It can be difficult to find a job that meets all your needs. Competitive, skilled, positive, and mindful are all essential qualities. You can’t be optimistic or mindful when you are under pressure to find the right job.
Your performance is directly related to how well you take care of your mental health. One can lose their very self in the process. It is important to go back to the blackboard every once in awhile to find yourself in this cycle.
Music can help you get back to yourself. Music can be a great tool for balancing stress and showing your best self. Music can awaken you from your deep sleep. I will be discussing how music can help improve your mental health.
Music can help you get back to the Present
Humans spend a lot of time worrying about the future and past rather than the present. When the default mode network, a subsystem in the brain, is active, this happens. It can lead to anxious thoughts and stress, but evolutionarily it has many benefits. To learn from past mistakes, we spend a lot of time reflecting on them and to plan for the future. To engage with reality, music forces us to be present-centered.
Music can help you deal with your past
Because of another evolutionary adaptation, negativity bias, a lot of our ruminating focuses on the past and future. It is both mentally and emotionally taxing. According to psychologist Daniel T Gilbert (author of Stumbling on Happiness), mind-wandering was closely associated with unhappiness in a Harvard study. Matthew Killingsworth, his co-author, stated that “a human mind can wander, and a wandering mindset is unhappiness.” Music activates the default mode network and also primes the brain to feel empathy. Empathy can help you overcome your limitations.
Music during emotional trauma
You might have experienced rejections after rejections. Emotional trauma could be a possibility. The brain produces a powerful cocktail of neurochemicals that can help us cope with the emotional trauma. After the song ends, and the fake-trauma as well, our brains are left with all the neurochemicals. It is like a warm, fuzzy opiate bath for the brain. No prescriptions!
Music during times of regret
Music can also help us get through difficult emotional times. There has been a time when we have sat down and felt self-pity, listening to Nick Drake’s sad musi-tragedies. It’s common to reach for the song that lifts us up, but it’s not uncommon to find ourselves drawn to dark, dramatic music when we feel down. When we are already feeling very shaky, why would we do this to ourselves? Arthur Schopenhauer, a German philosopher, put it perfectly: “The inexpressible depth and beauty of music, so simple to understand but so inexplicable is because it reproduces all of the emotions of our innermost being but completely without reality and distant from its pain.”
