The Role Music Plays in Your Mental Health

Music, in all of its forms, can be a therapeutic experience. Listening and playing music can make significant contributions to your mental health. Throughout history, however, we have endured the premature deaths of musicians that have been the result of struggling with mental health issues. So, how can music be proven to assist in good psychological health while people who immerse themselves in it are suffering from mental health?

Kurt Cobain, Chester Bennington, and (possibly) Dolores O’Riordan were notable figures in the music industry who all battled and ultimately lost to mental health issues. It is worth examining how music can be a therapeutic release for some, but assist in the onset or exacerbation of mental illness for others.

Read below to find out how music can boost your mental health, how it can create illnesses, and how to use music to keep on the right side of mental health.

How Music Can Contribute to Your Mental Health

Music has been proven to have a significant effect on your mental health. So much so, that music therapy is its own sector of counselling. Music has shown to elevate your mood, can be calming, and increase your focus and brain activity. Whether you are songwriting, playing music, or just listening to a nice playlist, your mental health is likely to improve.

Music can also help you concentrate and minimize feelings of anxiety. For example, you can put on a bit of music in the background to help you focus on a task at hand. Or, when you are feeling stressed or overwhelmed, you can take a break and confide in your headphones to relieve some anxious sensitivities.

Music therapy can be a reasonable alternative for people who don’t want to ingest medicine for acute anxiety, depression, and focus issues. Furthermore, there are no physical side effects of listening and playing music when you do it correctly.

The Darker Side of Music

In the same way that music can have beneficial effects on your mental health, it can take a toll on you. Sometimes, when we have unhappy or depressed feelings, we can listen to the somber music to fuel the fire. This can be a method of release in small doses, but doing this for too long may intensify depression. If you continue to use the profound effects of music has on your mood to further incite despair, you may wind up with more profound issues. It is one thing to use music for a release, but when misused, music can have a dark side.

Musicians, especially famous musicians, endure the full-fledged adverse effects of music. Making your life about listening and playing music can bring an enormous amount of stress upon you — stress that may manifest into physical ailments or turn into mental illness such as anxiety and depression. The pressures that come with being a musician include struggling to deal with fame and fortune, exhaustion from touring on the road, and sometimes drugs and alcohol abuse — as a result of dealing with fame and fatigue.

The life of a musician is demanding, and these stresses can become too much to bear. The music world has seen many casualties as a result of living this lifestyle. For any aspiring musician, it is vital to know how to deal with these stresses properly to avoid mental illnesses.

Keeping in Good Mental Health

Using music for good and listening to uplifting tunes is one obvious way to boost your mood and mental health. However, some of the stresses that come along with being a musician are part of being a musician. Travelling to promote your music on the road can be exhausting, but it is necessary to make a name for yourself.

Ideally, and with some luck, you’ll find fame and fortune. However, as previously mentioned, many musicians may turn to drugs and alcohol to deal with these physical and mental pressures or have already been battling addiction.

According to Duquesne Nursing, “people are using illicit drugs at an increasing rate in the United States (m)ore often than not, addiction begins during the teenage years, though this harmful dependence can affect people of all ages.” Duquesne helps make the point that addiction is increasingly becoming a problem for people of all ages; however, it begins during the teenage years. This statement correlates to musicians struggling with addiction early on, and that drug use can start or increase with the stresses of being a musician.

In a significant portion of the musicians who have lost the fight with mental illness, drugs and alcohol were involved. You should never depend on drugs and alcohol to alleviate the stress that comes with being a musician. Drug and alcohol dependence only bring on or assist in, the further development of mental illness.

People from all walks of life suffer Depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues. Adding stress to these mental health issues, and not appropriately dealing with them (using drugs and alcohol,) can only make things worse. Music can be used as a valuable tool for its benefits to help aid these issues, and boost your mood to maintain your mental health when used correctly.