How and When is Music Good for Who’s Mental Health?

To say that music can be therapeutic is a truism. We get this from folk wisdom, pop culture stereotypes, and normative human experiences (my post-breakup song is You Don’t Know What Love is, how about you?). It’s a pretty uncontroversial idea. Nonetheless, a recently published study adds scientific weight to this notion, finding that making or listening to music can benefit aspects of quality of life (most notably, mental health). The authors flag some important questions that their study raises, though. How do we develop an empirical understanding of this effect (i.e., through which specific processes might music improve mental health)? How do we account for large variations in how individuals engage with music? These questions matter, if we want to harness the power of music to help enrich peoples’ lives when they struggle with periods of mental ill health.

Each time we engage with music, whether making music ourselves or listening to other peoples’ music, we do so in a specific context. And that context matters. A distinction between passive and active engagement with music may help illustrate this point. In some contexts, passive engagement with music can be helpful (e.g., blasting Rage Against the Machine during a weight training session). This is an example of music as a facilitator (i.e., synergistically improving wellbeing via it’s influence on your workout). In other contexts, the effect of passive engagement is less clear (e.g., playing ambient music to help relax while checking emails, scrolling social media, scanning news headlines etc.). In any case, passive engagement with music may have an indirect influence on our mental health. It may be that in order to experience the direct mental health benefits, we need to be fully immersed in music. I’ve half-listened to the Teskey Brothers Hold Me in the car while trying to convince my children not to destroy each other on the morning school run. I’ve listened to the same song at a live concert amidst a sea of people clapping in unison. I’ll let you decide which experience was passive and which one was active; which barely registered as musical, and which was so immersive as to be spiritual (something like going to church for believers in music).

A key difference between active and passive engagement – whether we are fully immersed in music, or only half listening – is the way in which we allocate attention. Mindfulness, the practice of purposefully and non-judgementally paying full attention to some aspect/s of the present moment, is implicated in this process. Interestingly, the above-mentioned study found no significant differences in impact on mental health between listening to music and practicing mindfulness meditation. One can’t help but wonder what the impact on mental health may be when we combine the two: if we purposefully and non-judgementally pay full attention to a piece of music. This would be consistent with the wisdom that John Coltrane is said to have shared with his cousin Mary (yes, that one) about how to listen to music. Coltrane reportedly advised her to listen to a record all the way through while taking in the full range of sounds. He suggested that she then continue listening to the entire record as many times as there are instruments being played – so that she could isolate and focus on each instrument, one-at-a-time, all the way through. In other words, pay mindful attention to Giant Steps (which is infinitely cooler than following your breath – with all due respect to Jon Kabat-Zinn).

Another contextual factor that may influence music’s impact on our mental health is the above-mentioned variation – i.e., individual differences – in how we experience music. One difference is whether we engage with music for business, or pleasure, or both. For professional musicians, the benefits to wellbeing which music can provide may be undermined by the psychological distress of working in the music industry. On the one hand, creating music on a full-time basis can be a deeply meaningful experience, replete with flow states that improve one’s quality of life. On the other, a career that requires relentless promotion and monetization of yourself and your creations in an often adversarial workplace might make you sick. Some musicians may need support to maximise the creative and therapeutic gifts of music while minimising the sometimes-harmful effects of maintaining a professional music identity. How might we offer that support? From a sociocultural and industrial perspective, as Gross and Musgrave (and others) have suggested, we could start addressing unhealthy norms within the music industry. There is also an increasing awareness that musicians may need help with the psychological preparedness that the music industry evidently requires.

As an ex-performer/songwriter turned clinical psychologist, I’m interested in both understanding musicians’ inner experiences and providing some kind of intervention where it’s helpful to do so. In therapy, musicians may choose to work on amplifying mindful immersion in the tangible act/s of creating and listening to music – harnessing the above-mentioned wisdom of John Coltrane. They may also choose to do some self-concept work – de-emphasising identification with a narrow sense of self that is limited to music industry roles. However, as the authors of the earlier-mentioned study note, “The mechanisms of music’s impact on health are complex and specific to distinct settings, suggesting that targeted study is required to determine optimal music intervention characteristics in each setting.” Accordingly, we need more clinical research to figure out how best to help professional musicians absorb the mental health benefits of music while avoiding the mental health costs of the music industry. Any such research program needs to have the needs and preferences of professional musicians themselves at its core.