Music as a coping strategy

Music as a coping strategy involves the use of music (either through listening or playing music) in order to reduce many of the psychological and physical manifestations of stress, as well as stress itself. The use of music to cope with stress is an example of an emotion-focused, adaptive coping strategy in that it is typically geared towards the reduction or elimination of perceived feelings that arise in response to stress, rather than the stressor itself. In essence, advocates of this therapy claim that the use of music helps to lower perceived stress levels in patients, as well as lower more biologically measurable quantities such as the levels of epinephrine and cortisol. Additionally, music therapy programs have been repeatedly demonstrated to reduce depression and anxiety symptoms in the long term.

In the context of psychology, a coping strategy is any technique or practice designed to reduce or manage the negative effects associated with stress. While stress is known to be a natural biological response, biologists and psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated that stress in excess can lead to negative effects on one's physical and psychological well-being. Therefore, the need for a way to cope with and reduce the unhealthy qualities of stress is apparent.

While there are hundreds of different coping strategies, the use of music is one specific example of a coping strategy that is used to combat the negative effects of stress. Because of the substantially large number of strategies to choose from, psychologists break down these coping strategies into three types:

Because music-based coping is designed to modify an individual's emotional reactions to or perceptions of a certain event, it is best classified as an emotion-based coping strategy. Rather than attempting to directly influence or eliminate a particular stressor, music-based coping instead relies on influencing an individual's emotional and mental reaction to the stressor - by either reducing the physiological effects of the stress response, or directly mitigating the emotional response one has to stress.

Psychologists and medical practitioners recently have focused more time and attention on the concept of music as a coping strategy and the effects of its use on patients. In the literature on music and stress, empirical findings are typically grouped together according to the method in which they are gathered. There are two main methods of gathering data that yield the empirical findings discussed below. Studies of this treatment type have been looked at from a purely psychological perspective (based on patient responses to survey questions), as well as a more physiological perspective (often making use of more invasive methods of study). Despite the fact that different methods are used, most of these studies demonstrate that different types of music are associated with different effects on the mood of the depressed/stressed individual.

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