TORONTO -- Music really is the best medicine for those trying to cope with stress and sadness during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new research.

In a new study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed and published, researchers from McGill University and New York University examined how people were coping during the height of lockdown measures in May in three countries hard hit by the virus at the time: the U.S., Spain, and Italy.

“We thought we should figure out in a more scientific way, what activities people are actually engaging in that might be helpful to them to cope with the stress and anxiety of the confinement,” Robert Zatorre, one of the researchers and neuroscience professor at McGill University, told CTVNews.ca during a telephone interview on Thursday.

To do this, the team enlisted 1,000 participants from the U.S., Spain, and Italy who were representative of their countries’ populations in terms of social status, gender, age, and ethnicity. They were then asked to answer a series of online questionnaires in their native language.

The questionnaires required them to rate how profoundly they had been impacted by the pandemic. For example, did a loved one die from COVID-19? Did they lose their job? How stressed did they feel?

The participants were then asked to identify, from a list of 43 different activities, what they did that made themselves feel better during the lockdown period. Some of the activities included interacting with others on social media, cooking, sex, drinking, using drugs, watching movies, and exercising.

Of the 43 suggested activities, Zatorre said that music was chosen by the most people, about 20 per cent, as the activity they sought out to feel better.

“Our sample picked music as the single most important activity that they found to be helpful,” Zatorre said. “This could include anything from just listening to music, to playing music, to singing, to dancing along to music, to going out in the park and playing guitar with some friends.”

Zatorre said they also found that people who said they were more strongly affected by the pandemic reported music as their coping mechanism of choice. In one of the questionnaires, participants were also asked to assess their mental health.

“We found that people who reported using more music, listening or playing music for more hours, were less depressed than those who spent less time,” Zatorre said.

Besides music, the only other activity that appeared to have a similar relationship to participants’ mental health was cooking or baking.

Zatorre, who has been researching how the brain responds to music for more than 20 years, said he wasn’t surprised music was the most popular choice for people during the pandemic.

“When people experience pleasurable music, the circuits in the brain that are active are part of the so-called reward circuit. This is the part of the brain that responds to positive stimuli,” he explained. “When you perceive music that you like… there is this response of dopamine in a certain region of the brain.”

Although music and cooking were the only two activities that appeared to improve participants’ mental health, Zatorre said exercising and watching entertainment were also popular choices in the questionnaires.

Notably, Zatorre said the results of the study appeared to show that drugs, alcohol, and sex were not as sought out as other activities.

“It doesn’t mean that they didn’t do those things, but they didn’t report it as being something that really helped them,” he said.

And while the study hasn’t been published yet, Zatorre said he hopes the takeaway from their findings will be that music can be beneficial to people during the pandemic and during times of heightened stress and anxiety.

“Music is accessible. It doesn’t cost anything. You don't get fat from playing music. You don’t get addicted. You don’t get high. You don’t transmit any diseases. There are a lot of benefits,” he said.