How Your Music Affects Your Emotions and Actions

With everyone's Spotify wrapped and Apple music replay coming out around this time of year, it got many wondering if the music they listen to affects them and if their personalities might have changed along with their taste in music!

Many people don't know this, but music can affect your emotions in a very real and diverse way. This has ever been shown throughout history. Whether it be a happy song that raises one's dopamine levels to match the song, or a sombre song lowering a person's happiness as they relate to the song.

There's a reason music affects emotions at such a basic level, like making you happy, or sad. Music simply affects how our brain perceives how alone we are in a situation. Happy music makes your brain believe you're not alone and you make it through the situation. While sad or sorrowful music isolates you from the people around you while listening to it.

Even so, you might be asking if music affects permanent personality traits or even health versus spur-of-the-moment emotions. Though no long studies have been done on the effects, music can lead you to take on longform personality quirks. There have been many different studies on the effect music has on your health, some of which might have been in your very own classroom.

Music affecting your health has been a widespread theory since humans learned to strum a string, whether it be scientists or Anti-Vax nutjobs. People have long thought that music might be more than just a way for humans to pass the time. They believed this so much so that many classrooms in the USA and Canada started to test the experiment to see if the theory had backing. Soon enough, it became a member of the science curriculum for students.

During these studies people found out that music can reduce anxiety, blood pressure, and pain as well as improve sleep quality, mood, mental alertness, and memory. Getting all these benefits just from listening to your favourite song right before bed? Sounds like a sweet deal to me?

So next time you're in science class, remember that music is more than a distraction if you just let it be. Always remember to keep your eyes to the road and the ears to the pavement.

Till' next time Howe Sound!