Why I stopped listening to music for a month — and why I'm still not listening to it.
Music clearly affects us
It's obvious that music affects us — our emotions, our concentration, our state of mind.
In a tricky moment on the road you turn the volume down without thinking, to focus. In a club the music is uniformly high-energy, so you dance. And you're not going to be in the mood for sex with thrash metal blasting.
Conclusion: music, 100%, does something to your state.
Which means it spends a cognitive resource
If music affects your state, it affects your cognitive ability too. And that means it spends some of your cognitive resource, one way or another. People who have music on constantly are constantly loading their brain — and shrinking that resource.
Music also "immerses" you. You'll agree it's hard to feel sad over a cheerful, live-it-up anthem. And over a certain cool, confident rap track you suddenly feel like a pretty successful person.
And if the effect is obvious to me, the question is what to do about it. Two options: manage the effect, or get rid of it.
I'm not willing to deeply study and curate tracks and albums to match my current mood. And given that it's widely held you shouldn't listen to music all the time anyway — it's easier to just not listen at all.
What changed after a month without music
I started to hear my own thoughts. Being alone with myself stopped being boring. I can calmly spend an hour and a half cleaning and doing chores with no music — because I hear, think and feel myself. Before, I'd have died of boredom.
It's easier to concentrate and work. Where music used to play the whole time I worked, now there's no sound at all. And the work goes easier: fewer distractions, fewer moments of blanking out, thoughts run very clearly.
I actually started to enjoy music. When I do listen to a track now, I really listen. I was shocked when, for one reason or another, I heard something that had been sitting in my saved list for ages: you start listening to the lyrics, the message — and realise you never understood the track at all.
So music — as something that definitely affects concentration, mental ability, mood, emotions, happiness and dopamine — definitely needs to be controlled. And the simplest solution, for me, is just not to listen to it.