There is something transformative about music when you listen to it in headphones. I suppose it’s because there is no other noise that can come in. But it seems to make the music so much richer and deeper. If you didn’t want to dance to an upbeat song, put on your headphones – it will slip inside your brain and you will be nearly unable to stop the movement your body wants to make.
I love how headphones just wall off the world. When I’m experiencing anxiety I feel like I am clawing out of my skin. But I can put on headphones and my brain will recalibrate. It doesn’t have to be music, but music is best. A podcast or novel will also work though. I think a great deal of my anxiety is triggered by sounds. Happily, it can also be silenced by sounds.
I recall reading an article about how you can see the rhythms of music in someone’s brain MRI (or perhaps it was a different sort of scan) But they could see the brains activity sync up with music. It’s an actual thing that’s happening in my brain when I retreat into the headphones.
I think when anxiety is crawling around inside me – it’s like my brain is experiencing the static that used to be seen on TVs back in the day of antennas and 4 or 5 local channels. When you turned the dial to a channel that didn’t exist locally – the screen would be this garbled and skewed grey scale chaos and the noise was a harsh static.
But when I tune into music through the headphones my brain is adjusts itself to that and the static disappears. And that uneasy crawling of unreasonable aprehension ceases.
I am lucky to live in a time of headphones.
I like music when I’m doing an activity. But when I’m trying to think or create, the lyrics are too distracting. I guess synching my brain up to someone else’s music messes up my own?
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I think that’s possible. If your brain activity is doing something else, perhaps the music changes it’s activity.
I find music can be focusing for me. I cannot listen to any kind of spoken radio/podcast when I’m at work though. I can no longer focus on the numbers on the screen if I’m listening to conversation. I think I just don’t listen to music fully when I’m at work. I’m not thinking about the words. Just accepting the sounds.
But generally when i used the headphones to quiet the anxiety – I’m not doing anything but listening to what’s in the headphones.
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