At Feed.fm, we’re passionate about making people’s lives better through music, and supporting users in optimizing their health, fitness, and wellness is a key component of that commitment. Humans are uniquely attuned to respond to music in predictable ways, and intentionally composed and curated workout music and wellness music help us to engage fully in an activity and get the most out of it. A 2025 article in Psychology Today, “How Music Keeps You Moving and Makes Exercise More Fun,” notes that “Music shifts focus away from physical discomfort, making exercise feel easier at low-to-moderate intensities.” It’s no wonder that fitness, wellness, and health apps focused on supporting users to reach their goals want in-app music in their corner.
Music not only keeps us energized and moving during workouts, but also has the ability to reduce pain, induce sleep, help us relax more deeply, and focus more intensely. Let’s explore some of the ways that music in wellness, health, and fitness apps can provide real-life benefits for users.
Music in wellness apps
Calming anxiety
In-app music for anxiety relief instantly creates an immersive sanctuary, allowing users to center themselves, breathe, and regulate their nervous systems. The convenience of having relaxing melodies, nature sounds, and ambient soundscapes easily available transforms any environment into a peaceful retreat, empowering users to manage anxiety episodes in real time without needing to search through music libraries.
Improving sleep
Sleep music encourages a relaxing bedtime routine by offering progressive soundscapes that gradually slow heart rate and allow users to calm their minds. Carefully composed sleep music tracks use specific frequencies proven to promote deeper sleep cycles, creating a consistent and reliable pathway to better rest.
Intensifying focus
Focus music is consciously composed and curated to minimize distractions while promoting sustained attention. Groove, a pleasurable element of rhythm, can be a component of focus music. Neuroscientist Petr Janata, Ph.D., of The Groove Project at The Center for Mind and Brain at U.C. Davis, describes groove as “a sensorimotor phenomenon with an affective component”—or to put it another way, groovy focus music can help you stay focused on a task and feeling good.
Focus music can also consist of ambient tracks, white noise, and focus-specific frequencies, creating an auditory environment that blocks out interruptions and maintains cognitive flow during work or study sessions.
Facilitating stress reduction
Music for stress reduction offers instant relief through carefully designed audio experiences that lower cortisol levels and promote relaxation. The immediate availability of calming sounds, breathing-synchronized music, and progressive relaxation tracks empowers users to manage stress proactively throughout their day. According to Daniel Bowling, Ph.D., Director of Stanford Medicine's Music, Brain, and Health Lab, “...multiple large-scale meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials indicate that music interventions drive clinically significant reductions in anxiety.”
Deepening meditation
Meditation music can support a variety of meditation techniques, from mindfulness to transcendental practices. Guided soundscapes, singing bowls, chants, and ambient drones create the perfect backdrop for inner exploration, with customizable session lengths that adapt to both beginning and advanced practitioners.
Music in fitness apps
Enhancing fitness
Motivating workout music encourages people to get moving, gets them to work out longer and harder, and makes the subjective experience of exercise more pleasurable. By tapping into music’s neurophysiological effects, apps can push users towards their goals faster. Music’s ergogenic (work-enhancing) effect can result in increases of up to 15%
in recreational athletes, according to Costas Karageorghis, Ph.D. In his paper The ABC of Music in Exercise: Affect, Behavior, and Cognition, Karageorghis notes that “...digital music-based solutions provide a means by which to make exercise a habitual activity and for it to be rendered more enjoyable.”
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Increasing athletic performance
Music can give athletes a competitive advantage by amping up both motivation and endurance. In a study published in the Journal of Human Sport and Exercise, researchers investigated the effect on subjects of listening to music of their choice while running. “The findings indicate that listening to self-selected motivational music may be a useful strategy to help active people improve their endurance running capacity and performance when mentally fatigued,” says the study’s author, Dr. Shaun Phillips of the University of Edinburgh.
The integration of high-energy beats with performance tracking helps athletes maintain consistent pacing, push through fatigue barriers, and achieve peak athletic performance.
Reinforcing massage and bodywork
Music designed for massage and bodywork enhances therapeutic sessions by providing rhythm and ambiance that synchronize with treatment techniques. Calming soundscapes, relaxing melodies, and ambient music enables both practitioners and clients to achieve deeper states of relaxation, amplifying the healing benefits of spa treatments, massage, and bodywork.
Music in health apps
Supporting pain management
Pain management music makes use of therapeutic frequencies and calming compositions to redirect attention away from discomfort while promoting the release of natural endorphins. The accessibility of these tools means users can implement musical pain relief strategies anywhere, providing a non-pharmacological complement to traditional pain management approaches.
Assisting music therapy
Music therapy clients can extend professional treatment beyond clinical settings by utilizing structured musical exercises and therapeutic playlists designed by certified music therapists. Users can continue their therapeutic journey at home with guided activities that support emotional processing, cognitive rehabilitation, and social skill development.
Music’s unique therapeutic effects make it the perfect partner for health apps
The therapeutic power of music across all these wellness applications stems from music's profound ability to simultaneously activate multiple brain networks and trigger neurochemical responses throughout the body. When we listen to music, it engages the limbic system for emotional processing, the motor cortex for rhythm and movement, and the prefrontal cortex for attention and focus, while simultaneously releasing neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins that naturally regulate mood, pain, and stress responses. Importantly, music activates the vagus nerve—which controls the parasympathetic nervous system—explaining why musical interventions are effective across such diverse use cases, from sleep enhancement to pain management.
These qualities of musical experience mean that consistent exposure to carefully curated, science-backed music can actually rewire neural pathways, creating lasting improvements in stress resilience and overall well-being that extend far beyond the listening session itself.
Get in touch with a music specialist at Feed.fm to talk about how music can drive significant benefits for your health, wellness, and fitness app users.
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