Benefits of Learning to Play the Guitar

While most people play the guitar simply because it’s fun, it also offers a wide range of other benefits for your overall health and wellbeing. These benefits range all the way from cognitive improvements to stress relief. So, if you needed any extra reasons to pick up the guitar and start learning today beyond it simply being fun, you’ve just found them.

Benefits of Learning to Play the Guitar

Instant Stress Relief in Any Situation

Once you start to learn the guitar, you’ll quickly find every time you pick it back up you immediately lose focus from everything else going on in your world. This is because playing music uses more areas of your brain than any other activity. Simply picking up the guitar for just a few minutes when you’re feeling stressed will immediately melt that stress away. After you relieve your stress, you can reapproach the problem causing you stress with a fresh new outlook. It also gives you another outlet for any stress or frustrations.

Enhanced Cognitive Abilities

With the way playing music engages so many areas of the brain you actually enhance your cognitive abilities. It teaches you how to spot mistakes then fix them through the immediate feedback offered by playing music. Whenever you make a mistake, it’s immediately noticeable and usually the fix is pretty obvious as well. This immediate response from mistake to fixing the mistake teaches you how to apply those same thought patterns to other areas of your life as well. The effects of playing music on your cognitive abilities appear so strong that Medical News Today wrote an entire article on it.

Improved Concentration and Memory

Learning to play the guitar also improves your overall concentration and memory in a similar way that it enhances your cognitive abilities. This primarily comes from you naturally practicing these skills while you learn to play the guitar. Guitar playing requires extreme focus for an extended period of time which is a skill that you learn like anything else, through practice. Once you develop a high level of concentration it applies to other areas of your life as well. You also improve your memory when playing the guitar in the same exact way. A study conducted by the University of Zurich showed that playing the guitar stimulates the areas of the brain responsible for memory. With all of the chord shapes and patterns you need to memorize and utilize each time you play the guitar, your memory will never be sharper than after learning the guitar.

Train Your Multitasking Abilities

Each time you play the guitar you need to multitask extensively from reading your tabs to forming your chords and keeping time. This practice helps you improve your multitasking with every other thing you do throughout the day. Once you get better at learning how to multitask you can apply it to other areas of your life. The key is to engrain one task into your muscle memory so you don’t even have to think about it while focusing on the more difficult task you’re trying to learn. Once you get the hang of it through playing the guitar, you’ll start multitasking in all other areas of your life as well.