Many people enjoy listening to the radio while they continue with their work tasks. Whether its a truck driver listening as they travel, or an office worker listening while they type, playing music while at work can be beneficial to us and our brains as individual studies have revealed. But, before you go demanding to the boss that you simply cannot continue to work without listening to your favorite tunes take a few moments to digest when listening to music would be most beneficial.
If you work in a place that is noisy, your brain is constantly working hard to try and decipher all the sounds that are happening around you. This can sometimes have an adverse effect on your work because while your attention wanders, and you lose focus your cortisol (a stress-hormone) levels increase, and your dopamine (a feel-good hormone) levels decrease which results in the person not performing as well as they could under other circumstances. However, listening to music in a noisy workplace allows the brain to focus on just one area of sound and calms the body in the process.
Music can also help for those who have repetitive jobs, such as packing boxes. Studies have proved that those that listened to music while carrying out repetitive tasks were less likely to make errors than those who worked in silence. This is because listening to music that you enjoy releases feel-good hormones like dopamine and serotonin into the brain which makes you feel happy, relaxed and more focused. Many surgeons often listen to music while carrying out complex operations as it helps to relieve the stress and pressure and creates a calmer working environment for themselves and their co-workers.
But, there are some instances where listening to music can hinder our performance and this is mostly seen when we are trying to learn new tasks or are listening to music that is new to us. Because any learning requires us to engage our brains fully in interpreting and remembering instructions or data, when music is playing it distracts the brain and clouds the information that is being relayed to you. Although you may think that you have understood what the person has just told you, if the music is playing in the background, there is a very high chance that you interpreted it wrong.
And the same is true when you hear music that is new to you. Because your brain has not encountered these new sounds it can not help itself, it is automatically engaged trying to process it. As your brain sees it as a new novelty, it releases dopamine into the body to give you that feel good factor once again but also straying you from the real task at hand as your focus is redirected.
So, music can be a very useful tool for increasing productivity in the workplace if used in the right conditions. But one thing that will always ring true is that happy workers work much better than unhappy ones, and if music can help to achieve this within the workplace, then it should be welcomed with open arms everywhere.
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