Illustration: Kieran Blakey

The Nuance

Music Can Get Us Through This

Why a good tune is so good at relieving stress, anxiety, sadness, and other negative emotional states

Elemental
Published in
6 min readSep 10, 2020

--

Surgical operations tend to be stressful experiences, and that stress can cause problems.

“The outcome of a surgery is very much predicted by the state a patient is in right before the operation — their emotional and physical state,” says Daniel Levitin, PhD, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Canada and author of, among other books, This Is Your Brain on Music.

Anxiousness can elevate a person’s heart rate and blood pressure in ways that slow wound healing, delay recovery, and increase the risk of infection. Heavy pre-op jitters can also interfere with the onset of surgical anesthesia. “So those preoperative minutes are crucial to the long-term success of the operation,” Levitin says.

To counteract these risks, doctors often give their patients a mild sedative such as Valium — something to settle the heart and nerves. But for a 2009 study, a team at Södertälje Hospital in Sweden took a different tack: Instead of administering a drug, they had patients listen to relaxing music for roughly 20 to 40 minutes before going under the knife. (The patients could choose from several genres of music, such as…

--

--

Elemental

I’m a frequent contributor at TIME, the New York Times, and other media orgs. I write mostly about health and science. I like long walks and the Grateful Dead.