Resources For Well-Being

Music is Healing

I write about this because listening to the music you loved in your younger years can do more than just bring back memories—it can promote healing and rejuvenation as you age. Songs from the past, especially songs you listened to when you were in your physical prime (late teens and 20’s) can help your body reset the DNA codes back to where they were when you felt great. You “Youthen”.

Youthening

A study led by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, known as the “Counterclockwise Study,” demonstrated that immersing elderly individuals in an environment from their past had a powerful rejuvenating effect. In the experiment, men in their 70s and 80s were placed in a retreat designed to mimic the year 1959, a time when they were in their prime. The participants lived, dressed, and engaged with media as if it were two decades earlier. Remarkably, after just one week, the men exhibited verifiable improvements in memory, flexibility, dexterity, and appeared younger to outside observers.

What is Your Music?

What is the music of your youth? Your prime? For me going to college and on onto my first job in the late 60’s and early 70’s it’s the music I danced to like CCR, and BST, Chicago, Three Dog Night and more.

I invite you to go on Pandora, or itunes, or wherever you listen to music and pull up some of those old songs. Bath your mind and body in remembrance of when you felt really good, powerful, able to accomplish whatever you wanted. Allow yourself to “Youthen” down to your DNA by bathing your cells in the brain’s neurotransmitters.

Music releases Neurotransmitters and Hormones

Music associated with past happy events puts the brain in gear to release. Dopamine, the brain’s “feel good” neurotransmitter. Its release gives you feelings of pleasure, satisfaction and motivation. Dopamine also plays a role in controlling memory, mood, sleep, learning, concentration, movement and other body functions.

Other brain enzymes released include: Cortisol to regulate the stress response and lower stress; Serotonin to regulate your mood towards calm, steady, happy; and Oxytocin, boosting mood and social connections.

Dance to the Music

Find your music, turn up the volume and move your body (either sitting or dancing or both). If anyone asks, tell them the truth, you are getting healthier and younger one song at time!

A side note: As a physical therapist my specialty was geriatric rehab. My father made me a series of CD’s for each decade. Music from the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. I would play the time appropriate CD while the patients learned to stand and walk and move again. Most of the time these patients “danced” as their bodies’ remembered the music and loosened up, allowing them to regain motion they had lost. It really works!