Mental Health Starts with Listening

By Kenny Baldwin

When was the last time you considered how sound might impact your health?  Most of us only think about sound pollution when there’s a jackhammer outside our bedroom window, but it turns out what you listen to all day can affect your wellness. And since music is the most complex sound system you encounter in daily life, it may be worth pausing to consider what the next song on your playlist may do to your health. 

My research team at Genote discovered just how true this was when we were running some tests with premature infants in a neonatal intensive care unit. The sounds premature babies hear can cause stress or even cause pain because their ears are very sensitive. We wanted to see if we could use music to help them cope with stress, anxiety and development issues that come from living out of the womb too early.

Music is made up of hundreds of different components, such as melody, harmony and rhythm. Songs combine these elements to produce certain styles and emotions. But these musical elements also trigger reactions from the mind and body. After studying these interactions for more than twenty years, our team learned how to produce music that targets specific health goals.

We used a program of our specially prepared music to help the babies sleep better and to relax when they showed signs of discomfort—which worked almost immediately. In some cases, this improvement had significant health improvements for the babies, such as restoring oxygen levels in the blood.

After seeing how music could improve health in premature infants, we wanted to know if we could improve the lives of other groups of people. So, we partnered with a special education school that worked with young, blind students. We were hoping to help them improve focus, sleep, relationships and decrease anxiety through music.

By applying a special music-listening program at home and school, we saw improvement in nearly all the areas we were studying, including the students’ ability to focus, relax and sleep deeply and consistently. One student’s mother told us that the music made her son more playful and she could tell he slept more deeply and woke up in a happy mood, setting the tone for a positive day for learning.

Using Sound to Promote Mental Health

The biggest takeaway from these studies is the impact our sound environment has on our emotional well being. Unfortunately, negative sound pollution can also have a significant detrimental impact on mental health, such as increasing stress, anxiety and even blood pressure. Many studies also link certain types of music to negative emotional conditions like depression.

The sounds around you right now are influencing the state of your mental health. If you’re interested in seeing how your sound environment is affecting you, experiment with the following:

1. Keep a sound journal. At the end of each day, write down all the sounds you remember hearing. See if you can identify how any given sound affected you and make a note. Make a note describing how you felt that day.

2. Experiment with music. In your sound journal, pay close attention to what music you listen to and the effect of any given song or genre.

3. Make adjustments. Try to add more of the sounds that bring a positive change to your day and avoid the sounds that cause stress or anxiety.

4. Re-evaluate. After a week, evaluate how your experiment went and assess how your mood changed because of the changes you implemented.

My dream is for people everywhere to become more aware of how sound, and especially music, can be a measurable, impactful tool for healthy living. By better harnessing the power of music to improve mental health and stability, we have a powerful tool at our disposal that we can use before considering more invasive means of correction. A careful approach to music can change the game for mental health. It just starts with listening.