Songs as Medicine

There was a winter when I could not sleep. Not the occasional restless night that everyone has, but a sustained, weeks-long state of hypervigilance where my body forgot how to rest. I tried everything. Tea, meditation, prescription aids, leaving my phone in another room. Nothing worked. And then one night, around 2 a.m., I sat at my piano and started playing the simplest progression I knew. C major. G major. A minor. F major. The same four chords that have underpinned thousands of songs. And I sang nonsense over them. Not words. Just sounds. Vowels. Breath. And something happened. My shoulders dropped. My jaw unclenched. After about twenty minutes, I went to bed and slept through the night for the first time in weeks.

I am not a therapist. I cannot tell you why music affects the nervous system the way it does. But I can tell you what I have experienced. When I am anxious, my thoughts race in loops. The same worries, the same catastrophes, the same what-ifs, circling faster and faster until they feel like the only reality. Music breaks the loop. It gives the brain a different pattern to follow. A melody has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A rhythm establishes a predictable cycle. A harmony creates relationships between notes that resolve in ways that real life often refuses to. The structure of music is an alternative to the chaos of an anxious mind.

I have a playlist for every emotional state. Not the ones I stream publicly. Private playlists with names like morning dread and post-argument and cannot name this feeling. Some of them are full of songs that match my mood, that let me sink into it and feel less alone in the feeling. Others are full of songs that contradict my mood, that offer a different frequency for my body to try on. I do not have a rule for which approach works when. I just follow what my body wants. Sometimes you need to marinate in the sadness. Sometimes you need to be pulled out of it. Music can do both.

Writing songs when I am depressed is complicated. On one hand, the urge to create often disappears completely. The blank page looks like an enemy. The piano feels like a stranger. On the other hand, when I can push through that resistance, what comes out is often more honest than anything I write when I am happy. Depression strips away the performance. It removes the desire to impress. What remains is raw, unfiltered, sometimes ugly, and often true. I have songs in my catalog that I wrote in the middle of depressive episodes, and they are some of the most requested at shows. Not because they are fun. Because they name something that the listener has also felt and could not name themselves.

I want to be careful here. Music is not a replacement for professional mental health care. I see a therapist. I have benefited from medication at different points in my life. I believe in the full toolkit. But I also believe that music is part of that toolkit. It is a practice, a discipline, a relationship that I can turn to when other resources are not available. At 3 a.m., when no therapist is taking calls and the pharmacy is closed, the piano is there. The guitar is there. The voice is there. These are not small things. They are lifelines.

The songs that heal me are not always the ones I expect. Sometimes a piece of classical music will unlock something that a thousand love songs could not touch. Sometimes a harsh, abrasive track will clear my head in a way that gentle music only makes worse. I have learned to trust my body's response over my mind's categorization. If a song makes me cry, that might be exactly what I need. If a song makes me dance, that might be the medicine. The body knows. The body is always telling us what it needs. We just have to learn to listen without judgment.

I have started thinking of my songwriting practice as a form of daily hygiene. Not because every song needs to be good, but because the act of creating, of turning internal experience into external form, is a way of processing what would otherwise accumulate and rot. Unprocessed emotions are like unprocessed food. They sit in the system and cause problems. A song is digestion. It breaks the experience down, extracts what is useful, and releases the rest. Some days the digestion is easy. Some days it is painful. But either way, the system needs it.

If you are struggling right now and music is part of your life, I encourage you to use it intentionally. Make the playlist. Sit with the instrument. Sing the thing you are afraid to say. You do not have to share it. You do not have to perform it. You just have to make it. The transformation happens in the making, not in the reception. And if you do not make music, listen like it is medicine. Put on the headphones. Close your eyes. Let the sound enter your body and rearrange something. That is what music has always been for. Not entertainment. Not industry. Medicine. The oldest kind there is.