Why Music Has the Power to Heal |
Healing happens as you create a physiologic state of safety.
Music is a well-documented way of accomplishing this state.
Specific types of music can move your brain away from pain circuits and towards the life you desire.
Make music part of your daily healing journey.
An often-overlooked truth about healing is that it occurs only in states of safety.
Human beings break down under sustained threat. When the nervous system detects danger—whether physical, emotional, social, or mental—the body reallocates resources to survival. Stress hormones rise, inflammation increases, muscles tighten, digestion slows, sleep deteriorates, and the mind becomes hypervigilant. This response is highly useful in genuine emergencies. Modern life keeps most of us trapped in chronic threat long after any actual danger has passed.
In such a state, people often try harder and harder to “fix” themselves. They search for more techniques and more self-help strategies and apply more mental effort. Ironically, that very striving can reinforce the message that something is wrong. The nervous system interprets the constant search for solutions as evidence that danger is still present.
During the worst seven years of my personal ordeal, suffering from chronic mental and physical pain, I became an “epiphany addict.” I estimate that most people in chronic pain spend over half their day either discussing their pain with anyone who will listen, scouring the internet, seeing doctor after doctor, joining pain support groups, and undergoing test after test or surgery to escape the pain. Why wouldn’t you? However, you are heading in the wrong direction, because that is where your brain and attention are focused, inadvertently reinforcing pain circuits.
Healing begins when the body receives a different message: You are safe. Music is one of the most powerful ways to create that signal of safety.
The Power of Repetitive........