Listening To Music Perks Up Your Brain Just Like Exercise Does

When mental fatigue hits at the end of a long day, your usual tasks suddenly become so much harder and it feels like you can’t think clearly. A cup of coffee often helps to clear the brain fog for a few hours, but according to a new study there may be another simple solution for people who are avoiding caffeine: brief exercise or listening to music. 

Using exercise to clear your mind is a well-known trick. If you go for a walk during your break you’ll probably feel more refreshed afterwards than if you were sitting at your desk. But in a recent study published in the journal Neuroscience, researchers from the Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté in Nice, France,  found that listening to your favourite music has a very similar effect. 

They recruited 37 volunteers and asked them to carry out a series of tasks. First they had to rapidly touch a series of targets on a screen, then they carried out a cognitively demanding task for half an hour. Some participants then took a break by carrying out 15 minutes of physical activity by cycling on an exercise bike, while others listened to their music of choice for 15 minutes. After that, they carried out a final task by rapidly pointing at touch targets on screen again. In between these tasks, they took questionnaires to assess how mentally fatigued they felt. In a control experiment without exercise or music, people still reported feeling less mentally fatigued after they took a 20-minute break, but they didn’t perform as well on their last pointing task as they did on the first. Even though they didn’t feel tired, they weren’t as alert as before. On the other hand, the group that exercised and the group that listened to music both did better on that final task than the people who only took a break, which suggested that both exercise and listening to music reduced their mental fatigue. 

This was a very small study, with only about a dozen people in each group, so there was a lot of variation between individuals. Even though they all arrived well-rested at the start of the experiment, some felt much more mentally fatigued than others throughout the test. That makes it difficult to draw any big conclusions from this study, but it does seem to match up with some other studies. For example, earlier this year a study looked at how well runners performed when they were mentally exhausted, and found that listening to music helped them overcome some of the mental fatigue.  

How exactly music and exercise help clear brain fog is something that researchers are still trying to figure out. It could be related to dopamine release, but that would need to be checked with new experiments. 

Still, these are easy activities to incorporate in your day if you’re feeling mentally drained. And if you can’t drink coffee or don’t have the opportunity to move around for a few minutes, it’s good to know that listening to your favourite music could be equally effective at temporarily clearing the cobwebs in your brain.

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