Your favorite music can minimize physical pain, according to a 2025 study on how music can bring solace and address pain.

Music that builds to a crescendo and then resolves relieves stress more than listening to nature sounds

What to listen to if you want to focus

Have you ever put your headphones in, turned on your favorite playlist, and tuned out the rest of the world? That’s the power of music. It can improve your mood, reduce stress, and enhance focus. But what kind of music is best when working or studying? Check out this list for some suggestions.

Can music alter your memories?

You’re familiar with music’s ability to transport you to a past experience, but new research suggests that music can even alter how you remember your past experiences. A team of psychology researchers and music experts recently published a study that demonstrates how music can help shift our emotional recollection of a memory. Read to learn more about the study’s findings and how it could influence therapy practices.

Learn about the point of the physical and emotional experience of pain, which has three broad categories that help determine treatment approaches.

Researchers have investigated the benefits of extreme pain rituals, exploring how and why we engage in these events when humans generally naturally avoid pain and perceive it as a negative experience.

Over 28% of US adults use yoga for pain management.

50 years of research has focused on unraveling the relationship between music and frisson

One insight reveals that musical passages with surprising volume changes or unexpected harmonies and beauty are more likely to trigger frisson, perhaps because they upend listeners' expectations.

Skull bone marrow may be playing a key role in chronic pain.

Inside the rise of focus music

Any casual YouTube or Spotify user has likely stumbled upon a playlist called "lo-fi beats to study and relax to" while searching for new music. Those "lo-fi beats" actually represent a growing genre of music called "focus music." Spotify, for instance. saw a 50% increase in listening time for focus playlists in its 2023 Wrapped report. This article explains why productivity tunes are on an upswing right now. Read it here.

Theories vary on why we love to eat spicy food—even when it hurts.

Nine different studies exploring animals' relationship to music

Researchers have conducted multiple studies attempting to answer a certain question: do animals like human music? Across species, they observed different results and no clear pattern. Primates appear to prefer silence, and cockatoos appear to dance to funky beats.

Playing music enhances the creation, storage, and retrieval of memories

Scans of the brains of individuals who play instruments have shown enhanced connectivity between multiple brain regions—visual, auditory, and motor cortices—and the corpus callosum, which connects the two brain hemispheres. These complex connections are strengthened through practice and then used in other activities that involve both logic and creativity. The brains of musicians also appear to give experiences multiple types of memory tags, such as audio, emotional, and conceptual, improving their processing.

Explore the biology of pain and why the experience of pain may differ widely from one person to another.

Music may give some of us the chills and goose bumps—perhaps because it shocks us

The science is still unsettled about why music can trigger a chill down your spine, formally known as frisson, but one theory is that anything surprising to the nervous system—including sudden beat drops or unexpected harmonies—stimulates a type of alarm response that gives rise to this feeling.

Why the human brain loves opioids

When opioids enter the brain, they dock in receptors, blocking electrical pulses such as those that communicate pain. They also trigger the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter tied to motivation and associated with stress relief.

Some sounds that have been shown to affect mood and noise have been given color names, such as brown, pink, and green noise, corresponding their frequencies to those of light.

Why grocery stores play music while you shop

Grocery stores don't play music just for the good vibes. Store soundtracks have been proven to increase spending and improve customer experiences, especially if the music is upbeat. If the tunes are nostalgic for the stores' key demographics, it can help develop a store’s desired brand identity. This article from Reader's Digest details the many reasons behind this strategy.

Opioids mimic naturally produced endorphins to dull pain.

'Bibliotherapy' is of increasing interest as a way to improve mental health and help navigate complex life situations—with people immersing themselves in the experiences of fictional characters or nonfiction and self-help books to find relief and gain personal insights.

The subjectivity of pain means that one person's kidney stones may be another's childbirth, but most sources of pain do have objective, underlying causes.

Overuse of opioids can lead to hypersensitivity to pain.

Musicians are 57% more likely to have tinnitus compared to the general public

Musicians have four times the risk of developing hearing loss, and their risk of developing tinnitus is increased by more than half.

An overview of modern clinical research on LSD

Researchers have determined that LSD, taken in a medical setting, decreases anxiety related to "life-threatening disease," reduces brain reactivity to fearful faces, increases the meaning and emotional response derived from music, and more. No complications of LSD administration have been observed in medical settings, though acute adverse effects, including exhaustion, nausea, and difficulty concentrating.

Phantom limb pain may often match the pain or contortion of the injury that led to the limb loss.

Touch helps newborns regulate stress, gain weight, and feel less pain

Conclusions from this 2024 analysis from a team of Danish researchers included that touch interventions were particularly useful for newborns in regulating cortisol levels, helping newborns gain weight, and reducing pain. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

The belief that classical music enhances intelligence is mostly incorrect

"The Mozart Effect" was based on a 1993 study by psychologist Francis Rauscher. Rauscher played a Mozart Piano Sonata for college students and then assessed their spatial reasoning, finding it improved for 10 to 15 minutes. The media ran with a simpler story: listening to classical music made you smarter.

The brains of people who experience frisson have unique neural pathways

A small 2016 study aimed to investigate the behavioral and neural differences between 10 individuals who experience goose bumps when listening to music and 10 who typically don’t. Scientists reported that individuals experiencing musical chills had greater white matter connectivity in specific auditory, emotional, and social processing areas of the brain.

High-powered red light therapy—delivered directly to nerve fibers via a fiber optic needle—has been used in recent experimental research to suppress pain.

Opioids are a class of drugs including fentanyl, heroin, oxycodone, and more.

