According to partners from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, 115 million people in the United States have experienced stress in the last year, and 1 out of 4 U.S. citizens say they have dealt with serious stress in the last month.
Stress is very common among college students. It gives students headaches and pimples. It makes them concerned about every move they make, about every exam they have to take, about every word that comes out of their mouths. Students try to get rid of this tension by doing yoga or by taking pills, but the best cure for stress is music.
Music has power. Music can be as complicated as math or as simple and clear as water. It can evoke 100 different feelings at once. Music has a unique connection with the human body.
A Tchaikovsky violin concert can help us leave our troubles behind, can help us breathe and think clearly as we try to figure how the combination of so many instruments can suddenly make our bodies feel relieved, our muscles relaxed and our brain clear.
A Mozart concert can transform anger into joyful tranquility, and metal music can make us more determined and help us work more quickly. An Ed Sheeran song can make us feel melancholic, and a Louis Armstrong song can help us appreciate every detail around us.
When music plays, so many different emotions and thoughts flow over us that there is no place left for stress. Every part of our body is so focused on the music that the stress and the bad sentiments within us are incinerated.
The irony of stress is that it makes us feel that we have so much to do, that listening to music could be perceived as a waste of time. Music helps us be more efficient by making us more focused.
We don’t realize it, but when a relationship we were fond of is over, we drown our sorrows in music, in particular songs that will make us feel better. Our sadness is balanced by the music, and there is a sense of relaxation in our body.
When we are in a party dancing, music is what makes everything not awkward. It gives boys the courage to talk to girls and ask them if they want to dance. Music excites people when they hear their favorite song at a party and start singing their lungs out.
When you have to write a 2,000-word paper and stress is dominating your body, listening to a classical composition will make your stress disappear. It will help you focus on the prompt, and your fingers will fly across the key board as the blank sheet in front of you is filled with words. Music just makes everything better.
Coping with stress is never fun. It is frustrating, it makes us tense, and it makes us lose an incredible amount of time. The best way of taking stress out of our daily routine is by listening to music. It doesn’t matter which genre or style. Any music that can transport our imagination from one place to another and make us feel good is the cure to our stress.