How Music helps me

Hey everyone, how are you all? Hope you’re all in good mental health. Today, I’m going to talk to you about why music plays a big part in my journey of getting to grips with my mental health, how it helps me deal with hearing voices in my head, and how it helps me beat the negative thoughts I have.

So, when washing up, I see images of me cutting my fingers off and hear voices telling me to. At first this really started to freak me out, and I had to stop what I was doing and take a break from it because it was terrifying. I managed to get hold of an iPad, which then allowed me to listen to the radio or YouTube. This was the best thing I’ve done, because it kept my brain active and nothing negative or dangerous would happen. Then, I came across this artist on YouTube called WaTTz: his music is not usually my style – grime rap – but I love how passionate he is about his music and it has helped me a lot just listening to what he does. And the other side to this is, you should see me trying to sing along to his song and dance while washing up! The neighbours laugh at me as they know I don’t care: I’m having a good time. Here link to his song talk about it https://youtu.be/PMt5hoFd-IM.

When I have negative thoughts in my head, I tend to sit there and let them get worse, so a negative thought could turn into self harm. If I hadn’t dealt with them, it would have ended up with me having end of life thoughts. But now I’ve learned how to deal with them and not let them beat me, so I will turn to music to distract my mind. This time, I turn to a different genre of music – Meatloaf – and I find it really helps to ground me when I’m in a low place. Here’s a link to my favourite meatloaf song https://youtu.be/3QGMCSCFoKA.

When I’m struggling to get of to sleep, I would just lie there and my mind would go off all over the place. Because of this I would struggle even more to get to sleep, but since meeting my partner, she has introduced me to meditation music and I love it, especially when she’s not around. I will put an eight-hour track on in YouTube, shut my eyes and let the music do its job. I also find this style of music helps if I’m on public transport by myself. It helps me tune out and also helps me ground myself. Here link to one of the 8hour tacks on YouTube I use https://youtu.be/857bt64SomQ

The reason I do this blog was one of my admins is posting music on his Facebook each day, and is now doing so in our Burgh Castle Almanac group as well. It’s really made a positive impact on my days, so thank you, Robert, and I’m going to let him post the last song here. And here a link to Robert song https://youtu.be/ZF4Z6smOrZw.

Thank you for reading. I wish you all good mental health and hope we’re back to normal soon.