Study shows singing to babies improves their well-being

In a study of 110 parents and their babies across a span of four months, singing boosted infant mood and reduced fussiness. Follow-up studies are aimed at exploring whether singing can alleviate caregiver stress and postpartum depression.

How we frame stress—as good or bad—seems to alter how it affects us

This podcast discusses research that indicates stress perception may drastically affect how we respond to it. In research exploring if our stress is presented as diminishing our health versus if we're told it enhances our performance, it will lead to differences in how successful participants are at performing tasks—with the enhancers doing better.

An ear doctor with hearing loss seeks to help those with hearing loss enjoy music

Alex Chern, an ear doctor who has hearing loss himself, dreams of restoring the ability to experience "all the richness and the beauty of the sound of music" for patients—not just functional hearing. Hearing aids amplify sound waves and aren't designed to work well with music that may have varied pitch and volume. Chern is studying how hearing loss and engaging with music may affect cognitive decline.

A psychiatrist warns that chasing happiness can lead to misery

Rafa Euba, a retired consultant psychiatrist, argues that happiness is a vague and abstract concept that is hard to quantify. He suggests accepting that suffering and pain are a normal part of life. An attainable goal for one's life is to attempt to minimize pain, and pursue balance and contentment rather than a false ideal of permanent bliss.

Notch music therapy may filter out some tinnitus frequencies

Researchers in Germany have developed a smartphone app-based therapy for individuals with tinnitus associated with hearing loss. Some people with tinnitus can use this Notch app with their hearing aids to at least partially block sound frequencies matching their tinnitus pitch—turning down the volume of their tinnitus.

The history of music explained in 8 minutes

Traditional music history focuses on composers and sees music as an object. Historian Michael Spitzer focuses on music's role in everyday activity and sees it not as an object, but an activity. This brief history illuminates the fundamental role music plays in human culture, and sounds a hopeful not for music in the internet age.

Psychedelic side effects, including worsening mental health for some patients, give pause

This article explores whether the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drug use is really as good as current research suggests. Scientists are exploring its applications for conditions ranging from the existential crisis that can accompany terminal diagnoses to chronic mental health conditions, including anxiety and PTSD.

Certain medications can make tinnitus worse

Certain antidepressants, antimalarial medications, antibiotics, ibuprofen, and cancer drugs have been linked with the condition. At higher doses, particularly, it seems they can trigger or worsen tinnitus in some individuals.

Some claim breathwork can improve mental health, help process trauma, and more

Research shows people who practice breathing exercises see a decrease in depression and stress levels, and that such exercises are about as effective at treating PTSD as conventional approaches. Even something as simple as extending exhales can slow one's heart rate and activate the parasympathetic nervous system.

One classical musician arranged a work specifically for yoga

In the middle of a yoga class, Ellen Fishman noticed that sitting closer to a speaker allowed her to feel the music in her body, enhancing her overall experience. She arranged music for a string ensemble with a yoga session in mind. The group, StringFlo, now performs the work live in yoga classes.

Scientists are learning to guide your dreams using sound and touch.

A famous philosophical question asks would you opt for a life with no pain—but without reality.

Finding delight through your five senses

Digging into your immediate senses is shown to benefit your overall psychological well-being, from the happy memories evoked by familiar scents or through the transformative power of birdsong. This episode from the Science of Happiness podcast highlights insights from Gretchen Rubin, an author who has written books on the importance of engaging your senses for a happy life.

Eight ways literature can make us happier

Novels are often characterized as a form of cultural escape, but psychologists argue there are health benefits to the many elements comprising fiction. The Greek philosopher Aristotle explored this in his "Poetics," asking if literature was something meant to make us happier. This article highlights eight different innovations common to literature that provide psychological benefits, including the plot twist and more.

Listen to an amputee describe what it was like in the aftermath of his partial foot amputation and how his chronic, extreme pain fueled his depression and his decision to attempt to alleviate the pain with the radical surgery.

Doctors are prescribing social activities—and seeing good results

Physicians, especially in the UK, are asking patients what they enjoy and then prescribing a consistent regimen of doing that type of activity to improve fitness and overall health, including community exercise classes, volunteering, and spending time in nature. This approach may provide better incentives to stick with an activity.

Can microdosing improve mental health?

Animal studies involving microdoses of psilocybin, the psychoactive component in magic mushrooms and ketamine, found it helped to alleviate anxiety and inflammation, an immune response that can cause damage when chronically active. Human studies are ongoing. In at least one double-blind study, where researchers and patients don't know who got a placebo versus the real thing, about half of the participants incorrectly guessed they had been given placebos.

Doctors ignored women's pain as a nurse replaced their fentanyl with saline

This five-part podcast series, produced by Serial Productions, focuses on the experiences of women undergoing fertility treatments at a Yale clinic where a nurse secretly replaced pain medication with saline solution. This led to women experiencing excruciating pain during procedures, but the clinic downplayed or ignored their complaints.

Just a 10-minute mental health break can yield benefits

The US CDC offers recommendations for alleviating stress in daily life. Short 10-minute breaks can significantly improve mental health, especially when used for activities like deep breathing, dancing, or writing down things you are grateful for. Building meaningful relationships, termed "social connectedness," can also alleviate stress and promote resilience.

Ludwig van Beethoven suffered from tinnitus

Historical figures that reportedly had the condition include Charles Darwin and Beethoven. Both men wrote letters about the frustrations and pain they experienced from the condition. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

People with tinnitus should avoid silence—sound-rich environments distract the brain

This podcast from an audiologist discusses common questions about tinnitus. It notes that tinnitus could be described as a phantom sound associated with hyperactivity in the brain. It's linked with loud sound exposures above 85 decibels, hearing loss associated with aging and stress, among other factors.