One-Minute Lecture: Do headphones help reduce stress?
People are talking about the stress of back-to-school season. Avo-Rein Tereping, project manager at Tallinn University's Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, talks if headphones help reduce it.
Indeed, when people get stressed out, they often put on headphones almost automatically to listen to music and shut out the rest of the world. Headphones naturally have a positive side, but they also have a negative one. One reason is that, for example, listening to music that is too loud can eventually cause hearing damage. But another reason—when we use headphones to shut ourselves off from the outside world, school children very often use them on their way to school, and in doing so, they also disconnect themselves from the natural environment. However, to reduce stress, allowing your attention to wander here and there like that is a much better stress reliever than overly loud music coming from headphones.
So, let's use headphones wisely.