{"id":3614,"date":"2023-11-03T10:24:51","date_gmt":"2023-11-03T14:24:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dailycupofwellness\/?p=3614"},"modified":"2023-11-03T10:24:51","modified_gmt":"2023-11-03T14:24:51","slug":"new-study-finds-that-listening-to-your-favorite-songs-can-reduce-pain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dailycupofwellness\/2023\/11\/new-study-finds-that-listening-to-your-favorite-songs-can-reduce-pain.html","title":{"rendered":"New Study Finds That Listening to Your Favorite Songs Can Reduce Pain"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Grab your headphones: listening to your favorite music can ease your pain. A new study found that a patient\u2019s preferred music effectively eases discomfort without needing medication, enhancing an individual\u2019s ability to cope with physical pain. Recitals, songs, or performances that participants favored significantly outperformed generic clips of relaxing music in reducing comfort.<\/p>\n

Canadian researchers explain that hypoalgesia, a decreased sensitivity to pain, arises when there\u2019s an interruption to pain stimuli transmission from the point of entry to the brain\u2019s conscious recognition. The new study hoped to determine which music genres reduced pain perception most effectively. Darius Valevicius, a doctoral student at the Universit\u00e9 de Montr\u00e9al, said in a\u00a0media release<\/a>, \u201cIn our study, we show that favorite music chosen by study participants has a much larger effect on acute thermal pain reduction than unfamiliar relaxing music.\u201d<\/p>\n

Valevicius continued, \u201cWe also found that emotional responses play a very strong role in predicting whether music will have an effect on pain.\u201d In their experiment, participants felt\u00a0moderate thermal pain\u00a0on their inner forearm, akin to holding a warm teacup against the skin. This pain was then paired with music segments, each around seven minutes long, at the Roy Pain Lab at McGill University.<\/p>\n

Contrasted with generic music or silence, participants\u2019 favorite tunes substantially diminished both pain intensity and its associated unpleasantness. However, unfamiliar relaxing tracks did not yield the same results. Valevicius explains, \u201cIn addition, we used scrambled music, which mimics music in every way except its meaningful structure, and can therefore conclude that it is probably not just distraction or the presence of a sound stimulus that is causing the hypoalgesia.\u201d<\/p>\n