Depression Learning

Can Music as Stress Relaxation Therapy Reduce Depression?

More than 120 million people, around the globe, are diagnosed with some form of depression. Major depression, dysthemia, bipolar depression, and postpartum depression are the most prevalent. Depression is a serious mental illness, it isn’t just a state of mind; you can’t just turn depression off like you can a light switch. Yes, you can influence how you react to depression symptoms, and you can alter your brain chemistry enough to make the depression go away, but that is different than snapping your fingers to make it go “poof.”

You may not agree that major depression, dysthemia, and postpartum depression are serious mental illnesses; however, the suicide rate among depressed individuals suggests otherwise. Many psychotherapists are using music therapy in their approach to help their clients reduce or alleviate their depression symptoms. It’s generally known that many of us gravitate to music; it seems to reach inside us to soothe the soul. Music therapy has been used for many years in the treatment of depression and other mental illnesses in hospitalized individuals. Music therapy, sometimes called “stress relaxation” is a valuable tool to decrease stress and to help decrease depression symptoms.

You don’t need to be in a therapist’s office, and you don’t need to be a patient in a psychiatric hospital to benefit from music therapy. All you need to do is go to a quiet place in your home, where you won’t be distracted by people, phones, and other influences. Put on a CD of your favorite “mood” music, or nature CD. If you don’t necessarily want to listen to Bach and Beethoven, or some other music CD, you can listen to the sounds of nature set to a soft music in the background.

The next part of music therapy, or stress relaxation, is the relaxing part. Begin to relax your body, starting with your head and face muscles. Concentrate on every part of your body, starting at the head and work down to your toes. Relax your muscles and let the stress, anxiety, and negative feelings flow out of them. As you allow the stress to flow out, allow the mood from the music to flow in place of it. Let your mind find peace with the music. Using the power of suggestion let your mind take you to your “happy place.” Your happy place can be on a beautiful mountainside, or a beach in Hawaii, or in a canoe in the middle of a quiet lake. It doesn’t matter where you “go” in your mind, just let it wander. This sounds a lot like self-hypnosis, and in a way it is. We self-hypnotize all the time anyway, we just might not realize it. For instance, when you drive home from a long day’s work and you don’t remember how you got home. You drove home in a state of self-hypnosis, or auto-hypnosis. When you watch a movie, and you get so engrossed that the movie is over and you don’t know where all the time went, you were, in a way, hypnotized. With music therapy, the music helps you to enter into a calmer state of consciousness.

You can take music therapy with you anywhere you go. You can plug into your happy place by turning on your iPod. You don’t even necessarily have to carry the music with you, because after much practice, you can put yourself in this relaxed state at will. Many people let the music play within their heads, let the melodies dance in their minds to take them to their happy place. It’s amazing how calm and relaxed you feel after a “session” of music therapy. Most people find a marked reduction in their depression symptoms when they use the techniques they learned in music therapy on a regular basis.

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