Why singing is good for your brain, even if you are no Beyoncé

If there is a song in your soul, sing it out loud — whether in your car on your morning commute or at karaoke with friends. It’s OK if you are not the next Beyoncé.

Making music — even if we aren’t especially good at it — can still be good for us.

Music has the power to soothe the mind, promote brain health and bring people closer together, research has consistently shown.

But even though music can get stuck in our heads or make us want to move and groove, we can find it difficult to muster up the courage to make it ourselves.

“Nobody says you shouldn’t jog if you are not good at it,” said Daniel Levitin, a professor emeritus of neuroscience at McGill University and dean of arts and humanities at Minerva University. “That’s not the point.”

Making music boosts brain and mental health

Music can be powerful and healing.

“It can move us emotionally, it can move us physically, it can connect us to other people,” which are all important elements of mental health, said Daniel Bowling, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford School of Medicine who researches music-based treatments for mental health.

Studies have shown that listening to music we enjoy is associated with better subjective well-being, stress reduction and greater coping with negative emotions while lifting up positive ones, and that it can be an effective way to alleviate feelings of depression and anxiety.

Given its pleasurable nature, it is perhaps unsurprising that music releases dopamine and activates the brain’s reward system.

Making music with our voice or another instrument adds another dimension to the experience.

Instead of more passively hearing what is played, “you get some agency, you get ownership over what’s happening and you can control it,” Bowling said.

Singing karaoke was linked to increased feelings of flow and meaning in life, reported one 2022 study of 305 older adults. One study of 8,000 Swedish twins found that more time playing music was associated with better emotional awareness.

As with any other skill, “the more you invest, the more you develop, and the more you deepen the connection and involve more of your brain, you’re going to get more richness out of it,” Bowling said.

Making music can protect brain health as we age and can build up our cognitive reserve, or how resilient our brain is during aging. “It facilitates neuroplasticity and the making of new neural connections even if you’re not any good at it,” Levitin said.

One study of 132 older adults reported that six months of piano practice or active music listening (lessons about music and a structured way of listening) led to increases in gray matter in the brain and improvements in auditory working memory, or short-term memory of sounds. Practicing the piano for a year is associated with improved cognitive flexibility, according to a 2025 study of 153 older adults.

Learning to play music means we are able to “physically engage and mentally engage with some of the greatest works ever produced by some of the greatest minds that ever lived,” said Levitin, who is also a musician. You are “able to sit at the piano and put your fingers where Chopin put his,” he said.

Making music syncs us with other people

Making music with others — in a choir, jam session or karaoke bar — supercharges its benefits.

Our behaviors synchronize with the beat and each other. Even something as simple as tapping along to the same beat with another person makes us feel closer to them than if we tap out of beat, research shows.

Music also syncs up our brains, and more so when we make it together than merely listening. Neural activity becomes more similar in the brains of people engaged with the same music, imaging studies have shown.

Singing in groups can decrease cortisol, a stress hormone, and increase the release of oxytocin, a neuropeptide and hormone important for social bonding. The oxytocin release may further amplify the reward system so if “you have a very positive social experience, it may be extra reinforcing,” Bowling said.

One 2015 study found that singing may serve as an effective icebreaker and speed up social bonding and feelings of closeness.

Singing in a group is “the best possible way of ego dissolving that helps you feel more connected to the people around you and more a part of something larger,” Levitin said.

How to start singing and making music

For most of human history, we did not have recorded music, Bowling pointed out. “We’ve had to make music and do it with other people in order to experience that. So it’s embedded in this social context for most of our evolution and our human development,” he said.

“The advice I have for playing an instrument and singing is, it’s never too late to start,” Levitin said.

• Start small. Even just listening to music can be beneficial and has the lowest bar of entry to a musical experience. Then, you can tap along to your favorite songs and, if you want to, sing or play along with an instrument, Bowling said.

• Consider playing music with others. “Humankind always sang together,” Levitin said. “Singing was just something that everybody did naturally, and nobody said, ‘You’re not good enough.’”

But “don’t try to join a choir unless that’s what you really want to do,” Bowling said. “If you don’t feel comfortable doing it with others around, you can also start in the privacy of your shower or car.”

• Focus on engagement, not mastery. This shift in mindset may help with feelings of self-consciousness, though it can still be tricky, said Bowling, who grew up playing classical piano.

Feelings of mastery and confidence come with time and practice, but those are more “add-on” benefits; the real benefits of music — of reward and social bonding, and on emotion — are “pretty accessible,” Bowling said.

Levitin took lessons with Joni Mitchell to improve his own singing. The most important thing he learned?

“To stop trying to sound like a singer and just let the story of the song come out,” he said.