Ridding Sadness with Music

Music heals.

This is something that we believe to be true but we don’t exactly know why or how. Perhaps it’s the distraction that listening to music provides from our problems, or the relatable lyrics, or even the music itself. All we know is that when we’re hurt, angry or sad, listening to music makes us feel better.

Below I have some ideas as to why.

Music sticks to us

Personally, I listen to music every day – while I’m at work, while I’m driving, at home, and even while I’m sleeping. Music is such a part of my life that I can actually distinguish parts of my life like chapters, depending on the songs that I was listening to at the time. I’ll explain.

Every playlist I create on Spotify acts as a sort of soundtrack to a particular time in my life. I can listen to specific playlists and be taken back to the events that were happening while those songs were in rotation.

Without getting too personal, there are playlists that I associate with specific years and months in my youth (doing various things, frequenting different places and seeing different faces, etc.) and there are other playlists that I associate with loss and pain. To be taken back into a mood is almost always bittersweet, but due to liking the music and for the purpose of documenting my life (like how a scrapbook works), I keep those playlists close.

This goes to show that music is very closely associated with the events that happen in our lives and in turn also with our emotions. Similar to how certain smells or tastes can bring up “forgotten” memories and quickly change your mood, so can certain songs, and for this reason we can view music as a sort of spiritual tool.

Relating to the lyrics

It’s pretty clear how song lyrics can make a person feel better. They say that misery loves company, and for musicians to be singing about situations that their listeners can relate to, it can provide the listener with a lot of relief. This is why some people are thankful to artists for being there when no one else was.

We may think that what we’re going through is an isolated incident, but luckily the reality is that many other people have had similar experiences. That is why you can always count on there always being a song that is very relevant to your problem.

An interesting thing to try is searching on your music streaming service a topic or emotion. For example: “my cat died” typed into the Spotify search bar yields many hits, including user-created playlists relating to cats passing away, such as: “my cat died this morning and I don’t want to cry in silence,” “my cat died…, and “songs I sang to my cat before he died :((”

These playlists are full of songs that helped another person feel better when going through the same situation that you now find yourself in.

I don’t mean to come off as a depressing person, but truthfully music heals and if you search for something specific, chances are you’ll find songs that will make you feel worse (but at the same time, better). I’ll explain below.

Find yourself listening to music related to your emotion to speed through it

It may sound counter productive, but when you have something on your mind that you don’t want or feel something you don’t want to feel, say, a negative thought or emotion, sometimes the only solution to get rid of it is to surrender yourself to it. For instance, ‘my partner has left me’ is a common negative thought and sadness is what comes after it. It’s possible that whoever is going through that situation might not want to think about it, so they distract themselves. They do many things – everything – except give that thought their attention and time.

While this strategy might work for a day or two or at most, a week, after that it gets really difficult to ignore the thoughts that you know you’ll need to think about sooner or later. I’m from the school that if you feel a certain way and you don’t want to, then you should fill up on that certain thing as much as you can so that in no time you tire yourself out from that feeling or unwanted desire. Why postpone the enviable emotion? If you’re feeling sad, listen to sad music. If you’re angry, listen to anger, and so on and so one.

The science

It’s not just personal anecdotes as to why music can heal and is good for us. In a paper published by Harvard Health titled “Healing through music,” it talks about the rapidly growing medical field of Music Therapy and how it has proven benefits. According to the paper, patients who had calming music playing before, during and after undergoing invasive procedures reported to have felt less anxiety throughout the operation. Apart from that, they also reported to have felt less pain and less of a need for painkillers.

Final thoughts

However you’re feeling, there is a song out waiting to prove useful by your emotions. To end, I’ll provide this quote by Debasish Mridha:

“Music can heal the wounds which medicine cannot touch.”