Use music to calm your anxiety
Sound therapy has been used for thousands of years. In ancient Greece, physicians used the music of flutes, lyres, and zithers as part of the medical treatment to heal people who were ill. In Australia, the didgeridoo has been used as a healing tool for something like 40,000 years. Tibetan monks have used sound bowl healing for more than 2000 years. Chanting, singing, and other forms of music have also been used for healing and to soothe the soul for thousands of years.
A multitude of scientific studies have shown that music has power to it. It can wind you up (think about the loud music pumping in the gym, or the way tense scenes in movies add tense music to ratchet things up). It can also calm you down.
When choosing music to reduce anxiety, you might want to choose upbeat, cheerful music to boost your mood, if you are feeling down, or even use something that you want to dance around to, if you feel like busting a move will help you feel better.
If you want to calm down and feel less stressed, I personally recommend using Baroque music in order to calm down or reduce anxiety. Why go for Baroque? (That joke never gets old for me.) Because all the tempos in Baroque music were based on natural body rhythms (heart beat, walking, skipping, etc.), and the music has a lot of predictability to its structure and loudness, without the accelerations and crescendoes that can be used in later music to produce excitement (or dread). Science backs me up on this, with studies showing that pregnant women who listened to classical music had less stressful pregnancies, and that Iranian students who were learning English had lower stress levels during testing when listening to Baroque.
These include things like Bach, Haydn, Vivaldi, Pachelbel, Albinoni, and more. Try this phenomenal playlist over at YouTube and you will see what I mean:
You should know that the power of music to calm and soothe is so widely accepted by scientists, that some of them have worked with musicians to deliberately create calming tracks, which is how the band Marconi Union from Manchester, England, came to create its track, “Weightless”. The official video of this piece on YouTube has been viewed in excess of 53 million times, so you can tell they are on to something.
Marconi Union collaborated with the British Academy of Sound Therapy to create “Weightless”, which begins with a steady beat of 60 bpm, decreasing slowly to 50 bpm; people’s heartbeats tend to synchronize with the beat in the music, and slow down, plus there are other deliberate choices in the piece designed to calm overall anxiety, including low sounds that are chant-like. You can read more about it here, and get a list of other music that lowers anxiety as well (including some Coldplay, Enya, and Adele).
Other music that might help you to relax includes recordings of singing bowls or sound bowl healings, which are using to induce a deeper trance-like meditative state. Researchers have found that brain waves synchronize with the vibration of the singing bowls, which causes the body to slow its heart rate and respiration as we sink into a more meditative state, all of which helps to lessen the impact of stress and anxiety.
Another option is something known as binaural beats, which work through headphones by introducing slightly different, almost undetectable, sound waves into each ear, which your brain puts together as a sort of “beat”. While binaural beats are not advised for anyone with a seizure disorder, it may be something you want to look into, and there are certainly a ton of tracks available on YouTube, Spotify, and more. I have tried these once and found them to be rather odd, as far as I’m concerned, but in case they are your thing, I wanted to mention it as an option, since some people have found it to relieve anxiety.
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