What Kind of Music Offers the Most Psychological Benefits?

What Kind of Music Offers the Most Psychological Benefits?

Research finds that certain songs can bolster optimism, self-esteem, self-continuity, and social connectedness.

“Music is a potent source of nostalgia,” wrote the authors of a 2022 study published in the journal Psychology of Music. And nostalgia, they said, “acts as a buffer against noxious stimuli . . . with positive consequences for psychological well-being.”

One of the most pronounced (and maybe surprising) of these positive consequences is an enhanced sense of social connectedness.

Most of us have songs that remind us of our best friends. Even if you can’t be with those people, listening to those songs can make you feel close to them again.

Some researchers have called music an “esthetic surrogate” for social interaction. It can strengthen and re-affirm connections you feel toward other people. Partly due to this enhanced feeling of connectedness, music-evoked nostalgia also “elevates self-esteem, instills a sense of youthfulness, and augments optimism and inspiration,” wrote the authors of that 2022 Psychology of Music review.

Likewise, nostalgic music can also reconnect you with yourself.

Like a great theme song that ties together different parts of a film, listening to old hits from the soundtrack of your life can help you get back in touch with yourself in a way the promotes a sense of heightened “self-continuity,” which music researchers describe as “a sense of temporal connection between one’s past and one’s present.” Put another way, nostalgic music can act as an identity clarifier.

One study found that when people read lyrics from songs that made them feel nostalgic, they were more likely to endorse statements like “I feel connected with who I was” and “I feel that important aspects of my personality remain the same across time.”

Why music does so much for us is a mystery. But it’s clear that music occupies a special and sacred place in the architecture of the human mind.

Studies on people with dementia have found that listening to music from their pasts can help them access memories or autobiographical details that, absent music, they are unable to retrieve. Imaging research has also revealed that the areas of the brain that house music-encoded memories are often spared from the ravages of dementia. Like treasured heirlooms, our musical memories are hidden away in our mind’s deepest, best-protected places.

It may not be true for everyone. But for a lot of us, it seems the music we’ve loved and connected with during our lifetime helps form the solid core of our identity. Listening to it is like stepping into a portal that takes us not only back in time, but back to ourselves.

You probably already know which tracks are your strongest nostalgia triggers. But if you’re wondering what to play, research has found that music from your youth — and specifically from your late teens — is often the most likely to induce nostalgia. Even older adults in their 70s and 80s show this nostalgic bias toward songs from their teenage years.

Some social scientists have argued that humans may have sung before they spoke, and that musicality is one of the fundamental traits of our species. Reconnecting with music that has meaning for you seems to do all sorts of good for your mind, and maybe also for your spirit.

Excerpted from Markham Heid