Video Transcription

Session #2: Using Music

Does music help us to feel better or not? Everyone has different ways of choosing what music they want to listen to. Some people like to listen to familiar songs over and over; others like fresh music delivered to their ears all the time. Some people have different playlists for different times. For me, I just like to have a long playlist that I keep adding to all the time. What do you do if you’re someone who likes listening over and over? Let me guess, what does that feel like for you? Is it comforting, familiar, relaxing, calming? There’s a reason people like stuff to stay the same—it reduces stress, and it’s not a surprise.

But something else happens when you listen to the same music over and over: you build associations. When you hear a certain track, it reminds you of something. That might be conscious, or it might be unconscious. It might be something beautiful, or it might be something that used to be beautiful but now it’s broken, like a relationship. It’s pretty common to connect a song to a romance. For some people, it’s the song that was playing when they first met. When you talk to old married people, they’ll often have one of those.

But what happens when the relationship ends? Is the song spoiled forever? Do you delete it from your phone and just shudder if you accidentally hear it another way? Do you rewrite the script and deliberately create different memories to go with it? Or do you torture yourself with repeat listens?

If you’re listening to music to help you feel the feels, but it also makes you hurt, take a moment to stop here and think about it. What are you really using the music for? Do you feel better after, or does it work you up into an intense state? Or does it work for a bit, and then you feel worse and possibly unsafe? Listening to music as a release to feel the feels, or as a sweet memory of how things were, can be really useful for processing—until it’s not. And sometimes it won’t be. Often it’s better after enough time has passed. How long do you need to keep processing it for? Or, if it hasn’t achieved the goal of working through it by now, is it ever going to? Or is there something about the pain that you’ve grown a bit attached to, or dependent on?

Take some time now to think about the songs you listen to that don’t always do what you expect. You might want to delete them from your playlist just in case they pop up randomly and ruin your music listening experience. If you want to know how to kick the habit of unhappy associations, check out the next video about rethinking our music listening habits.

Video by Uni Melbourne