You wouldn’t agree less that music is one of the beautiful gifts to humanity. Its worth cannot be measured in gold. Imagine a world without music!
What’s more – the impact of music is also noticeable in the medical world. It has been adapted to serve therapeutic purposes to ailing persons. This makes music more impressive and less dispensable.
Now let’s consider the effects of falling asleep while listening to your favorite song on your mental and physical health.
Music: how it affects your mind and body
Music triggers the release of hormones, boosts the brain’s emotional and cognitive points, stimulates your immune system, and influences your mind and psyche. Such hormones like serotonin are boosted when you listen to pleasant vibes (this hormone kinda makes you happy or relaxed). Also, music activates our brain causing us to be creative and logical simultaneously (this is not true for everyone though).
Interestingly too, music could trigger the hippocampus in the brain causing you to go down memory lane especially when a song that reinforces such memory in you is listened to. It ignites that nostalgic feeling in you bringing back different memories from childhood to adulthood experiences.
Concerning sleep, several studies have confirmed that when listening to calm music, slows down your breathing and heart rate, stimulates your muscles to relax, and reduces your blood pressure. These rapid changes account for why you drift off while listening.
The benefit of listening to music while you sleep include the following
Impacts on mood and relieves stress
How well you sleep at night largely depends on your emotional state. That is, your mood can impair upon a good night’s rest. This is why some people depend on sleep pills to override this emotional vulnerability. For those suffering from anxiety, depression, or insomnia, it’s even a different ball game entirely.
However, music has been largely instrumental in relieving stress and altering our emotional state of mind. Research has shown that listening to your favorite song before bed helps relieve your stress and mood disorders. This is why musical therapy is largely used at medical centers to treat sleeping disorders in patients.
Music boosts sleep efficiency
Not getting enough sleep (for instance, waking up at intervals during a sleep session or waking up too early without being able to go back to sleep) can be tiring. However, research has shown that listening to music (especially meditative music or Yoga music) before bedtime, can help you sleep soundly throughout the night. Even, it is a case that ‘the more you make use of songs to sleep, the more effective your sleep would become.
Active for treating pains
Listening to music before or during sleep time is highly effective for relieving acute and chronic pains (even those pains that are as severe as Fibromyalgia). Even research conducted on pain levels after surgery confirmed this. The study found out that those patients who listened to music were less dependent on pain pills, unlike the other patients who didn’t listen to music during and after their surgery sessions.
It should be pointed out that this experience is not general to everyone. Of course, what makes me sleep might not make you sleep. The point here is, we acknowledge the relativity of music to inducing sleep based on individual experience. For instance, for some people, they have to listen to serene music, while to some others; such music would only reinforce some nostalgic memories in them – causing them to brood.
The flip sides
It is not arguable that music is good for your health. However, when wrongly done could pose serious health implication to your health. Consider the following
Sleeping with earphones or earbuds in the ear
Apart from the physical discomfort, you can get from sleeping with an earbud stuck to your ears, some more grievous health risks could be lurking at the corner for you. You could contract necrosis which is the death of the ear tissues due to lack of blood flow in the ears induced by the earbuds. Also, your ability to hear well could be impaired due to wax that could build up in your ears owing to the pressure-induced upon
What about strangulation? Yes, you risk strangling yourself to death (this is peculiar to corded earphones). They could end up been wrapped around your neck. Even if there’s a call to safety, like an emergency (say fire for instance), you might not be aware
