Does Playing Guitar Lower Cortisol? What the Research Shows

Does Playing Guitar Lower Cortisol? The Science of Music and Stress

The short answer is a careful yes. Several studies have measured lower cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone, after a session of music-making, with two important exceptions covered below. Guitar itself has barely been studied on its own, so most of what follows comes from research on singing, drumming and listening, and the results depend on the activity, the setting and how the study was run. The longer answer is more interesting, because the same kinds of effects show up when you sing, when you drum in a group, and when you listen attentively to music you love. Music-making is one of the more consistently studied stress regulators, and the mechanism is starting to come into focus.

Here’s what the science actually says, and what it means for whether to pick the guitar back up.

What Cortisol Is, Briefly

Find Your Music Teacher

Cortisol is a steroid hormone your adrenal glands release when your body perceives stress. In short bursts, it’s useful. It sharpens focus, mobilizes energy, prepares you to act. The problem is that modern life triggers cortisol release constantly: traffic, email, deadlines, screens. Chronically elevated cortisol is linked to poor sleep, weight gain around the midsection, immune suppression, anxiety, and the general feeling of being wound tight.

Anything that brings cortisol down is worth understanding, and music is one of the better-studied candidates, which is why researchers keep coming back to it.

What the Studies Show

A 2020 systematic review and meta-analysis of 104 randomized trials found that music interventions produce a small to medium reduction in physiological stress markers, cortisol included, and a somewhat larger effect on how stressed people say they feel. Individual studies fill in the picture. A 2001 group drumming study found a higher DHEA-to-cortisol ratio and higher natural killer cell activity in healthy adults after a single hour-long session, though it measured no change in self-reported anxiety or depression. Cortisol on its own is the part to be careful with there, because it moved the same way in the randomized control group, so the drumming cannot be credited with it, and immune activity was what the session actually changed. A 2016 study of cancer patients and carers found cortisol fell after an hour of choir singing. And a 2004 experiment found cortisol dropped when people listened to choral music but not when they sang it, a reminder that the effect is not automatic. The exception that matters most: a 2015 study of professional singers found cortisol fell during a relaxed rehearsal and rose during a high-pressure performance. Music lowers stress when it is the kind you do for its own sake. Rehearsing for a recital is a different animal.

Guitar specifically has been studied less in isolation than singing or drumming, but the underlying mechanism is the same. Playing a string instrument engages slow, focused, repetitive motion combined with attention to sound, which is essentially a description of a meditative state with an external focal point.

Why It Works: Three Plausible Mechanisms

Researchers point to three plausible reasons music-making might lower cortisol:

Slow breathing. Singers obviously regulate their breath, but so do guitar players, pianists, and drummers, especially during slower or more contemplative pieces. Slow breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which signals the body to lower stress hormones.

Focused attention. Music-making demands sustained, present-tense attention. You can’t be playing a piece and ruminating about a work email at the same time. That state of absorbed focus, what psychologists call “flow”, goes with lower reported tension and a better mood in the flow research. The hormone and neurotransmitter side of it is a working hypothesis rather than a measured result, so take the felt calm as the finding.

Social and rhythmic entrainment. Playing music with others or to a backing track entrains the nervous system to an external rhythm. Group settings are the most studied, because drumming circles and choirs are the easiest sessions to run and measure, and the social element is one of the mechanisms researchers point to. What the studies do not give you is a clean ranking of playing with other people over playing alone.

How Much Music Is Enough?

The studies that show meaningful cortisol drops typically involve thirty to sixty minutes of active music-making. Shorter sessions have been studied far less, so fifteen minutes is a practical recommendation rather than a measured threshold.

The pattern matters more than the duration. Nobody has measured what a daily fifteen-minute guitar habit does to baseline cortisol over months, so treat any baseline claim as a hypothesis. What the studies show is a drop during and after a session, on average, across a group. Nobody can promise you a measured drop from every session. A daily habit, treated as a contemplative ritual rather than a productivity task, is still the practical way to give yourself the best chance of it, and the calmer mood most people notice afterward does not need a blood test to be real.

Listening vs. Playing

It is tempting to rank playing above listening, and the evidence does not support a clean ranking. The 2004 choir experiment above found its cortisol drop in the listening session, not the singing one, while singing improved mood and an immune marker instead. Listening to slow, predictable, instrumental music (classical baroque, ambient, slow folk) has lowered cortisol in stressed participants in several trials, though the size of the drop varies a lot from study to study. Playing gives you something listening cannot, the focused attention and the physical rhythm, but which one moves the hormone more depends on the study.

This is part of why music has been used therapeutically in surgical recovery rooms, dental offices, and ICUs. The autonomic nervous system responds to certain kinds of music whether you’re playing or listening.

What the Research Is Pointing At

There’s a deeper pattern in this research that’s worth naming. The kinds of music that most reliably lower cortisol are the kinds that ask for slow attention: contemplative tempos, predictable structures, gentle dynamic range. They’re often older music (baroque, folk, classical) and they require the listener (or player) to stop multitasking.

What seems to actually be happening in cortisol-lowering music isn’t magic about specific frequencies or composers. It’s that this kind of music invites a state of being that’s increasingly rare in modern life: undistracted, slow-attentioned, embodied. That state is what your nervous system is responding to.

You could call it joy. You could call it meditation. You could call it presence. Whatever you call it, it lives on the other side of putting your phone down and picking up an instrument for fifteen minutes.

For more on what learning music as a grown-up can actually do for you, see our guide on the benefits of learning music as an adult.

How to Find a Guitar Teacher on Tunelark

If the research has nudged you toward picking up the guitar (or any instrument) here is how to start. Every Tunelark teacher is vetted by working musicians and educators for teaching quality before they can list, and each one sets their own rate and shows it on their profile.

1. Browse our teacher list and filter for your instrument.

2. Read bios. Look for teachers who explicitly work with adult students and mention the joy of playing, not just performance.

3. Book a trial lesson. Tell the teacher what brought you back, stress relief, focus, something to look forward to.

4. Notice whether the lesson left you energized or wrung out. The right teacher leaves you wanting to play more.

Playing guitar (or anything) for fifteen minutes a day won’t solve a chronically stressful life. But it can move your nervous system toward calm. Researchers have measured that shift in group sessions of thirty to sixty minutes. It is still a good return on a small daily investment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Looking for an online guitar teacher? See our full Online Guitar and Bass Lessons page for everything you need to know about getting started.

Keep reading

About Jennifer Heath

I'm Jennifer Heath, VP at Tunelark and a lifelong singer. I joined the company in 2020 and oversee much of what makes Tunelark work for our students and our teachers. That includes hiring, training, and supporting our instructors, customer and student support, marketing, and the day-to-day operations of the business.

I started voice lessons at age 7, sang with professional choirs that toured internationally through my teens, and performed solo at competitions and community events across Texas before stepping away in my twenties to study other interests, including business management. I haven't performed professionally in years, but I'll happily take the microphone at a karaoke night. Music has been in me every day of my life. Being able to spend the last six years working inside an online music education company, while traveling the world full-time, has been a perfect fit.

I believe deeply that music belongs in every life. For the self-expression, the discipline, the comfort, and the simple joy of it.

The Tunelark blog is where we share what we've learned about online music lessons: how to choose an instrument and a teacher, what to expect from your first lesson, how the major platforms compare, and how to keep music going through the busier seasons of life. Practical, honest writing you can act on.