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Mar 2, 2024

“Sad Girl” Music and the Iso Principle

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“Sad girl” pop isn’t a new genre, but it’s been having a renaissance over the last decade. That’s thanks to artists like Billie Eilish, Gracie Abrams, Olivia Rodrigo, Japanese Breakfast, Phoebe Bridgers, and so much more who are dropping hits lilting in melancholy.

It also comes at a time when the generations consuming pop music are increasingly open and intimate about their mental health, and music has long been a natural vehicle for people to self-regulate their emotions.

"There's a cliche about pop that it represents a retreat from reality, an escapist fantasy world where listeners get to leave their fears and anxieties in a vision of Katy Perry's 'Teenage Dream' or fun.'s 'We Are Young,'" Nate Sloan, host of Switched on Pop and assistant professor of musicology at USC Thornton School of Music, told Grammy news. "But modern listeners — especially young people — are pushing back against that paradigm, celebrating artists like Billie Eilish, Halsey, and girl in red, who don't shy away from the troubles of the world but sublimate them into their music."

He adds that this music helps them deal with their own "lived realities."

And so it makes sense that music streaming services are teeming with these soft and somber “sad girl” playlists, ones that listeners might turn to when they’re feeling sad or overwhelmed or wistful.

Music psychology expert Dr. Michael Bonshor told Esquire that people, especially young people, can and often use music to complement emotions. “If we want to continue feeling a certain way, we can choose songs that reinforce it. If we want to change our mood, then we can use music to change it, too.”

He adds that listening to “sad girl” music doesn’t inherently suggest someone is sad. They might want to relax, since that music tends to be slower, less intense, and melodic.

And a carefully curated “sad girl” playlist might cater or facilitate a mood, to a point. But if you’re looking to move from one undesired emotion (sadness, anxiety, stress) to a more desired one (content, focused, calm), you’ll want to get a bit more scientific with your music choices.

That’s why, at Spiritune, you won’t find a Billie Eilish song on one of our playlists. It’s a great song that might be slightly self-soothing, but it doesn’t follow the iso principle.

The iso principle is all about the journey. It follows that, if you’re trying to achieve a certain emotion, the music should first match your current emotional state and then gradually shift toward music that aligns with how you’d like to feel.

We utilize the iso principle as a cornerstone in our Spiritune music compositions. That's why, when you open up the Spiritune app, we always ask you how you *currently* feel, and then how you want to feel.

When the music meets the user where they are, it helps them feel validated, seen and embraced in whatever emotion they’re feeling. Then as the musical features gradually shift towards their desired emotion, the listener is able to feel tangible relief as the music helps gently guide them towards where they want to be.

“Our music is all about facilitating emotional transitions, offering a pathway to catharsis and understanding, like a musical GPS, leading you through your ups and downs,” Spiritune founder Jamie Pabst says. “In a world where mental health seems to be deteriorating by the day, people are craving tunes that get them, that speak to their real-life struggles, offering a shoulder to lean on and a hand to pull them through.”

When you think about “sad girl” music from the lens of the iso principle—or the power of musical transition on our mood—it makes sense that someone might turn to it when they’re already feeling sad, or want to feel a little wistful.

But to move from one mood to another, you can’t simply dwell in the same musical space and hope to magically feel like a new person.

There’s a science to the transition - and that’s where the magic happens.

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The Good Life Approach

The Good Life Center at Yale is an organization that equips students with evidence-based skills for fostering mental, physical, social, and emotional well-being. They host events that help students unwind with practices like yoga and art, as well as carve out physical spaces for health and relaxation (think: a green room filled with plants and natural materials).

The Center also provides students with tools they can use to combat stress in the moment. When the pressures of maintaining healthy relationships, getting good grades, and planning for the future start to add up, these science-backed techniques can help them get back to baseline.

“By offering accessible, evidence-based opportunities to build healthy habits, we help students build a more balanced and fulfilling college experience,” Bethel Asomaning, The Good Life Center’s 2025-2026 Director of Programming, tells Spiritune.

A Flexible Tool for Students

Starting this academic year, The Good Life Center is offering students a free subscription to Spiritune’s music library. This new offering comes on the heels of scientific research showing that music can be uniquely therapeutic for adolescents—providing an avenue to manage emotions, ease anxiety, and build self-confidence.

“By giving students a simple yet effective way to regulate their mood and enhance focus, this partnership advances our mission of making well-being a more frequent practice,” says Asomaning.

Here’s how it works: Using a customized link, students can sign up for a free Spiritune subscription with their school email address. Once enrolled, they receive full access to Spiritune’s music library and all customization features, allowing them to tailor the experience to their current needs and wellness goals. So far, over 100 students have downloaded the app and put it to use to sharpen focus before study sessions, calm the mind before sleep, and more.

Only a few months into the school year, early student feedback has been encouraging. “Many have shared that Spiritune has noticeably improved their ability to concentrate and manage stress while studying,” Asomaning says.

