155. Sad Music... For A Mood Boost?
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Welcome to Joy Lab!: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Joy Lab podcast, where we help you uncover and foster your most joyful self. Your hosts, Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Aimee Prasek, bring you the ideal mix of soulful and scientifically sound tools to spark your joy, even when it feels dark. When you're ready to experiment with more joy, combine this podcast with the full Joy Lab program over at JoyLab.coach
Henry: Hello, I'm Henry Emmons and welcome to Joy Lab.
Aimee: and I'm Aimee Prasek. Here at Joy Lab, we infuse science with soul to help you build your resilience and uncover your joy. And today we are talking about sad music and how it can influence mood. I love this. So for me, I'm actually not a super big music listener, at least compared to my friends. I feel like they are all huge music fans with these, just loving these [00:01:00] diversity of genres, and they have these amazing musical palettes, and I'll just kind of play something when I'm cooking or cleaning sometimes, but it's not a huge part of my world really.
However, I did grow up with music. My dad loved music and listened to all kinds. I mostly remember Rare Earth hearing that, Roy Orbison, Bob Marley, Eric Clapton, Michael Jackson, and always Prairie Home Companion on Sundays on the radio, so was an eclectic mix at our house. How about you, Henry? What was on your radio when you were a kid?
Henry: Well, I grew up in the 60s and 70s. So as you might guess, it was classic rock for me, and I was also too cheap to buy records. So, I just relied, relied on whatever was playing on the local radio stations. I lived in northern Iowa, so yeah, it was classic [00:02:00] rock.
Aimee: I'm picturing, um, farmland and Bob Dylan, for you, Henry.
Henry: more or less. Yeah.
Aimee: So maybe you all listening are having memories of songs rise up, um, along with these other memories that kind of accompany them, like a small Iowa town or your old apartment in Brooklyn or that CD your mom used to play in the car all the time.
You can just put yourself sort of back in the seat and feel the wind blowing on your face with the windows wide open. I think music, like smells, can really transport us. They can link us back to past experiences. And what's interesting, paradoxical, even, and what I what we really want to talk about today is that many people seek out sad songs. And it's paradoxical because sadness isn't necessarily something we really aim to feel, [00:03:00] right?
But so many songs are actually pretty sad. And so many of them are really popular. So people clearly want to listen to them. And I've had this experience. I remember after my dad died. I became kind of obsessed with Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt. And if you've heard that song before, it is like the epitome of a sad song.
It is painful. And during some of my darkest days, I would listen to it on replay. And here's the paradoxical part, I would strangely feel a little bit better after I heard it. And I remember thinking, God, this is kind of weird because this song is terribly painful. Why do I feel a little bit better? And then I remember hearing an interview with Darryl McDaniels from Run DMC on the [00:04:00] radio.
This is probably 15 years ago now. And he was sharing how he would listen to Sarah McLachlan's Angel on repeat during the worst of his depression. And he described it as this kind of life preserver for him. And if you've ever heard that song or caught an ASPCA commercial, it's comforting, but it is sad. So what's going on here, right? There was a recent study that really caught my attention that helps explain this paradox. This was a big study with a diverse group of like 775 participants right around there. And the researchers were interested in why people seek out sad music and how it impacts them.
So participants were assured anonymity. It was an online study and they filled out a survey to share their experiences. And here are the main findings. Folks who sought out sad music said they experienced [00:05:00] diverse emotions as a result. So, the main ones were sadness, no big surprise there, but here's the other ones:
nostalgia , peacefulness, tenderness, transcendence and wonder. And of these, nostalgia was the most common.
Also, the researchers noted these four dimensions or rewards that were common across participants when listening to sad music. These were what they called the reward of imagination. That was the first one. And with this, it was this experience of aligning with the rich emotional experience that the song or music portrayed or expressed. And so you kind of ride along this journey, it can kind of be cathartic. The second dimension was the reward of emotional regulation. So essentially, we can tap into the emotion of sadness or other "negative emotions", quote "negative [00:06:00] emotions". And with that awareness, it can dissipate...
That negativity that we might be feeling or that sadness. So we move into it and then we let it relieve a little bit. So we've worked on it a bit with that reward. The third dimension is a reward of empathy. I like that this is actually a social function. So even if we're listening alone, we're sharing the sadness, with the musician, with the music.
And then this last dimension was interpreted as the reward of no real life implications. I think this is super interesting. It's essentially how we can press play and tap into this sadness or other more negative quote emotions or just these rich, diverse emotions, but without application to our life.
Right? So if, if something brought us to that song, you know, a breakup or a death or, you know, just a frustration, but we can just press play. [00:07:00] We can feel it. We feel that sadness, but it's not like it was initiated per se in real life. So it offers this more safe exploration in some ways. So maybe you all listening can resonate with one of those rewards.
I feel like they all kind of ring true for me.
Henry: Yeah, I, I love that those dimensions are referred to as rewards.
That's just a great term for it. And that really does resonate with me. And in listening to that list, Aimee, so many of them feel to me as though they, in some ways, they help us to get connected, to break out of our isolation. Even though we might be you know, sitting there listening to the music all by ourselves.
In fact, it's probably, probably more effective if we do that, do it alone. But there's something about the internal experience that feels connecting. Like nostalgia, you know, I'm connecting with something that feels rich or bittersweet [00:08:00] or something. So I, as you're talking, I have this distinct memory of being in college. and choosing to stay in my dorm room all by myself on a Friday or Saturday night. Now, college was not a bad time for me. It was actually a great time. But I was a, I was sensitive. Um, you know, I still am, by the way. But I think that, you know, I think it was this intuitive sense that I just needed a little time to myself to process stuff.
So I just needed some solitude and on those nights what I chose to listen to were these slow, sad ballads pretty much, things that, that fit my mood.
You know, probably it was folk music or folk rock or something like that, a genre I still really like to this day. But as I look [00:09:00] back on it, I I think it helped me process my emotions.
You know, this is long before I'd ever heard of mindfulness. I wasn't very psychologically oriented, even. I didn't major in psychology in college, but I think I just knew intuitively that these emotions were roiling around inside of me and they needed some attention. And it was a way to give that attention to them.
So I would just sit and listen, and feel.
Aimee: Yeah.
Henry: And then some years later, I would add journaling to an experience like that, but back then it felt really nice just to process it without words, just, just having this beautiful, slightly melancholic internal experience.
And for me, there was just a ton of reward in that.
Aimee: Yeah. Processing it without words.
There's something there too, I [00:10:00] think, that's valuable. And if it makes you feel better, um, Henry, perhaps the reward of empathy here. I was alone most Friday and Saturday nights during most of my undergrad. Also on the other nights of the week. I don't know what I was listening to, if anything, but I'd like to think we were just blooming.
As you said, we were tending to our emotional landscape. So it looks different for all of us. If you are a sad song listener, cheers to you. I think there are rewards in that. There's wisdom in that to feel. It's a mindfulness practice in many ways. So to close, I want to quote journalist Zarin Burnett III.
He did a write up on Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt that I thought was really good. It kind of spoke to me. So here's some wisdom from that article. " Life rolls on. Every day you [00:11:00] gain experience is another day you gain strength. And it's the exact strength you'll need to deal with pain you'll find in your future.
Sorry if that's a bummer. It's actually a really good thing. You're going to be tested again and again and again, and each time you'll grow a little stronger, a little wiser, and a little deeper. If you forget that for a moment when you're suffering, just hum the tune to hurt and it'll remind you of life's tragic, bittersweet beauty."
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