How Music Can Benefit Older Adults

If you’ve ever had a familiar song prompt a long-forgotten memory or felt your body relax while listening to a quiet, soothing piece, you already know how music can affect the human body. While the entire population can benefit from music, music offers certain important benefits to older adults in particular. From helping adults to better vocalize their emotions to creating social engagement opportunities through group music settings, there are countless ways that we can put music to work for older adults. 

The Brain Benefits of Music

Music can essentially keep older adults’ brains younger, longer. Even more, playing music has been shown to improve verbal skills, memory, literacy skills, and spatial reasoning in older adults. Playing music, even for short periods of time, can result in other long-term benefits for adults as well, such as increased resiliency to hearing impediments related to aging.

But older adults don’t have to be musicians to enjoy some of the benefits that music can have on the brain — simply listening to music provides a mental workout. Because music is mathematical and structural, and based on the relationships between different notes, brains have to work hard to understand music. As a result, music can increase creativity as a brain works to understand new sounds.

Familiar music can also help older adults to recall certain memories. An adult listening to a certain song might remember the time they traveled to an iconic musical place where they heard that same song played decades ago, for example. In this way, music can evoke both memories and emotions. Hearing familiar music can also help adults to remember activities and events that took place, like the time they danced to a favorite song at their wedding or the soundtrack they listened to while writing and creating art.

The Benefits of Music as a Group Activity

While adults can benefit from listening to certain songs that are meaningful to them, older adults can also benefit from music offered in a social setting, like a drum circle, group sing-a-long, or a spiritual or religious ceremony. These group settings can make music feel more accessible and can help adults and their caretakers to overcome some common challenges.

Some of the most common challenges in caring for the elderly include impaired communication and loss of memory. Because of this, older adults who are impaired need access to resources that empower them. Music as a group activity can help, giving even adults with impaired communication and memory the chance to engage with a group.

Drum circles, for instance, offer adults a chance to engage with others, providing valuable social interaction and relationship-building opportunities. The act of drumming is a good workout for the arms, core, obliques, and back, and can provide adults with physical activity and an engaging atmosphere. Adults also exercise mental awareness and concentration in listening to the instructor and performing movements, such as drumming with both hands. Drumming is also a relatively low-impact activity that both relieves stress and can leave participants feeling energized —  all of these effects allowing for improved caregiving and a better quality of life for older adults. 

How Music Helps Seniors Process Emotions 

Because music can help adults to process emotions, it’s also useful in overcoming some common challenges in counseling and therapy. Older adults often have a cultural or generational resistance to counseling, since they may have been taught that discussing their feelings or other concerns is a sign of weakness. In some cultures, discussing emotions and personal family matters is even entirely taboo. These backgrounds can make it difficult for counselors and therapists to engage with seniors and older adults.

Because of this, music can be used in both individual and group therapy situations, and can help to bridge resistance to traditional talk therapy. Music therapy can be used specifically to help people who have anxiety and depression, and can also help people to address past trauma. It’s also helpful for adults with Alzheimer’s and brain damage, since singing or listening to familiar songs can develop emotional awareness.

Music therapy is often used in conjunction with other therapies, and it can take on many forms. A senior might write a song about a difficult event in their lives, or might talk about the emotions they feel when listening to a certain song. Seniors may also improvise on instruments, sing songs from their childhood, and use music in other ways to connect with their emotions. With having a musical activity to focus on, therapy feels less like therapy and more like a music lesson or session. Plus, because so many people engage strongly with music, it can help therapists to engage with seniors who would be otherwise opposed to or reluctant to take part in traditional therapy. 

As musicians, we know how powerful music is, but listening to music does much more than stir up emotions and nostalgia. For older adults, music offers countless benefits that can improve their lives in many different ways.  

Courtesy of Indiana Lee.

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