Twenty-four minutes of your own music, with a gentle beat underneath, cut the stress hormone more than twice as much as pink noise

In a randomised trial at Toronto Metropolitan University, 83 students who reported anxiety symptoms listened for 24 minutes to either personalised music layered with auditory beat stimulation — soft rhythmic pulses — or to pink noise, a popular relaxation sound. The music group’s cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, fell more than twice as much. Curiously, both groups said they felt equally calm, a reminder that what we feel and what our bodies do are two different stories. The team, led by Frank A. Russo and publishing in the International Journal of Psychophysiology, calls the biology preliminary — outlier handling mattered — but the direction is hopeful for drug-free anxiety tools.

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: tech innovation