Using Music To Improve Your Health
Most people like or even love music but few know how it actually affects their health. Listening to music have many positive effects on both body and mind, and can even ease physical pain.
Music has been used in various ways by many ancient medicine men and shamans to aid in healing their patients. For this and many other reasons - scientists have been interested in music s effect for a long time.
Music has been proved to have several positive effects on your health, mainly due to its relaxing effect on your body. Music can help your body not to produce a stress hormone called cortisol. Cortisol causes your body to be "on guard", not letting it relax enough to heal and mend. Less cortisol also means lower blood pressure and better sleep, setting off a positive spiral on your stress syndromes.
In experiments with music during surgery and wake up, patients listening to music during and after their surgery, was in fact not in as much pain as the patients without music. The research in this area is new, and these results are not statistically proven in any way, but the implications are very interesting and positive.
Despite angry parents warnings about loud music and its effect on your studying, music can help you concentrate. Even though loud music can be bad for your hearing, the effect it has on concentration is all good. The ability to filter out background noise helps, but more important is the rhythmic beat, activating both sides of the brain.
Simplified: Music makes you smarter
A very common misconception about hard and fast music is that can t be relaxing. As most people feel their pulse go up if the BPM is high enough, they assume it s the same for everyone. This, how ever, is not the case. Tests made with people used to loud and fast music showed that their bodies reacted in a similar way to fast music as "ordinary people" react to soothing music. Lowered heart rate and blood pressure as well as lower levels of cortisol were common among the subjects of this test. The same effects as slow, relaxing music has on the rest of us.
Music is widely used for exercise. The beat and sometimes aggressiveness of the music is very helpful when exercising. It is no coincidence most gyms have music; this is well known to have a good effect on physical activities.
Just as music can help you give all when exercising, it can help you post exercise as well. Listening to soothing music after a work out will help your body to relax and begin the healing. After a hard work out your muscles need their rest, the sooner the better. Putting on a good CD in the car on the way home can make this process go much faster.
No matter how you use music, make you are listening to as much music as possible. The effects on your health are all good, making this a very easy way to stay healthy.
By: Robb Stark
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Robb is writing about staying healthy with the help of music. He is running his blog about living healthy, and was inspired by reviewing music affiliate programs.
