New Study Finds That Listening to Chill-Inducing Music Can Reduce Pain

Have you ever gotten the chills from listening to a particular song? A new study by Canadian researcher Darius Valevicius has found that listening to chill-inducing music can reduce pain, and may actually be as effective as some pain medication.

Before getting into the details of the study, let's first break down why music can produce physiological effects, such as goosebumps and chills. According to Discovery, this phenomenon is called frisson, and not everyone experiences it. A study featured in Oxford Academic states that only about 50 percent of people will either get chills, goosebumps or a lump in their throat while listening to music, and the findings conclude that these people are more prone to experiencing extreme emotions than those who don't feel such sensations while listening to music.

While it's been said in the past that music can relieve pain, Valevicius' new study argues that music that invokes an emotional response may have the strongest effect on pain. He and his colleagues experimented on 63 healthy individuals at Montreal's McGill University by using a device to heat a certain area of each of their left arms.

“We can approximate that favorite music reduced pain by about one point on a 10-point scale, which is at least as strong as an over-the-counter painkiller like Advil [ibuprofen] under the same conditions. Moving music may have an even stronger effect," Valevicius said [via The Guardian].

Some of the participants listened to two of their favorite songs during the process, while others listened to "relaxing" or random music that was chosen for them. The rest didn't hear any music at all. They were each probed with the heat device eight times over the span of around seven minutes, and were asked to rate their pain each time they were probed, and describe how many chills or goosebump sensations they felt.

The results found that the participants rated the pain less intense when they were listening to their favorite songs, as opposed to the random music or silence. The relaxing music, however, didn't show any effect.

“We found a very strong correlation between music pleasantness and pain unpleasantness, but zero correlation between music pleasantness and pain intensity, which would be an unlikely finding if it was just placebo or expectation effects,” Valevicius added.

READ MORE: Study Reveals the Rock + Metal Bands That Make People Feel Most Confident

The results further found that when participants listened to music that gave them chills, they rated their pain intensity and unpleasantness even lower.

“The difference in effect on pain intensity implies two mechanisms – chills may have a physiological sensory-gating effect, blocking ascending pain signals, while pleasantness may affect the emotional value of pain without affecting the sensation, so more at a cognitive-emotional level involving prefrontal brain areas."

Remember this next time a song makes your spine tingle.