Why Music is Like Drugs & How to Use it to Impact Your Emotions
A deeper look into music’s influence on mood.
Creativity / /
That music impacts your emotion is not news. But what was once aural conjecture is now approaching the scientifically-sound—“experts
in behavioral endocrinology and neuroendocrinology have found that
musical stimulation (listening) affects various biochemical substance[s].”
As you probably know, chemicals play large role in your mood—specifically, the chemical messengers in the brain called neurotransmitters. These chemicals guide our behavior; fluctuations in neurotransmitters, such as serotonin, signal essential desires like hunger and sleep, and more abstract sensations, e.g. happiness and sadness. Music, like drugs, can alter our mental chemistry—the same basic mechanism that makes you feel buzzed post-espresso is what makes you bob your head to the beat.
In fact, these changes in “biochemical substances” may account for the bate of success in so-called music therapy, which is an effective treatment for conditions as varied as Alzheimer’s, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and depression.
Chemicals & Circumstance: The Biology of “Dope Beats”
In an essay titled “Drugs That Shape Men’s Minds,” Aldous Huxley wrote, with respect to improving one’s self, that there are “two methods available—the educational and the biochemical. We can take adults and children as they are and give them a much better training than we are giving them now. Or, by appropriate biochemical methods, we can transform them into superior individuals.”
In other words, your mood is the product of two things: circumstance and chemicals.
While we know that putting yourself in front of a upbeat live band on a Friday will lend to a good time, to what extent does music chemically improve mood?
According to Nature, “music, an abstract stimulus, can arouse feelings of euphoria…which [may] help to explain why music is of such high value across all human societies.” Moreover, the key to that sense of euphoria is indeed chemical—the same article explains that “that intense pleasure in response to music can lead to dopamine release.” Dopamine is an often-discussed neurotransmitter, as it’s usually associated with neural reward (realized as pleasurable feelings) and the accordant building of habits.
The specific interaction with dopamine is as follows: when a listener enjoys a song, this neurotransmitter binds to a brain region called the Nucleus accumbens (hereafter NAc). This dopamine-NAc binding is also associated with “[engagement in] sexual activity, intake of drugs, eating of chocolate and drinking water when dehydrated.”
In addition to its effect on dopamine, music-listening is also associated with an increase in electrical activity in the left frontal lobe of the brain. There’s some correlation between depression and lower electrical activity in this part of the neuro-anatomy, and most neuroscientists (and cognitive scientists, et al.) suspect that there is some causality at play.
Alright—but when you’re really feeling a song? Like you pop in your ear-buds, throw on a track, and it puts you in the zone? It literally gives you “chills” or “shivers down the spine”? When this happens, you experience changes in heart rate, respiration, and blood flows to “brain regions thought to be involved in reward/motivation, emotion, and arousal…brain structures [which] are known to be active in response to other euphoria-inducing stimuli, such as food, sex, and drugs of abuse.”
The Extent to Which Music Changes Mood is a Matter of Taste
One interesting common thread throughout musically-induced shifts is that those synaptic, electrical snap-crackles are highly dependent on a single variable across many studies: your taste. Yes, music is like drugs, in that it can positively change the electro-chemical landscape of your mind. But that only happens if you’re into said sounds.
One study found that changes in serotonin, the other feel-good neurotransmitter—which is upped by sex and sleep, MDMA and Prozac, etc.—is totally dependent on the extent to which the subjects reported enjoying the music. As one might suspect, those who reported disliking what they listened to were found to have lower levels of serotonin than those who reported liking it, and vice versa.
With this in mind, perhaps a more precise claim would be: music that resonates with you has the potential to improve your sense of emotional well-being.
So how can you apply this phenomenon practically?
Dr. Ariane Dahleim, a research psychologist at the University of Sydney, said that music can definitely be therapeutic. In her own work, she finds music to be useful in “arousal reduction,” where arousal basically means “you are in a ‘heated’ state of mind and not thinking clearly. Errors in thinking are one of the biggest obstacles in mental health…from jumping-to-conclusions, to negative generalizations—nobody likes me; I’ll never be successful—and so on. We teach people to slow down their thinking and detect those errors.”
