Five Ways Music and Songwriting Benefit Student Health
- Jun 28
- 8 min read
Updated: Jun 29
Emma G is an award-winning singer/songwriter, 2x TEDx speaker, and empowerment coach specializing in trauma-aware voicework, mental health advocacy, and music-led healing. She is the author of "Mental Health Sounds Like This" and founder of Emma G Music LLC.
From stress reduction to nervous system regulation, music and songwriting offer powerful benefits for student health. Today, I want to explore the science and the practice with you. We know music moves us. But the research now shows it also heals us, connects us, and helps us learn. Here's what the science says, and what I've witnessed firsthand working with young people through music and songwriting for over 20 years.
Five ways music and songwriting benefit student health
Ask most educators what they need more of in their classrooms and they'll say the same things, more engagement, better emotional regulation, stronger social connection, less anxiety, and fewer students slipping through the cracks.
What they don't always know is that one of the most powerful tools for all of those things has been around for as long as human beings have gathered together. Music. Not just listening to it. Creating it. Writing it. Singing it, unapologetically, in community, with intention.
I've spent over two decades working at the intersection of music, mental health, and empowerment. My book, Mental Health Sounds Like This, explores this methodology in depth, part memoir, part neuroscience, part songwriting workbook. What I've seen in schools, treatment centers, workshops, and one-on-one sessions tells the same story the research is increasingly confirming.
Music isn't an extracurricular. For young people, especially those navigating a genuinely difficult world, it's a lifeline.
Here are five ways music, and especially singing and songwriting, benefits student health.
1. Mentally: Music builds brains that learn better
When a young person engages with music, listening, playing, or writing, their brain lights up in ways that few other activities can replicate. Music activates multiple neural networks simultaneously, engaging memory, language, emotional processing, attention, and executive function all at once.
Research has shown that music therapy can stimulate the brain to secrete neurotransmitters, effectively regulate emotions, and relieve symptoms of depression and anxiety, conditions that are increasingly prevalent among students at every level of education.
The field of music neuroscience identifies specific neural correlates involved in or altered by engagement with music, including areas associated with memory consolidation and cognitive flexibility, two things every student needs to learn effectively.
Songwriting, in particular, demands a level of cognitive engagement that passive listening doesn't. When a student writes a song, they're organising thoughts, making connections, problem-solving, finding metaphors, and making decisions about structure and language. This creative exercise can improve problem-solving skills as students organise their thoughts and emotions, make connections, and experiment with new ways to communicate, benefits that carry over to school and other areas of life. In short, music doesn't just feel good. It builds the kind of brain that learns.
2. Emotionally: Giving feelings somewhere to go
One of the most common things I hear from young people, and from the adults who care for them, is that they don't know what to do with how they feel. Much like a toddler having a tantrum, for many young people, and more experienced people, let's be real, the emotions are there, but the language for them isn't. Songwriting solves that problem in a way that very few other tools can.
Research from Youth Music found that young people aged 16 to 24 reported that listening to, reading, or writing lyrics enables them to process difficult feelings and emotions and helps to reduce feelings of isolation or loneliness.
But the benefit goes deeper than expression. With the right guidance, songwriting becomes a tool for cognitive reframing, the practice of consciously shifting the story we tell ourselves about our experiences from negative to empowered. When a young person takes something painful and turns it into a lyric, they move from being the passive recipient of an experience to being its author. That shift, from helplessness to agency, is one of the most powerful things I witness in my work.
According to Medium, a 2025 randomised controlled trial found that mindfulness-based music therapy significantly improved all mental health indicators in students, including depression, anxiety, sleep quality, and resilience, with effects remaining stable after the intervention.
This is why I say that songwriting isn't just a creative tool. It's an emotional one. It gives feelings somewhere to go and, with the right coaching, it can transform those feelings into something a young person can own, share, and build upon.
3. Physically: Sound moves through the body, not just the mind
This is the part that surprises people most, and it shouldn't. When I'm working with vocal clients, one of the first things I tell them is this, you are no longer a human. You are an instrument.
It sounds provocative. It's meant to. Because the moment a young person truly internalises that idea, everything changes about how they relate to their body, their voice, and their health.
Think about it this way. A guitar doesn't perform well if its strings are too tight, its body is damaged, or it hasn't been tuned. A piano sounds different in a cold room than in a warm one. Every instrument is affected by its environment, its condition, and how it's treated. Your body is no different.
Everything a student carries in their body directly impacts their voice. Stress creates tension in the jaw, the neck, and the shoulders, and tension is the enemy of free, resonant sound. Shallow breathing from anxiety restricts the diaphragm, robbing the voice of its power and warmth. Emotional heaviness literally changes how sound moves through the body. You can hear grief in someone's voice. You can hear fear. You can hear when someone hasn't slept, hasn't eaten, or is carrying something they haven't told anyone yet.
The voice is the body's most honest instrument. This is why physical health is not separate from musical development. It is musical development. It's why I approach vocal coaching as whole body work, not just technique.