Students appreciate the app’s flexibility and accessibility, too. Since its tracks can be played to meet the demands of any time of day—morning, afternoon, or evening—it’s a helpful companion from the dorm room to the library. Its customized music arrangements can also guide students through a number of emotions—from sadness to stress to boredom—quickly and effectively.

“Spiritune’s scientific foundation, combined with its accessibility and usability, makes it a helpful tool for students as they integrate wellness into their rest, work, and daily rhythms of life,” Asomaning says.

Music Medicine for a New Generation

We’re thrilled to see how our partnership with Yale is equipping young adults to more effectively manage their mental health.

“Spiritune leverages a tool that young adults are already engaging with daily: music! The early results from Yale show how the app can help students in a low-stigma, intuitive way,” says Jamie Pabst, Spiritune Founder and CEO. “For us, this partnership reinforces a core mission: to make evidence-based musical support easy to use, widely accessible, and part of how the next generation takes care of their mental health.”

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Oct 30, 2025

Music for Exercise: How It Can Improve Power, Endurance, and Recovery

The New York City Marathon is coming up this weekend, which means thousands of athletes are busy preparing for the big day: gathering their gear, upping their carb intake, and of course, curating the perfect playlist.

Working out just isn’t the same without music, with one survey finding that 65% of Americans polled said they’d have “no motivation” to exercise without their tunes of choice. But what is it about music that helps us crush our athletic goals? Can sounds really make a difference in our performance, or is it just a placebo effect?

Here’s the science behind how music impacts mental and physical performance, and how to strategically use sound to nail your next workout.

The Science of a Sweat Playlist

Music can turn around your mood within minutes, making it a valuable tool when you’re faced with a daunting workout in the gym, on the mat, or at the track.

Research shows that exercising with music enhances positive mood more than working out in silence, which can lead to better results. In one 2018 study published in Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology, male and female athletes running on a treadmill selected more challenging settings, ran with more intensity, and felt better while doing it when they were able to listen to music.

In addition to improving mood, certain music can serve as a distraction from the pain and discomfort of exercise. For evidence, we can look to a 2023 study that observed 28 healthy people as they completed functional workouts.

Participants were carefully selected for their opposing musical tastes: For every person who enjoyed listening to a particular song, another person disliked it. Athletes reported feeling less pain when listening to their favorite songs than they did when listening to music they disliked or no music at all. Brain scans verified that listening to preferred music was associated with reduced activity in brain regions that respond to pain.

Some researchers attribute this physiological response to the "bottleneck hypothesis," which theorizes that the human nervous system can only process a certain amount of sensory input at a time.

This suggests that music’s workout benefits aren’t just a placebo. Music is, in a sense, “competing” with exercise-induced pain to capture your brain’s attention—and winning.

There is also an element of entrainment—the syncing up of your body with music—at play when you exercise to your favorite tunes. Your heart rate and blood pressure tend to align with musical tempo, speeding up during faster songs and calming down during slower ones. Musical patterns may also influence the speed and intensity of your physical movements, as shown in this research on walking cadence.

These responses can allow you to push through discomfort for longer and stave off mental and even muscular fatigue during exercise. With this comes an increase in performance and anaerobic power (the body's ability to produce high-intensity, explosive energy without using oxygen). Music-induced benefits have been recorded during all types of exercises and sports—from endurance to resistance training, from taekwondo to sprinting. And it’s not just the pros who stand to gain: the same effects have been seen in trained athletes and recreational exercisers alike.

Turning Up the Volume on Recovery

Don’t turn off the music as soon as your sweat session is over; it’s been shown to aid in exercise recovery as well.

One of the best indications of this is the way that music impacts heart rate variability (HRV)—a measure of the balance between the two branches of your nervous system: parasympathetic (rest and digest) and sympathetic (fight or flight). In short, a higher HRV signals that your body is more responsive to the parasympathetic nervous system, indicating that you are better equipped to recover from stressors.

“Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is one of the most powerful indicators of how the body adapts to demands—physical, mental, and emotional… It helps reveal how recovered or resilient someone truly is,” says Alexi Coffey, VP of Product at WHOOP—a wearable health companion that turns complex physiological data into clear, actionable feedback, and includes HRV as one of its key metrics.

Certain music—particularly slow, relaxing classical tunes—has been shown to increase HRV, making it a potentially helpful post-workout tool for kickstarting recovery.

While WHOOP has not done any formal research on the relationship between music and heart rate or HRV just yet, Coffey considers it a fascinating area. “Music can elicit powerful physiological responses—from lowering heart rate and promoting calm to increasing arousal and focus before competition,” she says.

Spiritune Spotlight: Crunch Fitness is equipping its members to prioritize recovery with its new Relax & Recover® wellness rooms. These spaces contain proven recovery tools like massage devices, red light therapies, infrared saunas, and, of course, a selection of music medicine. Spiritune and Crunch have joined together to incorporate Spiritune tracks into these spaces to help gym-goers relax, unwind, and recover faster so they can continue to show up as their strongest selves.