Pick Music that Matches the Mood You’re After—Not the One You’re In
Most of us tend to listen to sad songs when we’re sad, and happy songs when we’re happy. You don’t throw on Morrissey when you’re stoked. Or if you do, maybe you shouldn’t—as it happens, sad music can actually make you feel sad, and the opposite is also true. That being said, it’s pretty difficult to bump an overwhelmingly upbeat track when you’re glum. When you’re feeling gloomy, sunny stuff tends to bum you out even more. (For a severe illustration of this point, consider that suicide rates are actually highest in the spring and early summer, and not in the winter as most people suspect; when you’re consciousness is darkly-clouded and stormy, a bright and sunny world only makes you feel more isolated and alienated from your surroundings.)
While it’s harder to stomach a happy song when we’re unhappy, it’s worthwhile to try and find something you can stand, to ease yourself into it. Instead of turning your mood upside down, constructive a narrative like you would for a mix-tape. Listen to one sad song—fine, it’ll level you out. Then slowly select things that are more upbeat.
Dr. Dalheim agreed, and said that “having a playlist handy may be a smart, quick way to slow down and take a breath before you act upon a situation, which leads to better behavior.” She also adds that “music can elicit memories that may pull you out of a bad mood before it spirals into something disruptive.”
Furthermore, studies suggest efforts to harness music and re-shape your mood are worthwhile. A recent example monitored patients’ levels of arousal after heart surgery, and explored the extent to which music might alleviate any stress. The results found that those who listened to music after surgery were less likely to develop complications than those who did not.
Listening to music also makes it easier to work out. At least one study found that listening to music actually does hype you up, and subjects workout more intensely and longer with it than they do without. This can prove a vital boon to one’s mental health, considering the role exercise plays in the reduction of stress and anxiety.
In mitigating depression, alleviating stress, and in raising our spirits, we find music at the ultimate juncture between the educational and the chemical. By learning to listen better, we can begin to feel better, too.
As you probably know, chemicals play large role in your mood—specifically, the chemical messengers in the brain called neurotransmitters. These chemicals guide our behavior; fluctuations in neurotransmitters, such as serotonin, signal essential desires like hunger and sleep, and more abstract sensations, e.g. happiness and sadness. Music, like drugs, can alter our mental chemistry—the same basic mechanism that makes you feel buzzed post-espresso is what makes you bob your head to the beat.
In fact, these changes in “biochemical substances” may account for the bate of success in so-called music therapy, which is an effective treatment for conditions as varied as Alzheimer’s, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and depression.
Chemicals & Circumstance: The Biology of “Dope Beats”
In an essay titled “Drugs That Shape Men’s Minds,” Aldous Huxley wrote, with respect to improving one’s self, that there are “two methods available—the educational and the biochemical. We can take adults and children as they are and give them a much better training than we are giving them now. Or, by appropriate biochemical methods, we can transform them into superior individuals.”
In other words, your mood is the product of two things: circumstance and chemicals.
While we know that putting yourself in front of a upbeat live band on a Friday will lend to a good time, to what extent does music chemically improve mood?
According to Nature, “music, an abstract stimulus, can arouse feelings of euphoria…which [may] help to explain why music is of such high value across all human societies.” Moreover, the key to that sense of euphoria is indeed chemical—the same article explains that “that intense pleasure in response to music can lead to dopamine release.” Dopamine is an often-discussed neurotransmitter, as it’s usually associated with neural reward (realized as pleasurable feelings) and the accordant building of habits.
The specific interaction with dopamine is as follows: when a listener enjoys a song, this neurotransmitter binds to a brain region called the Nucleus accumbens (hereafter NAc). This dopamine-NAc binding is also associated with “[engagement in] sexual activity, intake of drugs, eating of chocolate and drinking water when dehydrated.”
