Leave Unhealthy Behavior in 2024
As the new year really starts to take hold, now is the time for all of us to put our new year-new me goals into action. We should all be striving to have a healthier mind, and there are plenty of great ways to accomplish that.
One great way to break into a healthier year, and the pathway to a healthier life, is to start looking into mental health professionals, or start considering a wider variety of practices. One of the more important skills you can focus on in the coming months is emotional regulation, specifically through music. It may sound a bit odd, but music and sound can have a huge impact on how we feel day-to-day.
Sometimes, certain methods of improving mental health just don’t work for everyone, and picking the right person is just as important. To simplify that process, let’s take a look at audio-based clinical psychology: music therapy.
Despite what many of us may believe, our ears aren’t as accurate at interpreting the world around us as we may believe. This often has to do with memory, which many psychologists know is deeply unreliable. We can see this issue easily in everyday life. If Person A says something, and Person B repeats it right after, trying to exactly copy Person A’s tone and rhythm, but the repeat will usually be glaringly wrong. Everyone who heard what Person A had to say, and Person B couldn’t quite grasp it, but that was how it sounded in their memory. This sort of mistake can also happen in real time, though, without the use of memory.
Just like the rest of our many human senses, the ears can easily be tricked. Look at the Cocktail Party Effect: our ears are great at filtering out information. Say you’re at a cocktail party. A dozen small groups of people are all having their own conversations around the room. It’s an enclosed space, so you can technically hear everything around you, but you’re only able to focus on your own conversation. You unconsciously defocus from the crowd. Even if you’re on your own, you can hear a hundred people talking at once, but still zone out if your brain changes focus.
These are just a couple of the many ways your hearing may not be your most faithful sense. Luckily, we can use some of these tricks of the mind to our advantage.
Our brains aren’t just sitting in jars on a shelf– anything you sense around you can impact how you feel. A texture you touch can inspire fear. Seeing a person you love can make you happy. Smelling something undesirable can make you upset. Hearing is no different, and it has a special relationship with emotional regulation.
Emotional regulation is an important part of everyone’s life. As we all know, too much of any good thing is a bad thing, and too much of a bad thing is also a bad thing. The goal of emotional regulation is about keeping your feelings at a healthy, balanced level.
Too much cortisol, the fear hormone, can cause physical issues, meaning there’s technically an actual manifestation of the unjustified level of fear. Too much dopamine, the pleasure and reward hormone, can make it difficult to control your impulses and increase aggression. You should always be on the lookout for unbalanced emotion.
Several disorders can also cause disruptions in emotional balance. For example, OCD can cause an excess of cortisol to be released. While medications are generally miracles to people affected, they don’t work for everyone. They also only ease symptoms, so including extra strategies that minimize negative effects of mental disorders are good ways to live.
There are plenty of healthy strategies to emotional regulation. Of course the basic things, like always wearing clean clothes, eating right, and having a roof over your head are top priority, because you can’t build a house without a foundation. On top of those, though, the best way to work on yourself is in a group. Having a large, developed social network is a must for anyone. Working through issues with other people is the way we grow as humans.
Now, what does this have to do with hearing?
The human brain is great at creating relationships between unique sensations and certain emotions. Here’s a quick exercise– think about the following items and determine how you feel while remembering them:
Did you experience any brief joy? Did you feel energized? Maybe bored or anxious? Even without experiencing them as you read it, your brain has created an emotional response to those ideas. They’re all feelings based on moments you’ve had with them in the past that you can now recall.
Our ears are particularly good at creating these relationships. Seeing someone we love is amazing, but just hearing them, which, in the age of the cell phone, is much easier to accomplish, can work just as well.
Hearing also has a large impact on fear response. The sounds we hear can quickly be understood as scary or okay. These are all emotional responses to our surroundings.
Knowing that our hearing, like so many other senses, can both be tricked and have a large impact on our feelings, we should look for ways we can positively regulate our emotions through sound.
So, what is music therapy? Music therapy is a form of clinical psychology that involves using music to regulate emotion. It’s become a pretty hot topic in the psychology world in the last few years, but most people don’t know that it’s been around for almost a century. Music can have a strong emotional effect on the brain, and plenty of people have found ways to support people’s mental health through this practice.
You can do a number of things during music therapy. The therapist might have you play music. You don’t need any skill going in, and the music therapist will tailor your clinical experience to your music experience. You may also listen to music, and you can discuss the poetry and meaning behind the lyrics.
Music therapy is heavily individualized. The therapist has to make sure they understand what kind of music you like, so each appointment is completely specialized to you. The music therapist, because the role is so specific, may also work with another professional to give you a more holistic mental health experience. This could be a regular old therapist, a psychiatrist, or whoever you need for your specific mental health journey.
Music therapy can also have much more immediately noticeable effects on patients. Music is a useful tool in improving and retaining memory in people with dementia, and it can function as a painkiller for those recovering from surgery.
For at least as long as we’ve recorded history, we’ve had music. From Homer’s epics to Taylor Swift, music has helped people throughout all of time work through their lives. If music has been around us for so long, then there has to be a universal psychological reason we keep playing it, and there is. Music has been found to produce a strong emotional response in most people. It’s easy to relate to the person or people performing a piece of music. This makes emotional response fairly universal.
Of course, we all like our own different styles of music, so there can’t be a one-size-fits-all treatment plan, but that tends to work for the better. Approaches to therapy should be specialized based on the patient.
You may be reading this with your child in mind, wondering if music therapy could help improve your kid’s mental health. Music therapy is great for children too! Even with toddlers, music therapy can help improve emotional regulation, cognitive skills, and motor ability.
Like with any form of therapy, there is the possibility that music therapy doesn’t work for you. That’s perfectly natural– it doesn’t work for everyone. This is where doing plenty of research into picking the right professional for your needs comes into play.
All of this comes back to our hearing. Certain songs and genres of music will have certain connotations in our brains. We can use these connections to get greater positive results in sessions.
It’s never a bad time to weigh all of your options. Who knows, music therapy could be the thing for you. It’s helped millions of people through tough times in their lives, including emotional regulation, and it may be able to help you, too.
