People should stop listening to music while they work. While people think they motivate themselves, release stress, and make them feel happier, many people tend to ignore the negative effects that music induces while working: distraction, diminished quality of work, and weakened cognitive skills.

When listening to music while working, you are hearing sounds that may push your thoughts away to the pleasure of listening. According to Annie Murphy Paul’s Time article “Does Listening to Music While Working Make You Less Productive?” they asked anesthetists about their experience with music and answered with: “felt that music was distracting when they were dealing with a problem with the anesthesia.”Anesthetists need to manage their patient’s reactions to anesthetics which are often in life or death situations. Music is drifting their focus from their priorities, which can lead to devastating events. Music is distracting, and it can affect anyone negatively at any extent.

Furthermore, the distraction caused by music can cause you to diminish your quality of work. In Jesse Singal’s Science of Us article “Music Isn’t Distracting-If You’re Young” states that: “Overall, both young and old participants rated the presence of music as distracting.” From this article, one can infer that at any age, music is still distracting. Sounds and words from music sway workers from paying attention to the things that are essential. This causes people to multitask while working which is harder for the brain to focus on the assignment you need to complete. Music is distracting, and it diminishes your quality of work by splitting your attention.

In addition to music lessening the quality of work, it decreases your cognitive skills. Adrian Furnham and Anna Bradley states in their article “Music While You Work: The Differential Distraction of Background Music on the Cognitive Test Performance of Introverts and Extraverts” that “After a 6-minute interval the introverts who had memorized the objects in the presence of the pop music had a significantly lower recall than the extraverts in the same condition and the introverts who had observed them in silence.” Lyrics cause confusion, because lyrics and studying collide with each other on cognitive skills. So, it is drifting you off the main focus when memorizing things such as vocabulary to memorizing the lyrics which leads to longer periods of studying and less time for anything else. Listening to music while studying is inefficient, because your cognitive abilities will constantly drift from one focus to the other.

Music can be helpful, but many people forget that it can also be unhelpful. Though the “Mozart Effect” is real, it only affects classical music listeners. Today, many people listen to modern music such as pop and hip hop while they work. So, it is common that people are being negatively affected by music, and people can almost instantly change the music they listen to classical music to exuberate their learning experience.

<Young Joon Ha Glen A.Wilson High School 10th Grade>