There have been several studies conducted that have tested music’s effectiveness in reducing stress in high-anxiety situations. These studies are often performed on people who are undergoing medical treatments like surgery. Ever wonder why we sing babies and children lullabies before bedtime? It’s because it’s a great way to calm them down and put them in a state of relaxation where they’ll easier drift to sleep. But lullabies aren’t just for babies—they work for adults, too.
While the Mozart Effect doesn’t make you permanently smarter, it does make you more relaxed, and therefore able to tackle a task with confidence. The calming effect of classical music takes away any jitters or nervousness, and can help to decrease your heart rate and anxiety. The Mozart Effect relies on listening to classical music while performing a task, which helps to focus on the task at hand and improve memory retention. If you need something soothing to help you go off to sleep, listen to this relaxing music and let your body and mind relax.
Putting on some tunes can help you fall asleep faster, wake up less during the night, and feel more rested in the morning. Music can help sleepers of all ages, from toddlers through the elderly, at naptime and nighttime alike. The need for a non-pharmaceutical, low cost sleep aid within our modern society is clear due to the economic, physical and psychological costs of sleep loss, which are increasingly widespread. Many people endure inadequate sleep on a regular basis and whilst pharmaceutical and over-the-counter options can provide some relief, many are ineffective and can lead to short term and chronic health-related side effects. Music’s potential for successful use in therapeutic and clinical settings makes it a viable, low cost, side-effect free option in the treatment of sleep loss.
Music is an effective treatment for both short-term and chronic sleep disorders. The therapeutic effects of music on your sleep increase with time. This means, the more consistently you use music to help you sleep, the more effective it will be at aiding in your sleep efficiency. Research suggests that the beneficial effects of music for sleep and relaxation get stronger over time.
The results of this population survey suggest that many individuals are already intuitively using diverse types of music to fight sleep difficulties. With a growing body of evidence of successful music interventions in clinical populations, a potential therapeutic benefit exists for populations coping with transient insomnia due to life circumstances. Support for this claim has come from a recent Cochrane report that reviewed the music for sleep literature and concluded that the daily use of music, prior to sleep, was effective in improving overall sleep quality .
Our research questions were concerned with who is using music to help them sleep , what types of music they choose, and why people believe that music helps them to sleep. To gain further insight, each of the questions included a final option for an open text response. Participants were asked to fill in text boxes if they felt that they had a response that was not covered by the example statements or because they wanted to provide extra information relating to one or more of their responses. Data provided in these sections was collected for suitable analysis. If participants stated they had used music to help them sleep we gave them the opportunity to tell us what kind of music they chose.
The main reason people reported using music was as a tool to change one’s state of mind; whether to relax, focus or initiate a change in mood. This finding is in line with previous research which has suggested that music is used as part of everyday life to regulate mood or reduce arousal and anxiety . It has been suggested that the effects of music on anxiety are biological ; music’s effect on sleep could well be mediated by these biological effects, and the autonomic systems for anxiety and arousal in particular. If these complex chemical and neural systems are being recruited by the use of music, it is reasonable to suggest that the use of music over long periods of time may come with increasing or long-term benefits.
Lovely contemporary piano music with accompanying instruments and nature scenes. The links below each open relaxing musical selections in YouTube. Sleep apnea is a sleep disorder which is characterized by hypopnea.
