Chilling on your way back home from a long day is never complete without some music, am I right? Music let’s us escape from the mundane and experience, even if it’s just for those measly two minutes, something uniquely different. It’s been ingrained within our culture from the prehistoric days as a way of conveying stories in a way that just can’t be matched.

If you’re like me, you don’t proscribe to being a fan of just a particular genre of music; you are as moody of a music listener as there can be. However, there is the added benefit of how different types of music can soothe the mind and enhance your overall emotional state and mood. From our early heyday as toddlers being sung a lullaby to adults urging to be left alone with headphones in during our daily commute, music has played a pivotal role in shaping the mind.

The mind has become treated more recently as a muscle that needs to be trained like any other muscle of the body. Meditation to yoga to sleep have all been studied to understand their underlying impact to the brain and how that carries forward to intellect and motor functions. Music has shown to drastically improve mental well-being in a variety of ways for both cognitive and physical means. When you listen to music you like, you will naturally find your body moving to its rhythm as your brain releases a chemical called dopamine in response to positive signals.

Tying back to moods, music has this odd sensation of creating and nurturing an emotional ambiance. You’ll often see athletes bumping along to the harsh beat to amp themselves up before a game or match. Sometimes though, they’ll slowly bop to the beat when it’s one of the last things you would think an athlete would listen to in preparation for a game/match. When we experience a life altering moment, we gravitate towards music to enhance the emotional state of mind - happy, exciting music to celebrate a joyous occasion or more mellow, melancholic music to feel and breathe a sorrowful event that is deeply affecting us. Music is like a drug, providing soothing effects that can be beneficial or harmful depending upon how it’s used.

Your mind develops a personal relationship with music through the brain’s neurochemical responses and body’s physiological reactions. You will learn to crave music from a specific domain that aids in the additional release of dopamine and physiological exhilaration. This is the point in which you have the grave responsibility of understanding what music works best for your mind and well-being. A key differentiation here is that musical taste is drastically different from musical style. Musical taste has little to no negative effects since it’s simply what your brain likes to listen to. On the other hand, musical style has detrimental effects if not dealt with carefully in your music choices.

Harking back to the emotional state of mind, we often find ourselves yearning for music that amplifies the state of mind. More often that not, the mind fires away with a million unwarranted messages that hold little to no significance, but they all aid in crafting a story that needs to become reality and constantly reinforced. Music is one gateway to reinforce such a negative head space through the stylistic choices you may crave in the down moments. It’s in times like those when I believe it is best to find true, authentic music you enjoy and that soothes your mind rather than amplifies your mind’s own persona. It’s difficult to explain, but there is a way to detach yourself from your mind and the emotional situations and environment and analyze who in fact is really making the choice when you choose that one set of songs versus another.

Meditation with the appropriate music is a great way to ease the mind and body of all these firing messages that may kick off bad habits when it comes to choosing music. Detaching yourself from you own mind is no easy feat, but it can be done through, you guessed it, the use of music and stillness. Musical scales can match the frequency of human frequencies and be utilized as a way of re-tuning yourself. I find listening to instrumentals to be a great way to detach from the thoughts of the mind by detaching music from spoken language; this allows the authentic beats, melody, rhythm, and pitch to do all the talking.

At the same time, I don’t mean to say that you should completely ignore darker emotions that need to be channeled. I detail how there is power in the darker emotions here, so take stock of them still in potentially other ways instead of succumbing to the negative feedback loop of music every time. The emotional environment we situate our mind around will have a lasting impact on its cultivation and emanation to our daily actions. Like our immune system, the brain will adapt to its surrounding stimuli, and music can be one of the greatest stimuli we feed it.

The power of music is infinite, so we should not take it for granted with its beneficial qualities. Music affects us in a way that leaves a lasting impression and call to some action. In fact, scientists find that music stimulates more parts of the brain than any other stimuli. That’s a crazy thought when you think about it and the magnitude of our choices. I once heard that it’s the power of the choice that has a redemptive quality - think some of you might know the familiar figure who said this. Your musical choices can be the greatest power to your mind and its development for emotional intelligence and IQ. Whether it’s an emotional craving or moment you’d like to reminisce back on, music can take us places like none other. Let’s all find a way to soothe and healthily develop our minds for a better future with the aid of music.