Can listening to music lower blood pressure?

Listening to music can help lower your blood pressure.

Yep. Just pop in your favorite CD, lie back and practice deep breathing. Just make sure your music selection has a mellow tempo -- one that you can breathe along to very, very slowly. Breathing to music reduced people's blood pressure in a recent study.

When people inhaled and exhaled rhythmically to slow, soothing music for 30 minutes a day, their systolic blood pressure (the top number in a BP reading) fell four points after six months. This may not sound like much to you, but medically it's enough to make your insurance company crack a smile. Deep breathing and listening worked better than just listening to music or quietly reading a good book.

Steady, deep breathing may work its magic by soothing parts of the nervous system that keep blood vessels flexible. Other studies have found that inhaling and exhaling to instructions plus music can tame high blood pressure, too. But chillin' with your favorite Harry Connick, Norah Jones or Mozart tracks sounds like way more fun to us.