In addition to its effect on dopamine, music-listening is also associated with an increase in electrical activity in the left frontal lobe of the brain. There’s some correlation between depression and lower electrical activity in this part of the neuro-anatomy, and most neuroscientists (and cognitive scientists, et al.) suspect that there is some causality at play.
Alright—but when you’re really feeling a song? Like you pop in your ear-buds, throw on a track, and it puts you in the zone? It literally gives you “chills” or “shivers down the spine”? When this happens, you experience changes in heart rate, respiration, and blood flows to “brain regions thought to be involved in reward/motivation, emotion, and arousal…brain structures [which] are known to be active in response to other euphoria-inducing stimuli, such as food, sex, and drugs of abuse.”
The Extent to Which Music Changes Mood is a Matter of Taste
One interesting common thread throughout musically-induced shifts is that those synaptic, electrical snap-crackles are highly dependent on a single variable across many studies: your taste. Yes, music is like drugs, in that it can positively change the electro-chemical landscape of your mind. But that only happens if you’re into said sounds.
One study found that changes in serotonin, the other feel-good neurotransmitter—which is upped by sex and sleep, MDMA and Prozac, etc.—is totally dependent on the extent to which the subjects reported enjoying the music. As one might suspect, those who reported disliking what they listened to were found to have lower levels of serotonin than those who reported liking it, and vice versa.
With this in mind, perhaps a more precise claim would be: music that resonates with you has the potential to improve your sense of emotional well-being.
So how can you apply this phenomenon practically?
Dr. Ariane Dahleim, a research psychologist at the University of Sydney, said that music can definitely be therapeutic. In her own work, she finds music to be useful in “arousal reduction,” where arousal basically means “you are in a ‘heated’ state of mind and not thinking clearly. Errors in thinking are one of the biggest obstacles in mental health…from jumping-to-conclusions, to negative generalizations—nobody likes me; I’ll never be successful—and so on. We teach people to slow down their thinking and detect those errors.”
Pick Music that Matches the Mood You’re After—Not the One You’re In
Most of us tend to listen to sad songs when we’re sad, and happy songs when we’re happy. You don’t throw on Morrissey when you’re stoked. Or if you do, maybe you shouldn’t—as it happens, sad music can actually make you feel sad, and the opposite is also true. That being said, it’s pretty difficult to bump an overwhelmingly upbeat track when you’re glum. When you’re feeling gloomy, sunny stuff tends to bum you out even more. (For a severe illustration of this point, consider that suicide rates are actually highest in the spring and early summer, and not in the winter as most people suspect; when you’re consciousness is darkly-clouded and stormy, a bright and sunny world only makes you feel more isolated and alienated from your surroundings.)
While it’s harder to stomach a happy song when we’re unhappy, it’s worthwhile to try and find something you can stand, to ease yourself into it. Instead of turning your mood upside down, constructive a narrative like you would for a mix-tape. Listen to one sad song—fine, it’ll level you out. Then slowly select things that are more upbeat.
Dr. Dalheim agreed, and said that “having a playlist handy may be a smart, quick way to slow down and take a breath before you act upon a situation, which leads to better behavior.” She also adds that “music can elicit memories that may pull you out of a bad mood before it spirals into something disruptive.”
Furthermore, studies suggest efforts to harness music and re-shape your mood are worthwhile. A recent example monitored patients’ levels of arousal after heart surgery, and explored the extent to which music might alleviate any stress. The results found that those who listened to music after surgery were less likely to develop complications than those who did not.
Listening to music also makes it easier to work out. At least one study found that listening to music actually does hype you up, and subjects workout more intensely and longer with it than they do without. This can prove a vital boon to one’s mental health, considering the role exercise plays in the reduction of stress and anxiety.
In mitigating depression, alleviating stress, and in raising our spirits, we find music at the ultimate juncture between the educational and the chemical. By learning to listen better, we can begin to feel better, too.
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