Shreya Giria is a practising counsellor from Bengaluru and a certified expressive arts therapist who has extensive experience working in schools, colleges, and corporates.
She believes in the efficacy of music on the mind and has personally witnessed the positive role music can play in personality development as well as self-care and preservation.
A soothing tune at a time of stress or anxiety, or an upbeat rhythm when one is low, is known to alter the mind-state and elevate consciousness, and in turn human functionality as well. The role of music in boosting motivation finds its roots in the nature of sound.
How Music Impacts Trauma Victims
There are several causes that could lead one to experience trauma, but few surpass sexual abuse and domestic violence. In such cases, the victim may have had to endure years of abuse in silence and that is where trauma-informed therapists like Anindita Kundu play a vital role.
It is not easy for a person who has endured abuse to open up, which is why professionals like Kundu create an environment where the victim feels safe and can express personal experiences, thoughts, and feelings.
When music is used as therapy, the simple act of singing, humming, or chanting can help activate the Vagus nerve. The role of the Vagus nerve is to activate the ‘rest and restore’ response in the body and the brain and lower the ‘fight or flight’ (stress) response.
Many of the distressing symptoms of trauma are felt acutely by the body, such as tightness in the chest and a sinking feeling in the stomach.
Yoga, physiotherapy, meditation, deep breathing, listening to calming and relaxing music, singing, chanting, humming and so on help stimulate one’s parasympathetic nervous system’s Vagus nerve to kick in the health benefits of relaxation.
Kundu is also dealing with patients who are undergoing chronic pain due to disorders like endometriosis (characterised by pain in the pelvic region) and fibromyalgia (musculoskeletal pain). She uses a specific genre of music to help alleviate the symptoms of emotional and physical pain.
A 2014 study shows that music eases pain by triggering the release of opioids — the body’s natural pain relievers.
Classical Music For Good Health
Nithya Rajendran is a certified Indian music therapist. She believes that in India there is immense potential for creating a scientifically-backed structured approach to using Indian Classical Music for therapy; if that is done, the field has the scope to eventually match the reach and acceptability of Western Classical Music therapy.
In her years of practicing music, Rajendran has come to believe that Indian classical music is constituted of sound energies of the ‘divine creative force’. In that lies its therapeutic potential.
In a study called the “Mozart Effect” — carried out by Dr Gordon Shaw, a physicist at the University of California, Irvine, and others — listening to music boosted cognitive function in general and spatial-temporal reasoning in particular. The test concluded that listening to Mozart helped improve test scores.
Music also plays an important role in sports because tuning in increases reaction speed. Studies have shown that listening to calming music before a competition can reduce anxiety and calm the frazzled nerves that athletes experience.
Virender Sehwag, the former swashbuckling opening batsman for Team India, has many times spoken of how he would sing songs while batting to help him relax. One of his triple centuries is, in fact, attributed to the power of a song.
Oliver Sacks spent over 40 years studying the human brain and neurological disorders. In his book Musicophilia, neurologist Dr Sacks makes some startling revelations about the connection between music and the human brain.
As this review of the work correctly describes, Sacks “explains that there is no single musical center in the brain, but rather 20 to 30 networks spread throughout every region that analyse different components of music, from pitch to melody.
“That’s why a symphony that moves some people to tears is perceived by others as the cacophonous clattering of pots and pans, a condition known as amusia.”
Sacks also tells of people haunted by musical hallucinations, in which they hear a set of tunes, or even full-fledged choirs inside their head, a phenomenon one patient describes as his ‘intracranial jukebox’.
Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears — it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more — it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.
In other words, the link between sound and health was something that those who lived before us knew about and strove to make it a part of our life so that we could lead healthy and fulfilled lives.
The impact of music on health is understated. That it operates in the background in all the good – and not so good – times in our lives is known, but its healing capacity must be acknowledged.
Source:https://swarajyamag.com/culture/the-sound-of-healing-how-music-is-being-used-to-impact-the-health-of-our-society