Music is a physical experience at every level. Sound frequencies travel through the body, not just the ears, and the physiological effects are measurable. Research shows that high-frequency music plays a significant role in stress relief. 528 Hz frequency music has been shown to lower cortisol and increase oxytocin levels, a modulator of stress response and social bonding. Specific frequencies can promote relaxation, reduce anxiety, and lower cortisol levels, fostering an environment conducive to recovery and learning.
Singing specifically engages the diaphragm, the primary muscle of respiration, which directly stimulates the vagus nerve and activates the parasympathetic nervous system. In plain terms, singing helps the body shift out of fight or flight and into a state where learning, connection, and growth are actually possible.
For students whose nervous systems are chronically activated by academic pressure, social anxiety, or difficult home environments, this physiological reset isn't a nice-to-have. It's a necessity. It's one that music, uniquely, can provide through the simple act of opening your mouth and making a sound.
This is why I begin many of my sessions with breath and voice work before we ever touch a lyric. You can't write from a place of genuine expression if your body is braced against the world. We have to get the instrument in tune first. When we do? Everything else becomes possible.
4. Socially: Music builds the community that young people need
There's a reason music has been used across every culture in human history as a communal tool. It brings people together in a way that few other activities can, and for young people navigating loneliness, disconnection, and the pressures of social comparison, that matters enormously.
Research led by Dr. Jason Goopy at Edith Cowan University, reviewing 30 academic sources, found strong positive links between music education and wellbeing, specifically that music supports confidence, social connections, and overall engagement with learning.
Group songwriting is particularly powerful in a student wellbeing context because of its capacity to both create and explore social connections and identity. Research suggests that songwriting in this context provides a meaningful base for identification, change, and personal development through the act of participating in a shared creative experience.
There's also something important happening in the digital space. When young people write songs and share them on social media, in performances, and in their communities, they're doing something that most people don't fully appreciate. They're programming their own algorithms. They're actively curating what they consume and what they put out into the world, training the platforms they use to reflect their values, their voice, and their identity back to them. That kind of intentional self-expression builds confidence, strengthens connection, and creates a sense of agency over one's own narrative that is genuinely rare in the social media landscape.
The research also points to something I've long understood, community is one of the most powerful protective factors for young people navigating mental health challenges. Joining new groups can improve physical and mental health, even in those experiencing severe depression. Isolation, which prevails in people experiencing mental health difficulties, can be directly addressed through shared music making. Music doesn't just entertain. It connects. Connection, for young people, is everything.
5. Spiritually: Music accesses something words can't
This one is harder to quantify, and that's exactly why it matters. There is a dimension of music that exists beyond the measurable. Every culture across every period of human history has used music as a spiritual tool, for ceremony, for healing, and for connection to something larger than the individual self. That universality is not coincidental.
For young people who may not have a religious framework, or who are in the process of forming their own sense of meaning and purpose, music can provide a pathway to transcendence that nothing else quite replicates. The experience of being completely absorbed in a song, of feeling a lyric land somewhere deep in the body, of co-creating something with a room full of strangers and feeling a collective shift happen, that is a spiritual experience, whether or not we label it as such.
In my work, I've seen this happen in libraries, in treatment centers, in school halls, and on stages. The moment when someone stops performing and starts feeling, when they stop thinking about the notes and start inhabiting the song, something opens. It's one of the most profound things I've ever witnessed, and it happens consistently.
Music teaches young people that they are part of something. That their voice matters. That beauty is accessible to them, that they can create it, not just consume it.
That's not a small thing. For a young person who has felt invisible, misunderstood, or without purpose, it can be the thing that changes everything.
What this means for educators and parents
The evidence is clear. Music, and especially singing and songwriting, offers young people benefits that span every dimension of their health and development. It builds better brains, regulates nervous systems, processes difficult emotions, creates community, and opens doors to meaning and purpose that other tools simply don't reach.
Yet music education continues to be underfunded, deprioritised, and treated as a supplementary activity rather than a core one.
If you're an educator, a parent, or a decision maker who cares about the wellbeing of young people, the research is telling you something important. So is the lived experience of every young person who has picked up a pen, written a line, and felt something shift.
Music is not a luxury. For young people, it is a language, for processing, for connecting, for becoming. It deserves to be treated as such.
Read more from Emma G
Emma G, Empowerment Coach and Singer-Songwriter
Emma G is an award-winning singer/songwriter, 2x TEDx speaker, and empowerment coach who helps teens and adults transform pain into power through trauma-informed voice work and songwriting. After surviving 10 brain surgeries due to hydrocephalus, she discovered the healing potential of music and self-expression. Her book and album, Mental Health Sounds Like This, offer a neuroscience-backed, culturally grounded approach to emotional wellness. She’s the founder of Emma G Music LLC and has been featured by FOX, WUSA9, The Washington Post, CBS, CBC, and more. Her mission? To save the world, one song at a time.
