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Do people who use music to relax recover faster from stress?

Song Y, Mewes R, Skoluda N, et al. · Frontiers in psychology · 2023

Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC

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.

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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)

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Key findings

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).

Methodology

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.

Limitations

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.

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