How to Use Music to Boost Motivation, Mood & Improve Learning

People that listen to a particular song that I'll describe in a moment experienced up to 65% reductions in their anxiety... with just 3 minutes of listening to this one particular song. And get this: That particular song was as effective in reducing anxiety as one of the most commonly prescribed benzodiazepines. So, what is this magical anxiety-reducing song. The title of the song is 'Weightless' by Marconi Union.

In other words, when people listen to music for a dedicated period of time each day of about 10-30 minutes... what one finds is that heart rate variability increases—not just during the period when they're listening to the music... but also heart rate variability is increased around the clock in those subjects, even during sleep.

So, for any of you that are suffering from lack of motivation, in particular to exercise, but believe it or not, also to do cognitive work where you're going to be still... listening to music for 10-15 minutes prior to doing that work, prior to doing that exercise, is one of the best ways to get motivated in order to engage in that work or engage in that exercise.

It's very clear that most people... perform best on cognitive tasks or tasks that require a lot of focus to perform—again, these are mental tasks, not physical tasks—when they are doing those tasks in complete silence.

In those studies, it was found that the white noise, brown noise, and 40-Hz binaural beats background produced better levels of focus—I should say, heightened levels of focus—and cognitive performance and learning than working in silence.

When one examines the various studies that looked at how long subjects need to listen to music in order to shift their mood into a happier state, the threshold seems to be 9 minutes. So, if you want to feel happier than you currently feel, it seems that listening to happy music for 9 minutes or more is going to be the effective approach.

These days, I use an older separate phone that doesn't have any text messaging or communication to the outside world, but it has music loaded into it, or onto it... so that I don't run the risk of getting distracted texting and doing things like that. I just want to focus on my physical exercise...

Listening to that music in between bouts of exertion, so in the rest between sets of resistance training, or periodically during, say, a run or a bout of cycling, can indeed enhance performance in a way that, at least by my read of the data, exceeds that which is observed when people just listen to music throughout.

When people who are feeling sad... listening to 13 minutes or more of sad music... has been shown to be effective in allowing people to quote 'process' their somber feelings and, to some extent, to move past their feelings of sadness.

When you deliberately inhale with a lot of vigor or you deliberately make your inhale longer than you naturally would... something very specific happens to your heart rate—it increases. Whereas when you deliberately exhale, meaning when you exhale and deliberately make that exhale longer or you deliberately add vigor to that exhale... you slow down your heart rate...

Hearing particular pieces of music, particular songs, more than any other experience, can activate a whole library of memory and emotions within us—and that's because of its ability to activate the parahippocampal regions of the brain, the cortex, and the hippocampus itself.

When we listen to music, we are more likely to move our body. And not just dance... but rather move our body from its current position to another position ... Music, despite being an auditory stimulus coming in through our ears, evokes the activation of neural circuits in our brain that creates a sort of inertia. It creates a propensity for action across our entire body.

People perform especially poorly relative to their performance in silence or any of the other conditions I mentioned when they listen to their favorite music while doing cognitive work.

We know, for instance, that when we read, we are creating a semantic narrative in our own head. And when we listen to music with lyrics, especially music with lyrics that we recognize, the semantic content of the song, the lyrics, competes with our comprehension of the narrative within our head from the material that we're supposed to be learning.

Listening to music while trying to do cognitive tasks can be detrimental toward learning that material. Turns out that if you listen to music in the breaks between trying to learn certain material, you can actually heighten your level of cognition and focus and your ability to learn.

When children, especially children younger than 8, learn to play an instrument—and even better, learn to play multiple instruments—regardless of whether or not they learn to read music, that it leads to greatly enhanced connectivity within their brain that persists into adulthood and that it facilitates other forms of neuroplasticity and learning.

The nerve cells, the neurons in your brain, as well as the nerve cells in your body, can become activated by music in a way that the... frequency of those neural impulses comes to match the frequency of the sounds that you're hearing in your outside environment. In other words, when you listen to music, not only is that music coming into your body... but your body itself is an instrument playing that music from within.

There is some evidence that listening to 40-Hz binaural beats can enhance concentration and focus. There are also data showing that other frequencies of binaural beats might be detrimental to concentration and cognitive performance.

We have a lot of scientific evidence to support the fact that music evolved prior to spoken language... and that music, singing, and dance together evolved prior to language—making music, as well as singing and dance but really just music, even on its own in the absence of any lyrics or any bodily movement, as the fundamental form of human communication.

Listening to music, relatively faster music, predisposes you to be more motivated to move.

The data are pretty clear: The data show that it's best to study and learn either in silence or with quiet instrumentals in the background.

Music that makes us 'happy' or tends to shift people's state from less happy to happy, regardless of how they enter the experiment, tends to be faster music—meaning music that, on average, contains 140-150 beats per minute or faster.

Learning how to play a musical instrument at any age as well as singing, and singing especially with others in a group, has been shown to enhance learning and the acquisition of new skills separate from musical learning and singing.

Whereas music can't describe nouns very well, it can beautifully describe emotions. And not only can music describe emotions with a tremendous degree of nuance; music can evoke emotions with a tremendous degree of nuance.