Gabriella Pinos/Assistant Entertainment Director
When it comes to health, music is our best friend. It motivates us when we’re sad, helps us express ourselves when words won’t cut it and comforts us when we’re alone.
As angsty teens, it’s one of the first things we turned to when we felt down. Maybe you wore black eyeliner and blasted My Chemical Romance when you were in a rut. Or maybe you were r like me and listened to One Direction because that’s what everyone else was listening to.
Our mental state has obviously changed since then, but our love for music is still as strong as ever. In 2017, the average American spent an average of 32.1 hours a week listening to music, according to a study done by Nielsen. FIU also ranked in the top 10 universities with “early risers,” or students listening to music between 7 and 8 a.m., on Spotify Insights in the same year. Nothing says “good morning” like some aggressive rock music to wake me up.
But regardless of how old you are, music has a huge influence the way we think and feel. It’s now known that music has a plethora of health benefits, from relieving stress to easing anxiety to even enhancing blood vessel function, according to USA Today.
Its mental implications are the most important part of that equation. For us, music is an escape, a way for us to form connections and relate to others. This is crucial in our formative years, when the desire to be popular and well-liked is all we can think about.
When we get older, music is an outlet to “release our inhibitions,” as Natasha Bedingfield puts it. Whenever I feel down, I turn to my favorite songs for relief, tapping my insecurities away along to guitar riffs, drum solos or an emotional ballad.
Music is so soothing, in fact, that it’s now applied in therapeutic practice. Music therapy is now recognized as a way for patients to address their physical, mental and emotional needs. Treatment ranges from listening to music to singing, moving along to and creating it, according to the American Music Therapy Association.
Music reflects our emotions through rhythm and melodies, things that transcend language and time. As teens and young adults, we often try to explain how we feel through words, but words don’t do our mental health justice. Our minds are a jumbled mess of feelings and thoughts, music is an avenue for us to express ourselves without using coherent sentences.
Last year, Karen Peterson Dancers, a dance organization featuring dancers with and without disabilities, performed at FIU as part of an Honors College symposium. Even though some were constrained to wheelchairs, the performers expressed themselves freely through music and choreography. For them, art and music were more than just an enjoyable experience, it was a form of communication.
That performance helped me understand the power music, above any other medium, has in our lives. As busy college students, we have very little time to take care of our mental health along with worrying about school and work. But we shouldn’t take the therapeutic nature of music for granted. Even exercising or meditating with a song playing in the background can have a profound effect on our performance.
So, for our physical and mental state, do yourself a favor and lose yourself in the rhythm of your favorite song. That extra dose of self-expression is not only satisfying but one of the healthiest things you can do today.
Photo by Gavin Withers on Flickr.
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