According to their investigations, soundscapes, classical music and ambient noise can all help to dissolve stress by inducing mental relaxation and muscle sedation.īut what is music? The definition is infamously elusive. “To silence sleep-preventing thoughts, I listen to minimalist composers and albums that have an overall sense of regularity and calmness to prevent spikes in tempo or timbre.” His account seems to be pitched in unison with scientists at the University of Fribourg’s Division of Cognitive Biopsychology and Methods, who have empirically proven that relaxing music can aid sleep. Jimi Tormey, a musician who has also suffered with insomnia, tells me of his own sonic self-medication: “I find that repetition is one of the key musical elements that helps me sleep, but dynamic percussive sounds somehow feel ‘closer’ to me, which can be disruptive when trying to get to sleep,” he affirms. Quality sleep is not a panacea and cannot resolve all the acute nightmares of the pandemic however, as subjective experience can attest to, music can be a practical leitmotif for a healthy regimen of rest. As a 2012 research paper from Korea University suggests, such worries can aggravate the triggers of insomnia, inducing the body to secrete excessive amounts of the hormone cortisol and leading to the hyper-alertness that breeds insomniac states.
While it may seem negligible compared to the widespread devastation of the coronavirus, issues ranging from epidemiological fears of infection to the economic worries of personal finance are preventing proper sleep. The recent outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought with it its own collateral miasma of stressfulness and sleeplessness, a factor reinforced by a scientific paper in the Journal of Sleep Research detailing the quarantine’s inimical effects on stress-inflected insomnia and emotional regulation. Calm music supports relaxation and this is also helpful to improve sleep.” Sleeping in uncertain timesįor me and millions of others, insomnia is the product of mental or emotional pressure, which can increase stress levels and engender a tortuously vicious cycle. Music may distract from feelings and thoughts and help the individual to fall asleep. “Thoughts and restlessness are preventing sleep initiation. “Stress and depression are likely to be followed by worries and thoughts,” she tells me. “One of the features which makes music a low-cost alternative to sleep medication is the distracting function of music,” explains Helle Nystrup Lund, a Danish PhD researcher and music therapist at the Unit for Psychiatric Research at Aalborg University Hospital, whose current research is focused on whether music can improve sleep quality for patients suffering from depression and insomnia. This should not have come as a surprise to me considering the scale to which I delved into psychiatric research on the topic at the time. After the temporary projects eventually flourished to a crescendo, music had become the requiem to my insomnia. Not a total cure for my affliction, but certainly a vital accompaniment. Finally, here was something that hit a chord.Īfter weeks of wakeful anxiety, in the soft strains of music I found a medium that regulated my mood, toned down the stress and tuned into my sleep patterns. In the past, I had used music to modulate my emotions, so I trialled a kind of self-directed musical hypnosis. A sleeping pill prescription was complicated by side-effect trepidation spawned by my state of nervous distress my mental health suffered and I feared a repeat of depressive episodes. I tried everything, from books on balmy midnight sleepwalks to friendly lectures on temperance. Like quicksand, the more I tried to sleep and ignore the freneticism of my racing thoughts, the harder it became to drift off – I couldn’t say how I partook in Miłosz’s becoming. Beleaguered in the stifling intensity of two interim jobs, I worked too much, too hard and too long stress-ridden and marooned in the city, I fell over the edge into a nightly insomnia.
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