Written by Isabel Brunkan

Are you in need of a mood booster? Have you lost your motivation and looking to get it back? As the end-of-term time approaches for many youngsters, it’s easy to lose motivation with the prospect of summer vacation just around the corner. Equally difficult can be regaining motivation after an attack, and rebuilding the energy for exercise, schoolwork, and friends after having a flare. 

Luckily, music can help! From triggering the reward center of the brain and cueing learning to boosting your mood, neuroscience has shown how impactful music can be for us. You can learn more about how music can be used as a reward to help you learn in this article summarizing recent research. 

Additionally, the type of music matters! Stuck thinking of a topic for a final essay or on a hard math problem? You can trigger creativity by listening to specific types of music! A study investigating different types of music found that listening to Vivaldi helped trigger innovation in study participants. There are two different types of creativity, convergent, which is a more logical process to find the best answer to a problem, and divergent, which is a more creative process, producing multiple answers given the available information. The study found that listening to happy music resulted in a more diverse set of answers, thereby possibly enhancing mental flexibility and creativity! 

Simply looking for a mood booster to get you energized and ready for the day? A neuroscientist from the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, worked with a British electronics brand to identify common traits of songs that reportedly made people “feel good”. A mix of tempo and lyrics was found to be influential and since publication, several playlists have been created with songs that fit these criteria. You can check out one of those playlists on Spotify here. Don’t have Spotify? No worries – people have made YouTube playlists with similar songs as well. 

Enjoying the playlists? Let us know!