Music is medicine!

Music is medicine and one we can prescribe to ourselves 🧠🎶❤️

This fascinating study proposes that we use music for different reasons at different stages of our lives. With this knowledge, therapists and educators could use music in more effective ways. Here is the impact statement, let’s break it down.

“The younger participants listened to music to engage in reminiscence, to gain a feeling of personal space, and to give personal meaning to life events. Through impacts on their emotional state and social connections, music supplied entertainment and security.”

This finding about the younger participants (18-30 years old) makes a lot of sense. Music of our time is not so much about the decade we formed our first identity in, but about the ideas that it was ours, and it was literally the “soundtrack of our lives/selves”.

“Older adults indicated that music listening results in strong emotional experiences and transcendent feelings, allowing them to move outside of their daily lives. Ultimately, music listening in this group enhanced personal growth and meaning, which is known to be more important in later life.”

This finding for the older participants (60-85 years old) sees a switch from grounding ourselves and our identity with music to transcending or moving beyond our identity through music. When we are forming our identity between 18-30 years we need grounding, when we are moving beyond reforming our identity, we need to fly.

“The researchers suggest that these findings may help to promote age-appropriate music interventions to enhance wellbeing throughout the lifespan.”

Isn’t music amazing? And it is amazing that we as humans, created this art form that helps us learn language when are very young, form our identity when we are adults and helps us fly beyond our world when we are older.

What musical medicine do you need today?