What is it about?
Stress is part of everyday life, and many people listen to music to help them relax. But can listening to your favorite music before a stressful event help your body cope with stress? To explore this question, we asked volunteers to either listen to their own relaxing music or spend the same amount of time quietly reading before completing a laboratory stress task. During the study, participants wore a wrist-worn sensor that continuously measured changes in heart activity and skin conductance—two signals that reflect how the body responds to stress. They also completed questionnaires about how anxious they felt. We found that both music listening and quiet reading helped participants feel less anxious before the stressful task. However, the body's physiological response was slightly different. People who listened to their own relaxing music showed a smaller increase in one measure of stress-related nervous system activity, suggesting that music may help reduce the body's reaction to stress. At the same time, some heart rate measures changed differently in the reading group, indicating that both activities may support healthy stress responses, but through different physiological pathways. Because this was a small pilot study, the findings should be considered preliminary. More research with larger groups of participants is needed. Even so, our results suggest that spending just a few minutes listening to personally meaningful, relaxing music before a stressful event could be a simple and practical way to help prepare the body for stress.
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Why is it important?
Stress affects millions of people and is linked to a wide range of physical and mental health problems. Although many people use music to relax, there is still limited evidence about whether listening to music before a stressful event can help prepare the body for stress. This study is important because it compares self-selected relaxing music with another enjoyable activity—quiet reading—rather than with silence. This provides a more realistic comparison of two simple strategies that people might actually use in everyday life. We also combined self-reported anxiety with objective physiological measurements collected from a wearable wrist sensor, allowing us to examine not only how people feel but also how their bodies respond. Our findings suggest that both music and quiet reading can reduce feelings of anxiety before a stressful event, while music may produce a different pattern of physiological stress responses. Rather than showing that one strategy is clearly better than the other, the study highlights that different relaxing activities may support stress management in different ways. These findings contribute to a better understanding of how simple, accessible, and low-cost activities may help people prepare for stressful situations. They also demonstrate the value of wearable technology for studying stress and may help guide future research on personalized approaches to stress management and well-being.
Perspectives
Working on this study reinforced my appreciation for the complexity of the human stress response. Many people believe that listening to music always reduces stress, but our findings suggest that the answer is more nuanced. While both music and quiet reading helped participants feel less anxious before a stressful task, their physiological responses were not identical. This reminds us that stress cannot be understood through self-report or physiology alone—both perspectives are important. One aspect of this project that I particularly enjoyed was combining wearable sensing technology with behavioral science. Using wearable devices allowed us to observe subtle physiological changes that people may not consciously notice, highlighting the potential of wearable technology for understanding stress in everyday life. I hope this study encourages researchers to continue investigating simple, accessible, and personalized approaches to stress management. As wearable technologies become more common, I believe they will play an increasingly important role in helping us understand how everyday activities—such as listening to personally meaningful music—can support health and well-being. Although this was a pilot study, I hope it inspires larger studies that further explore how music and other everyday activities influence the body's response to stress.
Nooshin Taheri Chatrudi
Arizona State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Comparable physiological stress responses following music listening and quiet reading: An exploratory pilot study., International Journal of Stress Management, July 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/str0000408.
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