Music therapy for the relief of anxiety symptoms in university students study

Abstract Background The college student population is in a critical stage of development where academic pressure, interpersonal relationships, and career uncertainty are intertwined, and the incidence of anxiety symptoms is continuously increasing. Anxiety not only affects learning efficiency and social functioning, but may also increase the risk of emotional disorders through long-term accumulation. Music therapy, as a non-pharmacological intervention that uses auditory stimuli to regulate emotions and physiological arousal levels, has shown promising prospects in clinical psychological and psychiatric disorders. Methods To explore the alleviating effect of music therapy on anxiety symptoms among college students and its practical application value, this study adopts a randomized controlled experimental design from the perspective of emotional regulation and cognitive arousal mechanisms. A total of 120 students with moderate or above anxiety levels were recruited from a comprehensive university, and were randomly divided into a music therapy group and a control group based on gender and baseline anxiety level, with 60 students in each group. The music therapy group received a structured intervention for 8 weeks, 3 times a week for 30 minutes each time, which included listening to rhythmically stable instrumental music and guided emotional imagination; The control group only received routine mental health education. Before and after intervention, the Self Rating Anxiety Scale and State Trait Anxiety Scale were used, and physiological indicators such as heart rate variability were recorded. Results The results showed that there was no significant difference in various anxiety indicators between the two groups before intervention (p.05). After 8 weeks of intervention, the self rating anxiety scale score of the music therapy group significantly decreased from 56.3 ± 6.8 to 42.1 ± 7.2, a decrease of about 25.2% (paired sample test, p.001); In the State Trait Anxiety Scale, the State Anxiety subscale decreased by 22.7% (p.001) and Trait Anxiety decreased by 18.4% (p=.002). In contrast, the corresponding indicators of the control group only decreased by 6.1% and 5.4%, and the differences did not reach a statistically significant level (p.05). The covariance analysis results showed that after controlling for baseline anxiety levels, the intervention had a significant main effect on anxiety improvement (F = 15.6, p.001). In terms of physiological indicators, the standard deviation of heart rate variability in the music therapy group increased by about 19.6% (p=.004) compared to before intervention, indicating a significant enhancement in autonomic nervous system regulation ability. The effect size analysis shows that the effect size of music therapy on overall anxiety relief is 0.72, which belongs to the medium to high intensity intervention effect. Discussion The research results indicate that systematic music therapy can significantly alleviate anxiety symptoms among college students, showing positive effects in both subjective emotional experience and objective physiological regulation. Future research can further compare the differences in anxiety relief effects of different music types, intervention frequencies, and individual music preferences based on expanding sample size and extending follow-up periods, in order to improve the individualization level of intervention programs.