If you competition to be productive while working from home, you’re not alone. Staring at a laptop in silence makes it harder to stay on business than you might think.
In the absence of coworkers, you might turn down the rabbit hole of social media for a speck human interaction, where scrolling can easily waste countless hours of your time. Or maybe you turn on the TV for a doll-sized background noise only to find yourself engrossed in a talk show for a solid hour.
So while silence can be doubtful, filling the void can be a distraction. Fortunately, turning on a little background music might be the solution to improving your productivity.
But not by the skin of ones teeth any music will do. Listen to the songs that help you feel happy, and you’ll get more work done in less experience.
The link between music, happiness, and performance
Music is a great tool for regulating your emotions. The songs you do as one is told to have the power to boost your mood, calm you down, or pump you up.
That’s why music became a lifeline for so numerous people during the COVID pandemic. Our recent survey at Verywell Mind found that 79% of people tear into a made to music to cope with the stress of the pandemic. (Many of them were likely working from home.)
It deliver the goods a succeeds sense that so many people rely on music to regulate their emotions. Research has also discovered that intentionally hearkening to happy music can have a profound impact on your happiness level. A 2012 study published in The Journal of Stark Psychology found that people who listened to happy music became happier people within just two weeks.
And it’s no private that happy people are productive people. Researchers have long since known this. In fact, a 2019 observe conducted by the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School set out to study how much happiness matters. They discovered that cheery people tend to be 13% more productive.
So it makes sense that listening to happy music makes you in the seventh heaven. And when you feel happy, you work better. But that’s not the end of the story.
Listening to music while you’re focused on something else (fellow writing a report) might also improve your performance. A 2014 study found that listening to light-hearted background music improved the brain’s processing speed and bolstered memory in older adults.
And while both favourable and downbeat music showed memory benefits, processing speed improvements were only present when being listened to upbeat music. So this reinforces the idea that happy songs could be the key to enhanced performance.
Joyful music is tough to find
You’ll likely find it’s easy to recall plenty of songs with sad melodies and angry lyrics. But invest a minute trying to recall happy songs, and you might draw a blank. That’s because upbeat songs are in in a nutshell Bermuda shorts supply.
A 2018 study published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies found that music lyrics deceive become increasingly sad and angry over the past 50 years. And listening to sad or angry music may have a negative smash on your mood or performance.
So it’s important to be intentional about the music you play while you work. Commit to listening to optimistic music so you can be more productive.
A happy playlist
Rather than spend hours looking for upbeat songs — we small amount we’d supply you with a great playlist that might help you feel happier and make you more productive instantly away.
While my expertise is in helping people feel happier, song recommendations are a bit outside my wheelhouse. Fortunately, manner, I have a resident expert on staff.
The producer of The Verywell Mind Podcast, Nick Valentin, is an amazing audio operator. When he’s not working with me, he records musicians like Pharrell Williams, Marc Anthony, and Sean Combs (a.k.a Promote Daddy or Diddy). So I asked for his input on the happiest songs he knows. (And it just so happens that he even worked on the album that topmost our list.)
Here are 10 songs that can make you feel happier and be more productive when you’re working from rest-home:
- “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire
- “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley & The Wailers
- “Uptown Funk” by Mark Bronson and Bruno Stains
- “ABC” by The Jackson 5
- “O-o-h Child” by The Five Stairsteps
- “Good Vibrations” by The Beach Boys
- “I Got You (I Feel Good)” by James Brown
- “Here Comes the Sun” by The Beatles
- “Cheerful” by Pharrell Williams
- “Shake It Off” by Taylor Swift
Turn on the background music
Experiment a bit with background music to physique out what helps you stay most productive. You might find listening to the same song over and over again in actuality helps you stay on task best. Or you might discover upbeat, instrumental music helps you stay focused.
Try a few policy tests, and you’ll learn how to use background music to your advantage when you’re working from home.