“Our Relax & Recover spaces used to play our gym music, which was not conducive to relaxing the mind and body,” says Carolyn Divone, a Senior Director at Crunch. “It is great that Spiritune’s composers have extensive knowledge on how one can achieve their emotional goals within minutes… Spiritune has been a perfect fit for this space.”

Putting It Into Practice

Ready to start using music to your advantage more during exercise? First and foremost, choose songs or melodies that you actually enjoy listening to. Personal preference plays a surprisingly significant role in how your body responds to music, with preferred songs consistently outperforming non-preferred songs in terms of performance metrics. So if the songs on your gym’s loudspeaker don’t do it for you, tee up your own music to listen to on headphones.

As for what tunes to choose for the ideal workout playlist, it depends on the exercise you’re doing. Since your heart rate and blood pressure tend to synch up with musical tempo, you’ll want to consider whether a faster or slower beat better suits the session. Faster songs (above 120 beats per minute or so) can fuel fast, high-octane moves, while slower beats may be more effective for slower, more focused movements, as well as calming anxious energy before a daunting workout or recovering after exercise. (Wondering about the tempo of your favorite track? This tool can tell you the BPM of any song.)

Spiritune makes it easy to tailor your music to your workout goals. Download the app to create personalized tracks that use neuroscience to match the mood and intensity you are starting your workout with—and the one you want to eventually reach—with a few clicks of a button. No BPM calculations or endless music service scrolling required. Spiritune also seamlessly integrates into the Apple HealthKit to record your listening sessions alongside your HRV data, so you can work out—and wind down—more intentionally and effectively. Music to any athlete’s ears.

Sep 24, 2025

Beyond the Runway: Music, Neuroscience, and Spiritual Connection at NYFW

Earlier this month, St. Bartholomew’s Church in midtown Manhattan filled with an ethereal soundtrack. It was not the sound of a typical Sunday Service. The songs were arranged using the principles of neuroscience to heighten their emotional impact, taking them from tranquil to transcendent.

When the legendary fashion designer Prabal Gurung first asked Spiritune to help develop the music for his New York Fashion Week show, “Angels in America,” our team knew right away that this was a special opportunity. We were even more excited to learn that the incredibly talented musician Chloe Flower would be our collaborator for the live choir performance in St Bartholomew.

The end result was even more powerful than we could have imagined. Gurung’s show, set to the soundtrack that Spiritune helped shape, exemplified music’s ability to heighten emotions, bring people together, and spark moments that can only be described as spiritual.

The Intersection of Music and Fashion

Gurung is a designer who thinks as much about emotions as he does fabrics. With each show, he creates space for his audience to have a deeply embodied experience.

His “Angels in America” show was built on the concept of non-denominational angels—the people who lift us up when the world feels heavy. During dark times, angels are the ones who allow us to hope. Gurung wanted to invite the audience to consider their personal angels—and he saw music as the perfect vehicle to guide this reflection.

Beyond inducing deep emotions on an individual level, music also has the capacity to bring us together. When we listen to music in public (especially in a space as sonically rich as a church!), our heart rates and breathing patterns tend to synchronize with those around us. When we feel moved by a piece of music, this connection becomes even stronger.

In order to heighten the emotional response and connection to the NYFW soundtrack, Daniel Bowling, Ph.D., the Neuroscience Co-founder at Spiritune, considered the biology of vocal expression and the neuroscience of rhythm. His scientific direction was masterfully blended into the art of performance by Chloe Flower.

As for the outcome, David Graver of Surface Magazine describes the show as “stirring” and writes that it “lifted attendees into a satisfying, ethereal emotional arc.” Read Graver’s complete coverage of the event here.

“This collection is about love, strength, and overcoming, and with Jamie and Dan's guidance, we were able to create a powerful soundtrack,” Gurung tells Surface.

Beyond the Runway

The musical elements of the show paired beautifully with Gurung’s new designs. “The collection unfolds against this backdrop of sound carefully designed to carry you on an emotional arc: grounding, lifting, and resonating in a way that leaves you changed when you walk out,” our Founder and CEO Jamie Pabst says of the event. “It’s as much a feeling as it is a fashion show.”

The show reinforced that music and art can transcend time by evoking ideas and emotions that stay with us long after the final note.

"Spiritune exists to show the world how music can be more than entertainment—it can be a tool for emotional well-being, connection, and even transcendence. Music unlocks our deepest emotions of joy, awe, and wonder, and in doing so, helps us thrive,” Pabst tells Surface.

We all agree the world needs joyful, inspiring moments now more than ever. And we’ve seen that when music and science come together, change is not far behind. We are so grateful to Gurung and Flower for allowing us to introduce a new audience to the transformative power of the Spiritune model.

Head to the app store to try it out for yourself (App Store / Google Play).

Nov 24, 2025

Yale and Spiritune Partner On a Unique New Mental Health Offering for Students