Lifestyle adjustments like exercising, meditation, and changing diets can benefit our physical and mental health. However, did you know that listening to jazz music can also positively impact our physical and mental health?
Benefits of Listening to Jazz Music
1. Cognitive Benefits
According to brain-music connection researchers at Johns Hopkins, few things stimulate our brains as well as music does. Listening to or playing jazz music can affect our brain waves, leading to stimulation that results in numerous cognitive benefits.
How our brain processes jazz music allows it to improve our mood, memory, mental alertness, and sleep quality. For example, jazz can activate the delta waves in our brain to induce better sleep, alpha waves to reduce anxiety and relieve stress, and theta waves to enhance creativity.
Jazz music also helps boost your verbal abilities, memory retention, and mood, whereas listening to slow music, including slow jazz, can reduce your chances of developing depression by around 25 percent. Ultimately, jazz music is excellent for your cognitive or mental well-being.
2. Supplementary Cardiac Benefits
Various music genres and types, like smooth jazz and classical music, are known to lower blood pressure in our bodies, especially for at-risk adults over 50. These health benefits have been observed because listening to jazz music can expand our blood vessels by up to 30 percent.
Healthy blood vessels help reduce the chances of serious cardiac issues like torn blood vessels, heart attacks, strokes, etc. Of course, music therapy or listening to jazz music alone is not a comprehensive solution or treatment for cardiac issues. Still, it can be an excellent supplement for ongoing medical treatment.
3. Possible Pain Relief
Just like jazz music can help your brain reduce anxiety, relieve stress, and enhance your mood, it can also help it resist feelings of chronic or acute pain. Of course, medical treatment and prescription drugs, according to your doctor’s recommendation, are the most important. Still, jazz music can help reduce the experience of pain by elevating our mood and reducing stress.
Apart from chronic pains, jazz music can help your mind and body reduce the pain from occurrences and events like childbirth, post-operative pain, headaches, migraines, and recovery from strokes. While not everyone will feel the immediate or complete pain relief benefits of listening to jazz music, it can be a great pain relief supplement for some people, particularly people over the age of 50.
If you are suffering from daily chronic or acute pain, it won’t harm you to listen to some soothing jazz music, if only to see if it helps you with pain relief.
4. Creativity Boost
For musicians and artists, a great benefit of playing or listening to jazz music is that it can help boost their creativity and help them unlock new levels of creative thinking. Considering all the cognitive benefits of listening to jazz music, it is highly likely that the genre is an enabler for creativity in all other genres of music.
Not only can it inspire artists and their music, but it can also allow them to think about or perceive their music and genre in new, creative ways. Renowned jazz musician John Coltrane famously said that music “can change the thinking of people.”
While he may have said it metaphorically, there is some truth to this quote, and we believe it is particularly so for genres like jazz music.
Final Words
Jazz music can improve our cognitive functions and physical health, unlock our creative potential, and reduce stress and pain. It is no wonder that so many doctors worldwide are supporting music therapy to promote health, happiness, and relaxation among patients, especially older adults.
Of course, music therapy or listening to jazz music alone is not a comprehensive treatment for cognitive, cardiac, anxiety, or pain. Still, it is perhaps the simplest supplement for these issues. We highly recommend you consult your doctor about music therapy, its benefits, and how it may help you even if you do not have chronic or serious medical issues.
