E026 - Listen to Ambient Music – Release Anxiety and feel Grounded

Welcome to you, to here to this channel, to this moment, to this exact moment, as we begin, let's just get feet on the ground, really feeling the lower halves of our bodies. Today, we are gonna talk about one of the greatest hacks for shifting the state of one's nervous system and getting out of feeling nervous or sad. And that is, using music to down regulate or up regulate your nervous system.

Read the blog below or watch the video!

I'm gonna say, before we go any further, please subscribe to this channel, click the bell. I will know it at some deep level that you've just done that and it'll give me this minute habit of dopamine and I'll be very glad. Thank you. Okay, so let's get into this. You will know that music shifts your state. But I think it's quite useful to do a deeper investigation into this, exactly what States does it create? Now for those of us who have a tendency to get into a bit of fight or flight, in other words, get this sympathetic nervous system activation from work, or just generally in your nervous system, it's quite uncomfortable to live there and it makes us sick. So how can we down-regulate out of that overstimulation? Music is a beautiful way to do that. I'm gonna say that listening to music with beats and with discernible vocals, sometimes will not do the trick or many of the times will not do the Trick. So I'm gonna say a lot of modern music with grooves and discernible vocals actually drives us into our heads and out of our bodies. Say if you wanna come home into what might be called the ventral vagal response, which is seated in your nervous system, Then you're not gonna want to listen to modern pop music to do that. So I really recommend ambient music and very gentle piano music. There will be a link to some of my Spotify playlists here, Which I just filled with that kind of music, because I love the effect that it has on my nervous system. So it can open up the emotional body or just one sense of connectedness to one's emotion. If you have favorite artists who produce this, kind of, please let me know, share your favorites in the comments. But I also wanna say there's another really useful thing that it can do. And this is specifically music with beats is on the one hand, it can drive us into our heads. In other words, we're working or driving. And basically we're gonna be completely in our heads, out of our bodies and in default mode completely unconscious. But if we allow ourselves to embody with that music, then it can really help us get physical, come home into our bodies and even move out of being in the head. So allow our awareness to drop. So putting beats on at home and dancing and just getting some primal energy out. And I think we've been dancing around fires and in discos for millennia, and it's wired into our nervous system to bring us home and heal. But It's a really a question of doing it consciously and noticing this shift instead, and choosing to embody, get into the feet, get into the lower half of the body. And ideally let go of all of the socialized dance moves. I would do the robot right now, but I don't feel like it. And just let a little bit of wildness out. Consciously using sound to shift state, and it happens unconsciously in movies, we are being manipulated all the way through a movie, through music to feel things. And it happens right now. And our mammal brain said it's long before we've thought a single conscious thought classical music as it is called in those movies is telling us to feel scared and then excited. And then... yeah, that's excited. And then Something this way comes. And so it is, but we can use this exact same mechanism to essentially entrain our nervous system, energy field or mammal body, whichever way you want to refer to it, to come home. So I really recommend having different Playlist's to Sooth the mammal body or to help you rewild, drums and some grooves to get your ass out and to move In a totally different episode. At some point I will actually dance, but that's not gonna happen for some time. So I hope this has inspired you to just work with music and enjoy music, but enjoy it more consciously watch out. And especially this is one of the things that I've noticed is watch out especially for background music that has a lot of beats and vocals in it while you're working or doing stuff around the house. Watch out for talk radio. Wow, talk radio. What do Eddie got into your head? Just put that in the background. Literally you'll just live up here with this endlessly dissatisfied problem-solver as your location of awareness. And in the background of this very same video, you'll hear an album of mine called Piano Nocturnes volume one. I put a link down to that. You can stream that on your favorite streaming service. And that piano album is designed to have huge spaces between the notes, to down regulate the nervous system to bring you home. Listen to it, let me know how you feel. So that's it for today. I hope you got something out of this and we'll investigate using music more consciously. There's beautiful mantra music if you wanna feel a little bit more spiritualized. There's great R&B and hip hop if you wanna get embodied and move and feel groove, and there's lots of grunge music, if you wanna feel sad and like an alienated white person in the suburbs, and there's all sorts for everyone.

Thanks for reading.