Do people who use music to relax recover faster from stress?
Young adults who often listen to music to relax did not recover from a stressful public-speaking task any faster than those who rarely do, on either self-reported or hormonal measures.
Source
How is music listening purpose related to stress recovery? - two preliminary studies in men and women
Study at a glance
- Design
- Other — Secondary analysis of two lab stress studies: participants grouped by self-reported frequency of listening to music to relax (low vs high), all given the Trier Social Stress Test with nine repeated measurements; no music was played
- N
- N=48 · 27 women in Study 1 and 21 men in Study 2 (5 low-frequency and 16 high-frequency listeners in Study 2); Study 1 group sizes are not given in the available text
- Population
- Healthy young adults (women in Study 1, men in Study 2) in Vienna, Austria, under restrictive inclusion criteria
- Outcome
- Subjective stress (visual analogue scale), salivary cortisol and salivary alpha-amylase across stress and 60-minute recovery; chronic stress (PSS, SSCS)
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
In two separate studies, 27 young women and 21 young men were split into low- and high-frequency groups based on how often they said they listen to music in order to relax. Everyone then went through the Trier Social Stress Test, a mock job interview and mental arithmetic in front of evaluators, followed by an hour of quiet rest with no music. Subjective stress and saliva samples (for cortisol and alpha-amylase) were taken nine times across the session, and chronic stress was measured with questionnaires.
What they found
The stress test worked: subjective stress, cortisol and alpha-amylase all rose and then fell back over the recovery period. However, in neither study did the two groups differ in how their stress measures changed over time or in their overall levels. On chronic stress, men who often used music to relax reported higher recent stress on the Perceived Stress Scale (r = 0.60), whereas women showed a non-significant trend the other way (p = 0.07).
The limits
What it doesn't show
The samples were very small and unbalanced (in Study 2 only 5 men were in the low-frequency group), so the studies had little power to detect modest differences; the authors call them preliminary. It was a secondary analysis of data collected for other purposes, and nobody actually listened to music during recovery, so it says nothing about whether playing music after stress helps. Groups were formed from a single self-report item, no one reported never using music to relax, and participants were young adults under strict inclusion criteria. The methods section for Study 1 is missing from the available text, so its grouping details could not be checked.
Key terms
- Trier Social Stress Test (TSST)
- A standard lab procedure that induces acute psychosocial stress through a mock job interview and mental arithmetic in front of an evaluating panel.
- Salivary cortisol
- A hormone measured in saliva that reflects activity of the HPA axis, the body's slower endocrine stress system.
- Salivary alpha-amylase
- A saliva enzyme used as a marker of the fast sympathetic (autonomic) stress response.
- Stress recovery
- How quickly subjective and physiological stress measures return to baseline after a stressor ends.
- Perceived Stress Scale (PSS)
- A questionnaire measuring how stressful people found their lives over roughly the past month.
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Quiz yourself
What was the main finding about habitual music use for relaxation and stress recovery?
Common questions
Does this mean music does not help with stress?
No. Nobody listened to music in this study. It only tested whether a habit of using music to relax is linked to better recovery when music is not available, and found no link.
Why did cortisol take longer to return to baseline than alpha-amylase?
Alpha-amylase reflects the fast autonomic response, which peaked at the end of the test and settled within minutes, while cortisol comes from the slower hormonal HPA axis, which peaked later and stayed raised for longer.
Why might men who use music to relax report more chronic stress?
One possibility the authors raise is that more stressed people seek out music as a coping tool, but with such small samples this needs testing in larger groups before it is taken seriously.
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