The benefits of Carol Singing at Christmas

The science behind boosting your pleasure hormone!

Christmas carols, you either love or hate them. However, joining in ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ can have wonderful health benefits. In fact according to research, communal singing as in a choir, a church service or even a singsong at the local pub can help boost our mental health and has strong social benefits too.

Professor Graham Welch, who leads the International Music Education Research Centre at the University of London, suggests, “it’s to do with the way the body is an integrated system, sometimes called the human body-mind, linking the nervous, endocrine and immune systems.

“Because music is multi-sited in the brain and we’re also involving ourselves in strong aerobic activity and singing is a form of exercise, it means there’s a release of what’s called the pleasure hormone.

“But when we sing, we also see a measurable decrease in stress hormones like cortisol – a direct correlation in the physical endocrine system.”

Apparently it doesn’t matter if we can’t sing in tune, the very act of singing requires your body to take in a deeper breath, which triggers the release of endorphins and serotonin; your feel-good hormones. When this happens you get a natural high from making a bit of noise and it is one of the main reasons why we always feel happy when we sing!