The Many Health Benefits of Learning to Play a Musical Instrument
Learning to play a musical instrument improves your health in so many different ways! Even just listening to music is a healthy habit, albeit not quite as effective as playing music. Here at Olenka School of Music, we’ve compiled a list of recent research to let you know the many different way that music can affect your health, because many people don’t realize that playing music truly is a whole-body and brain fitness work-out!
Just LISTENING to Music Offers Health Benefits
Music decreases pain. It’s true! According to research here from Brunel University in the UK just listening to music has been proven to decrease pain and anxiety if over 7,000 patients, across 72 trials, resulting in less pain medication for those patients. Scientists have replicated these results with patients suffering from everything from fibromyalgia to a spectrum of cancers. Across a whole myriad of chronic pain conditions, the same results persist: listening (just listening!) to music successfully reduces pain. For this reason, music has opened a whole new field, in its ability to manage pain.
Music not only alleviates symptoms of depression and anxiety, but music actually makes you happier. According to research here from McGill University in Canada, listening to music actually increases the brain’s dopamine production, a chemical that enhances mood. Whether you are suffering from anxiety or depression, or just looking for a safe way to lift your mood, music may be more critical to you feeling good, than you realize. Try it!
Music provides physical health benefits to both infants and the elderly. Whether walking, eating or sleeping is your challenge- have you tried listening to music as a remedy? Maybe you should! Studies here have discovered that music is now being used as a therapy to successfully improve premature infants’ sleeping and eating patterns, and it’s been proven to reduce rigidity and tremors, as well as increase walking speed and number of steps in Parkinson’s patients.
Music even increases physical endurance during work-outs! Want to burn extra calories? Turn on the music while you work-out! The science is here! It truly will help you go longer, further! And for anybody who’s been listening to podcasts during their work-outs, switch it up for music!
Music helps you pay attention. According to Mitzi Baker at Stanford University, “researchers caught glimpses of the brain in action using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, which gives a dynamic image showing which parts of the brain are working during a given activity. The goal of this study [here] was to look at how the brain sorts out events, but the research also revealed that musical techniques used by composers 200 years ago help the brain organize incoming information.” In other words, researchers found music helps compartmentalize chunks of information, helping with memory function, but also with focus. So for those of you studying ANYTHING right now, or simply trying to focus in a world filled with distractions - turn up the volume and focus!
Playing (Actively) A Musical Instrument Offers Even Healthier Benefits
Playing a musical instrument changes the structure and function of the brain. Gottfried Schlaug, MD and PhD from Harvard Medical School, says here “listening to and making music is not only an auditory experience, but it is a multi-sensory and motor experience. Making music over a long period of time can change brain function and brain structure.” Specifically, playing a musical instrument can increase the ability to process information and create more connections, ultimately increasing communication between parts of the brain. Schlaug says these changes are more beneficial if undertaken before age seven, but beneficial at any age, nonetheless.
Perhaps this explains the plethora of research correlating children’s music education with academic success. In just one study, here, students at one socio-economically challenged primary school raised math, reading and writing test scores simply by increasing the time spent on music education. The results were the same, regardless of financial, cultural and educational backgrounds. They are currently considered one of the top 10% nationally for pupil progress in reading, writing and maths.
Playing a musical instrument AT ANY POINT OF YOUR LIFE improves cognition, in your golden years! Research here find that older adults with any musical education (whether exposed as children or at any point in adulthood), perform better on cognitive tests than individuals who had never studied music. "Musical activity throughout life may serve as a challenging cognitive exercise, making your brain fitter and more capable of accommodating the challenges of aging" researcher Brenda Hanna-Pladdy, a neurologist at the Emory University School of Medicine, said. "Since studying an instrument requires years of practice and learning, it may create alternate connections in the brain that could compensate for cognitive declines as we get older.”
And while learning to play an instrument at any point provides life-long benefits to the brain, taking music lessons at age 60 or older, can improve memory and cognition, as evidenced here. “People who started to play piano between the ages of 60-85 notes that after six months, those who had received piano lessons showed more robust fans in memory, verbal fluency, the speed at which they processed information, planning ability and other cognitive functions, as compared with those who had not received lessons.”
Truly, the benefits of learning to play a musical instrument are too immense to publish in one small blog. But you get the point: music is really really really healthy for your body and brain. Learning to play an instrument is GREAT for the physical well being of your body! So don’t waste one more moment. Find your music classes now at Olenka School of Music! Start your music education adventure and open your world to fun, creativity, and perhaps best of all - brain and body fitness!
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All of our music classes and private music lessons at Olenka School of Music in Maryland are currently online, which means they are accessible anywhere in the United States. We offer beginner and all levels of guitar, voice, piano classes, and private lessons on nearly all musical instruments, for children and adults. We also offer creative songwriting, and Music Together® classes (think: “baby & me” style) for the 1-36 month olds and adults who love them!