How Classical Music Helps You Study
Not everyone thinks that music makes it easier to study. So, what’s up? Does it work or not? How it can be useful? Music isn’t quite that powerful, though. It helps mostly in indirect ways, but those ways are still very important.
It makes you feel better and reduces stress.
Music doesn’t just motivate you. It can also help you feel less stressed and have a better attitude. Research shows that, in general, being happy makes it easier to learn. When you’re feeling good, you’re more likely to be able to study and learn new things.
Studying can be stressful when you don’t fully understand what you’re studying. If you’re feeling stressed out or upset, putting on some music can help you calm down and get more done.
It can get you going.
If you’ve ever had to do a lot of homework on a long, tiring night, you may have lost motivation to study long before you were done. You might have promised yourself a reward, like the latest episode of a show you like or your favorite takeout food, if you wanted to study.
New research from 2019 shows that music can make the same parts of your brain light up as when you do other things you enjoy. Getting your favorite music as a reward can give you the drive you need to learn something new.
If you like music that isn’t good for studying (more on that below), listening to your favorite songs during study breaks could push you to work harder.
It can help you concentrate.
Your brain breaks up all the information it gets from the world around you into smaller pieces so it can understand it. The researchers found evidence that music can keep your brain busy in a way that trains it to pay more attention to what’s going on around you and guess what might happen next.
You can also link reasoning skills to being able to make better guesses about what will happen. When it’s time for an exam, having better reasoning skills won’t help you pull answers out of thin air. But based on the information you do have, you might notice a difference in how well you can reason your way to these answers.
It could help you remember new things.
A study from 2014 found that older people who listened to classical music seemed to do better on memory and processing tasks. Based on these results, it seems that some kinds of music can help improve memory and other brain functions.
Music can wake up your brain in the same way that exercise can wake up your body. Isn’t it true that the more you work out your muscles, the stronger they get? In the same way, giving your brain a mental workout could help it get stronger.