Music & Silence

If you are anything like me, when you get stressed, you start seeking information. Knowledge is power and there is perhaps no other time at which knowledge gathering feels more important than in moments of stress and crisis.

But don’t forget. That information seeking and consuming is activating. Our sympathetic nervous systems are usually in overdrive when we are absorbing and reacting to knowledge. So it can be very important to counterbalance that wordy, intellectual, cerebral influx with the wordless, often body-based experience of

MUSIC

and

SILENCE

During music perception, the auditory cortex plays a central role, processing the sound. Simultaneously, areas associated with emotional responses, like the amygdala, and memory, such as the hippocampus, become activated. [1]. If you have heard about the brain structures involved in the fight or flight response, the amygdala may sound familiar to you. It is the structure that is responsible for sensing danger and triggering the fight or flight response when someone experiences a stressful event. The amygdala is also responsible for processing emotions, especially fear, anxiety, and rage.  In fact, our natural response to music is so powerful that the “Mozart effect” was coined to describe the results of a 1993 study that looked at the impact listening to Mozart while studying had on a group of college students. Namely, after college students listened to a particular Mozart piano sonata for 10 minutes, they showed better spatial reasoning skills than they did after listening to relaxation instructions designed to lower blood pressure — or to nothing at all. [2] And their IQ scores jumped by 8 or 9 points — this is what became known as the Mozart effect. [2, 3] Perhaps even more astounding, there is growing evidence that listening to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K448) can improve symptoms in people with certain kinds of difficult-to-treat epilepsy (!!!).[4]

Music prevents stress-induced depression and anxiety-like behavior in mice. [5]. Human studies reflect this as well, and a meta-analysis (a type of study that looks at a large number of studies) showed that music therapy provides beneficial effects for people with depression and is also effective in decreasing anxiety levels and improving functioning of depressed individuals. [6]

Many of us have had the subjective experience of feeling more relaxed and at ease when we listen to music and may not need a long list of studies to convince us that music is an important, healing element in our lives. But, if you are still on the fence, consider one small but compelling study that looked at music interventions in ICU patients and found that they were effective in reducing anxiety and stress levels of people in a very high stress environment — being a patient in an ICU [7] What’s more, the stated clinical relevance of the study (i.e., how does this study translate into real life medicine) was that using music to reduce anxiety and stress levels may reduce the pharmacological need (for sedative or antipsychotic medications) and the risk of associated side effects in ICU patients. Please read that again:

Using music to reduce anxiety and stress levels may reduce the pharmacological need (for sedative or antipsychotic medications) and the risk of associated side effects in ICU patients.

The effect of music is so powerful that it may reduce how much medication people need for stress and anxiety management in the ICU. Sedatives and antipsychotics are incredibly powerful medications. Turns out — so is music. And music has no negative side effects, to boot!

Now…silence.

Stopping and sitting in silence has an immediate calming effect on the nervous system. Try this. Stop typing, start listening to the sounds around you, and start feeling the various things in your environment (the temperature of the air on your skin, the sensation of your clothes on your skin, the tickle on your upper lip from the air coming out of your nostrils). We will spend 15 seconds in silence. Close your eyes.

Welcome back. I bet you feel quite different from before our 15 seconds of silence (and presence).

Very interestingly, chronic stress can actually make us intolerant to loud noises, sometimes even being so severe that it meets the criteria for a debilitating condition called hyperacusis. [8]. Chronic stress literally causes our body to have a ravenous need for silence. Which makes sense, because silence is a very powerful antidote to stress. A 2006 study found that it was precisely during a short pause in music (i.e., silence), rather than during music, that the greatest evidence of relaxation was observed. [9]. Silence and stillness can also ground us into our bodies, allowing us to get calm and relaxed enough for inspiration to strike.

Often, we are surrounded by a truly incapacitating amount of information. Especially when we feel overwhelmed, music and stillness can be invaluable resources to help us restore our energy and our inner compass — and rebalance our nervous systems so that we can be responsive instead of reactive to our lives.

References:

1. Toader C, Tataru CP, Florian IA, Covache-Busuioc RA, Bratu BG, Glavan LA, Bordeianu A, Dumitrascu DI, Ciurea AV. Cognitive Crescendo: How Music Shapes the Brain's Structure and Function. Brain Sci. 2023 Sep 29;13(10):1390. doi: 10.3390/brainsci13101390. Erratum in: Brain Sci. 2024 Apr 09;14(4):365. doi: 10.3390/brainsci14040365. PMID: 37891759; PMCID: PMC10605363.

2. Rauscher FH, Shaw GL, Ky KN. Music and spatial task performance. Nature. 1993 Oct 14;365(6447):611. doi: 10.1038/365611a0. PMID: 8413624.

3. Jenkins JS. The Mozart effect. J R Soc Med. 2001 Apr;94(4):170-2. doi: 10.1177/014107680109400404. PMID: 11317617; PMCID: PMC1281386.

4. Quon, R.J., Casey, M.A., Camp, E.J. et al. Musical components important for the Mozart K448 effect in epilepsy. Sci Rep 11, 16490 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-95922-7

5. Fu Q, Qiu R, Chen L, Chen Y, Qi W, Cheng Y. Music prevents stress-induced depression and anxiety-like behavior in mice. Transl Psychiatry. 2023 Oct 12;13(1):317. doi: 10.1038/s41398-023-02606-z. PMID: 37828015; PMCID: PMC10570293.

6. Aalbers S, Fusar-Poli L, Freeman RE, Spreen M, Ket JC, Vink AC, Maratos A, Crawford M, Chen XJ, Gold C. Music therapy for depression. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2017 Nov 16;11(11):CD004517. doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD004517.pub3. PMID: 29144545; PMCID: PMC6486188.

7. Erbay Dalli Ö, Bozkurt C, Yildirim Y. The effectiveness of music interventions on stress response in intensive care patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis. J Clin Nurs. 2023 Jun;32(11-12):2827-2845. doi: 10.1111/jocn.16401. Epub 2022 Jun 6. PMID: 35668626.

8. Manohar S, Chen GD, Li L, Liu X, Salvi R. Chronic stress induced loudness hyperacusis, sound avoidance and auditory cortex hyperactivity. Hear Res. 2023 Apr;431:108726. doi: 10.1016/j.heares.2023.108726. Epub 2023 Mar 4. PMID: 36905854.

9. Bernardi L, Porta C, Sleight P. Cardiovascular, cerebrovascular, and respiratory changes induced by different types of music in musicians and non-musicians: the importance of silence. Heart. 2006 Apr;92(4):445-52. doi: 10.1136/hrt.2005.064600. Epub 2005 Sep 30. PMID: 16199412; PMCID: PMC1860846.