“We Can Be Heroes”: How Empowering Music Can Change Your Thinking
Our minds wander all the time. Whether you’re watching television, driving to work, getting a haircut, or taking an exam (yikes!), chances are, you’re quite familiar with the feeling of being on a kind of mental autopilot. You don’t feel very in-control of your thoughts, and they seem to pop in and out spontaneously for no real reason. These moments may feel inconsequential and unimportant because of how unintentional they are. However, the thoughts that you have when your mind wanders can have a significant impact on your emotional state. Whatever goes down when you’re in that floaty, free state of cognition can shape bigger-picture outcomes. With this in mind, it seems productive to figure out how to maximize the positive impacts that mind-wandering can have on your emotional state. One method that shows a great deal of promise is the use of music. Dust off your capes, everyone! If you choose the right song, you can become the hero your mind not only needs, but deserves.
The distinction between mind-wandering and deliberate thought isn’t entirely clear-cut. Generally, mind-wandering is thought of as non-intentional, spontaneous thoughts. Some researchers characterize it as a switch in attention from a current task to unrelated thoughts and feelings. Mind-wandering is extremely common, and it happens whether you’re being distracted from a specific task or you haven’t been presented with anything specific to focus on. There has been considerable debate in the scientific community about whether mind-wandering is more likely to be have negative or positive outcomes. Ultimately, it appears that mind-wandering with negative thoughts causes a negative mood, and that a negative mood is associated with mind-wandering with negative thought content. This points to the applications of mind-wandering science for people who struggle with things like anxiety and depression. For example, rumination, or repetitive thinking about one’s negative emotional experience, is a common symptom of depression and anxiety and would be greatly affected by mind-wandering. Don’t worry, mind-wandering doesn’t exclusively serve to make you feel depressed! In fact, mind-wandering with positive thought content can facilitate the production of creative ideas, mood improvements, and problem-solving.
Given all of this information, it’s time to talk ideas. How can you take charge of your mind-wandering to maximize positive emotional impacts? The idea sounds almost oxymoronic, since mind-wandering is pretty much characterized by the lack of control that you have over it. However, music may provide us with a handy way to exert control over this process. According to one study, sad-sounding music caused more mind-wandering than happy-sounding music. But how does happy-sounding music during mind-wandering change emotional outcomes? Empowering music can be characterized by vitality, and often sounds triumphant, energetic, strong, and heroic. Listening to empowering music has been linked to feelings of powerfulness and boldness. It has been reported to improve self-confidence, motivation for everyday tasks, and can even help patients with depression elevate their energy levels and hopefulness.
In a recent issue of Scientific Reports, researchers Koelsch, Bashevkin, Kristensen, Tvedt, & Jentschke reported on the effects of heroic or empowering music compared to sad music on mind-wandering. The researchers recruited 62 participants to listen to six 2-minute excerpts of heroic or sad-sounding music, all non-lyrical, with similar tempos, loudness, and orchestration. After each excerpt, each participant completed questionnaires that characterized their thought contents and assessed their mood and mind-wandering. Participants also had their heart rates measured throughout the experiment in order to control for physiological arousal effects of the stimuli.
The results of the study indicated that both types of music (sad, heroic) evoked similar amounts of mind-wandering. However, the type of thoughts evoked was very different depending on the quality of the music presented: listening to heroic music led to more positive thoughts during mind-wandering, and listening these thoughts led to feelings of motivation. During sad music, the thought contents were generally demotivating and also had a soothing effect for some participants. The heart rates of participants were higher for empowering music than for sad music, which makes sense because of the physical arousal that is associated with feeling motivated and energetic.
To be clear, the findings of this study do not indicate that listening to empowering music will instantly cause you to feel happy. Rather, it points to a mechanism that could help you to change your experiences with mind-wandering. When you play empowering music during moments of mind-wandering, it makes you more likely to have empowering thoughts, which in turn, may improve your mood. The study was limited in the sense that assessing non-intentional thought can be really challenging. Asking participants questions about thoughts that they are not supposed to be particularly aware of is difficult. Additionally, as is often the case, results should be taken with caution as the sample size for the study was small, with a total of 62 participants. The results would be more generalizable if more respondents were studied.
Overall, the study showed that both sad-sounding and heroic music can evoke mind-wandering. The type of music being experienced has a significant effect on the kinds of thoughts that take place during mind-wandering. If you want to feel more excited, positive, and motivated after a mind-wandering session, I’d recommend that you turn on your favorite empowering music. Here’s one of my personal favorite songs that makes me feel heroic — how do you feel when you listen to it while your mind wanders?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXgkuM2NhYI
Original study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-46266-w
