Listening to music helps reduce anxiety symptoms

Anxiety disorders have become a real epidemic of our time. And although medications or cognitive behavioral therapy are effective, they often have side effects, are expensive, or require a long wait for admission. Digital sound therapy is becoming a promising field, offering quick help.

Experts from the University of Toronto Metropolitan decided to test whether music enhanced by auditory stimulation technology (ABS) can really help patients. ABS is a method that uses binaural rhythms in the theta range to change brain activity.

The authors of the project selected 144 volunteers with moderate anxiety levels. It is important to note that all participants had already taken medication, but still experienced symptoms of anxiety. They were divided into four groups. The first group listened to pink noise for 24 minutes (the control group), and the rest listened to special ABS music for 12, 24, or 36 minutes.

Before and after the sessions, people underwent standardized tests to assess mood and stress levels. This approach allowed us to assess the effect of sound on the mental state of the participants based on their responses. Data analysis revealed a clear pattern. Those who listened to rhythmically stimulated music felt much calmer than those who listened to just noise. They had reduced both physical manifestations of anxiety and obsessive negative thoughts.

The study compared sessions lasting 12, 24, and 36 minutes. There was no statistically significant difference in the effectiveness of anxiety reduction between these three groups, but all of them showed an improvement in their condition compared to the control group. The 24-minute group showed numerically better results than the 36-minute group, which may indicate the effect of saturation or fatigue. At the same time, a 36-minute session was statistically more effective than a 12-minute session to reduce negative affect (depressed mood). Professor Frank Russo notes that the perfect balance has been found: this is enough time to rebuild the state of the nervous system, but the procedure does not take too much time, which makes it easy to fit it into the daily schedule.