Hormesis Benefits and The Comfort Trap
We hear it all the time as we get older: Take it easy. Protect yourself. Rest.
It sounds like loving wisdom, but biologically, it might be a trap. Dr. Steph, in a fascinating talk on healthy aging, flipped this conventional advice with one sentence: “If you really want to age well, avoid getting comfortable and always try new things.”
She was talking about hormesis, a foundational biological principle that reveals how bodies and minds actually thrive.
Hormesis is the idea that exposure to a low or moderate dose of stress induces a beneficial, adaptive effect.
A muscle left unchallenged wastes away. A mind left entirely unbothered grows dull. Comfort isn’t the ultimate reward we think it is. Left unchecked, it is closer to a slow leak of our capabilities.
This is exactly where musicking, the active practice of making music, comes in. And why it works so differently from just listening to your favourite playlist.
Listening vs. Playing
Listening to music is wonderful. It comforts us, lifts our mood, and helps us relax. But streaming a song asks very little of you. The brain coasts.
Playing an instrument, singing, or improvising is an entirely different category of experience. It is stress, but in the best sense of the word.
There is a common assumption that once you memorize a piece or learn the basic chords, the challenge is over. It isn’t. A memorized piece is never played the same way twice. Your physical touch shifts, your timing micro-adjusts, your emotional energy that day is different, and the music adapts with you.
Starting a new piece is its own kind of challenge, a genuinely fresh experience each time, if you let yourself meet it that way instead of rushing to make it familiar.
And in improvisation, the mechanism becomes fully visible. Every note is a decision made under mild pressure. A continuous loop of tension and resolution. There is no autopilot for a live instrument.
The Neurochemical Picture
Why can we sustain this kind of mental and physical effort without burning out? Because musicking engages an intricate system of hormones and neurotransmitters that keeps the brain alive, plastic, and adaptable.
Robert Zatorre at McGill University proved through direct brain imaging that music triggers dopamine in two waves: one during the anticipation of a musical climax, another when it resolves. His later research scanning the brains of pianists and cellists showed that the physical act of learning an instrument structurally rewires the brain over time. Dopamine isn’t just a listener’s reward. It is fuel for the player building a skill in real time.
Daniel Levitin‘s large-scale meta-analysis of 400 studies showed that passive listening is highly effective at lowering cortisol, the stress hormone. That alone is significant. But it’s active musicking, playing, singing, drumming with others, that drives the endorphin and immune response. The physical demands of playing, the breath control of singing, the repeated motion of drumming, all trigger the body’s natural painkillers, producing what musicians sometimes call the “musician’s high.” Serotonin also plays a role here, delivering not the sharp spike of dopamine but the sustained feeling of calm confidence and emotional equilibrium that lingers after a piece is finished.
Alan Harvey‘s research adds the social layer. Group singing and improvising produce significant oxytocin surges alongside cortisol drops. He has traced this to brain regions activated by music overlapping directly with oxytocin receptors, a plausible biological reason why playing with others feels categorically different from playing or listening alone. Music, in this reading, acts as a kind of social glue, one that bypasses self-consciousness and builds trust through shared effort in real time.
Put together, these three researchers point to the same shape. A brain cycling between challenge and resolution, tension and release, stress and reward, for as long as the playing continues.
The Permission to Stay Uncomfortable
Older adults are constantly offered a specific version of the comfort narrative: you’ve earned your rest, you deserve to relax. It is well-intentioned. And it is exactly backwards. Treating comfort as a permanent reward is the trap that hormesis exposes. The real reward is staying capable of discomfort in the first place.
But this isn’t only a lesson for older adults. A twenty-five-year-old who only ever streams music is missing the same mechanism entirely.
Musicking is not a treatment for aging. It is a lifelong practice for staying vibrant. And you don’t need anyone else in the room to get the full benefit. Sitting alone, working through a difficult passage, improvising with nobody listening, already delivers the complete cycle.
Avoid getting comfortable. Always try something new. Dr. Steph wasn’t thinking about music when she said it, but she could have been.
Picture by Gemini
