Rewind Your Mental Health: Music Therapy

So, let’s catch up…

Looking back over the last year, we celebrated Mental Health Awareness Week and World Mental Health Day. As a business, we’ve created various workshops and enrolled on a new roadmap to support people within the workplace with their mental health. Ultimately, we want to create a safe environment for our people. It’s been gratifying to see other businesses jump on board to show their support for mental health on social media.

But these weren’t just annual campaigns for us.

We want to continue sharing helpful content with our community and Unplugged podcast listeners. This extends beyond the podcast itself, we’re using this blog space to share highlights, show notes and particular pieces. These may be articles, songs, TV shows, documentaries, podcasts, or books that profoundly affect our own mental health.

For this edition of Rewind, we wanted to reflect on an Unplugged podcast. We discussed our passion for music and the significance of using it as a tool in our self-care toolbox.

Remember what live music felt like? Lyrics you would scream at the top of your lungs, matching the level of volume with the level of accuracy they described your personal crises, drumbeats thumping straight to the core of your heart. Emphasising the power of music, provoking tears and simultaneously uplifting irritable moods with the same melody.

All music is therapeutic and often it’s how you choose to hear music that depends on whether it induces you to feel sad, happy, angry or uplifted. You can connect with certain songs to navigate through challenging experiences.

That power can be felt in formal healthcare settings. Music is a form of therapy and registered music therapists help people with their psychological, emotional and social needs. Music can, in fact, treat a range of physical and mental conditions.

A music therapy session could involve listening to music, playing instruments, writing lyrics and singing. Working to manipulate melodies, people learn to build connections and express themselves creatively.

Using music is an effective tool to regulate our emotions. Across cultures, we build learning methods (the alphabet tune pops to mind), physically move with dance, develop relationships, and individual social identities. That’s beyond creating, playing, listening and growing our fountain of musical knowledge.

From adolescence through our entire lives, music is everything.

There’s an element of comfort music can offer, which is entirely personal to you. Whether it’s to offer a moment of meditation, drive motivation, or speak directly to your heart. Just like our brain chemistry, hormones are activated in different ways for different people.

Music has an individual impact on us all.

Do you have a favourite artist who you can turn to at times of need? Listen to the latest episode of Unplugged Mental Health