Do you hum in the shower? Do you like to sing in your car? Do not change anything. Better: sing louder. Because if a new generation of scientific studies converges on a point, it is this one: singing is good for you. Not just for morale (it was already suspected), but also for your physical health, your brain, and even for your immune system. Solo, duet, or within a choir, the human voice, when it rises, treats.
Maybe that’s why we have been singing since time immemorial. Long before the podcasts, the storytimes and the well-being tutorials, the human voice vibrated in the caves, the temples, the fields and the cabarets. Aristotle spoke of voice as of “reflection of being”. Today, neuroscientists join him, brain support.
A physical and mental explosion
From the first notes, the brain lights up. Literally. When you make music, it is a real “neurological explosion”, according to this study. And even more when we produce it ourselves. Sing active simultaneously the areas of language, motor skills, emotion and memory. An indoor fireworks, with a key, a hormonal cocktail of choice: dopamine (motivation), oxytocin (confidence), endorphins (anti-two-way) and serotonin (social well-being). As a bonus? A measurable fall in cortisol, the stress hormone. In other words, singing amounts to offering your body a mini-session of neurochemical yoga … without having to hold the crow’s position on a biodegradable carpet.
But singing is not only mental. It is also a soft sport. The diaphragmatic breathing, the placement of the voice, the maintenance of the body … The song requests the abdominals, reinforces the respiratory muscles, improves the oxygenation of the blood, and according to several research, squarely boosts the immune system. A choir is almost a sports club camouflaged under a rain of harmonies. And that’s not all. The song would also help manage pain, improve swallowing, and in some cases, treat speech problems. Some clinics also use voice music to accompany Parkinsonian patients or with Alzheimer’s. So when words flee, sometimes the song remains.
Singing is (re) bind
But what seduces the researchers the most is what the song produces on the social level. In groups, the effect is increased tenfold. Singing becomes a collective practice which promotes listening, synchronization, contact. Just attend an amateur choir rehearsal or a karaoke on Friday evening to feel this strange alchemy of “doing together”. British psychologist Natacha Hendry, who studied the subject, goes further: for her, group singing could become a large -scale mental health prevention tool. Less stress, less isolation, less expenses for care systems. She even speaks of a “social transformation lever”. It is no longer pop, but PO (p) litic.
In an era that sells performance, personal development (under steroids) and well-being pensions in Bali, it is almost subversive to recall that a simple free act, like pushing the song, may be enough to put the internal meters to zero. No need to sing just. No need to have done the conservatory. The human voice has never been made to be perfect, but to vibrate. And in these vibrations, there is warmth, bond, breath. What, perhaps, standing a little longer, a little stronger. So the next time you hear this little voice that tells you that you sing false or bad or too much (or even the three), ignore it. She visibly knows nothing in neurochemistry.
