To me, roller coasters are terrifying yet exhilarating. What’s so scary is the initial ride up to the top before the first drop. Over the light conversations between passengers, I always heard the pounding clicks of the chain as it carried the cart up to what seemed to be a never-ending ride into the sky. But after the cart flew down the first drop it was all fun and games.
Without realizing it, I would "play" songs in my head at that beginning part of every roller coaster ride to try and calm my nerves. It was a way of distracting myself from that clicking noise that left my heart racing, that left me with that anxious feeling of not knowing how high up we were really going.
As it turns out, using music to calm feelings of stress and anxiety can be more powerful than anti-anxiety drugs. I discovered this from a study conducted by Daniel Levitin where patients who were about to undergo surgery would either listen to music or take anti-anxiety drugs to alleviate their anxiety. The patients would then have their cortisol — the stress hormone — levels checked along with rating how much anxiety they believed to have experienced.
At the end of the study, Levitin discovered that the patients who listened to music had less cortisol and thus less anxiety than the patients who took the drugs. Now that I know that using music to calm my anxiety is more than just something I used to do when riding roller coasters I’ve found myself using the technique outside of just amusement parks. This study also means that instead of using drugs that often have harmful side effects patients who substitute drugs with music will gain more than lower anxiety levels. They will experience “higher counts of cells that fight germs and bacteria” because “music is associated with immunoglobulin A,” which is an antibody associated with immunity, according to Levitin.
The act of ‘playing’ music in my head while on a roller coaster also worked because music is a great distraction. When listened to while exercising people are able to “drown out [their] brain’s cries of fatigue” as explained in the article “The Surprising Science Behind What Music Does To Our Brains.” This works because when the body gets tired it tells the brain to stop but if you’re listening to music it takes up more of your brain’s attention, meaning that it doesn’t hear the signals from your body and you can continue to exercise.
Now with this new information on how music can help alleviate your anxiety and distract your mind from pain, we can all improve our lives for the better.