you to sit with a mood, explore it, understand it, but not feel worse from doing so. Other music might help you change a mood, or set a new mood. This can be helpful if it helps you bring your mood/emotions to a more stable place.
How find out the effect music has on you, to be in tune with yourself and answer to the following questions:

• Does the music allow you to sit with a mood, change a mood or set a new mood?
• Does it make you feel better or worse?
• Is it helpful to feel worse? When does it stop being helpful? For example, rather than music having a calming effect on you, listening to it might make you feel more angry or anxious.
• When is it not helpful?
• Is it a certain style of music that is helpful or unhelpful or is it a certain artist or words in a song?

Managing YOUR Music

Once you are aware of how music affects you we can then start to intentionally USE it to IMPROVE your WELLBEING.
Many people say that having their music on shuffle is not the best thing when they are having a tough time. Rather, being aware of your music choice, and selecting songs or playlists that you know can help you cope in a positive way, can be more helpful at times.
Considering the questions listed above may help you work out which music would be on which playlists.
Why not have a go at CREATING a few PLAYLISTS for different EMOTIONS?

• Purposeful playlists
• Music to wake me up
• Music to energise me
• My happy music
• Music for venting frustration
• Nostalgic musicListening to music doesn’t have to be the only way it can be helpful. Sometimes you may find singing or dancing along is the actual factor that has the positive effect.

Try putting on some great songs to belt along to maybe also with your partner or your kids! Otherwise, you might try listening to live music, or actually writing and playing your own songs. The key is to become aware of how different music affects you.
Actively and intentionally selecting and using your music can be a really helpful way to feel more in CONTROL of your FEELINGS.
At the times when I felt a little bit awful and dumpy, music saved me. It has been my diversion from the bad mood.
I could write all day about how much music has helped my mental health.
Each of us had tried the experience watching a film that music is used to match, alter or amplify our mood.

Now it is clear that there are benefits to matching music to our mood, but we can use it also to switch our state from a depressive, angry or anxious one to another relaxed and calm.

Some music therapists play music to match the current mood of a person and then slowly shift to a more positive or calm state.
During this uncertain time of long isolation and stay at home, whether we are stuck at home working or just looking after to our loved ones, the music can help us to feel better, more relaxed or more concentrated on our work and on our life.
In this time technology is our friend and listening to music and feed our musical appetite were never so easy with fantastic devices and services that the technology gives us. YouTube, iPods, mobile phones, MP3 players and an excess of apps and online services, all of them can help us to satisfy our need of vibrations.

Sound is Energy

The music is a sequence of sounds and creates a vibration all around us since we are immersed in air and it transmits energy to our whole body.

Think for a moment at what you feel when you listen to some music using a headphone or maybe in front of an orchestra or a wall of speakers in a stadium for a rock performance of your favourite artist. Sound enable deep relaxation and a sense of peace and wellbeing, easing any tension that may have built up in the body and soothing any stress in the mind. 

On the market we have so many choices that we are overwhelmed so below my guide to  find the coolest speaker just right for your.

 As I love design and I always look for a way to get cables under control my choice is among wireless speakers. I’ll promise you to explain in another post more details about the high fidelity reproduction of the music and why the cables are magnets for dust!!

 But now let’s play around with the wireless speakers and the Bluetooth ones in particular. Bluetooth is a communication protocol to send data that nowadays is present in many electronic devices like TVs, mobiles, music players etc.
Another point very important to me that I look at is the size of the speakers and of course the design.
Why you don't push up your home to the next level choising a stylish Bluetooth Speaker, as Italian I can't forget the design of an accessories I love when form and function go together.

 Let the music give voice to your emotions and improve your mental wellbeing.

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Do not miss my post on Why you cannot miss to buy this budget bluetooth speaker

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