Therapist Explains the Reason Why You Should Listen to Music From High School Days
From nostalgia to joy and even sorrow, the right tune is known to evoke a number of strong emotions, and songs etched in our memory even take us back in time. It has also been found that music can have a therapeutic effect on the human mind. Songs we used to listen to a few decades back are bound to induce a sense of nostalgia when we listen to them in our present. Many of us also curate old tracks into a "nostalgia playlist" which works like magic whenever we hit the play button.
Now therapist Nikki Roy (@nikkiroy.collection on TikTok) has made a video responding to another creator who made a video about going for a drive while blasting 2000s music. Sharing the healing properties of nostalgia-inducing songs, she said, “There is a thing called neural nostalgia." She further adds, "Researchers are actually finding that the music we used to listen to as teenagers binds to our brain differently than anything we’re ever going to hear as adults.”
Roy adds that listening to music that you enjoyed during your teens or early years, really functions as an individual's coping mechanism and it is something that Roy herself uses as well. "Listen to bangers like punk rock, Pitbull, or whatever. Listen to that because it actually helps us. It helps us get out of our heads and it helps us connect to ourselves. It makes us feel alive again. So that is 100% approved and do it all the time. I will do it with you too," Roy concluded.
“We can maybe start to do some inner child healing and wound repair work if that feels safe,” Roy suggested, in a second video where she responded to a person who used to be depressed in their high school days and used to listen to sad music. “Listen to the music that got you through that time period, watch the shows that you loved, and give those experiences back to yourself. Soothe and validate the position you were in. Show up to yourself as a teenager as you would like an adult now. We can't ever go back and change what happened to us, but we can go back and heal those parts of us."
The people in the comment section found Roy's advice to be useful as they shared their personal experiences too. @emmashortygray wrote, "I love doing it when I’m sad, angry, down, or stressed and it just makes me feel better!" @oliviakalae commented, "Oh my god this makes so much sense. I am probably my happiest when in the car blasting early 2000s music." @findingjackie79 shared, "Late teen years were my absolute best and also one of my most aggressive and scary years I look back on the fun with such nostalgia and disassociate a lot of the bad and I'm OK with that now." @sejarv96 added, "Around age 12, you start to come into your own taste. That is why music at that time will forever hold a special place. It makes you feel truly yourself."
Follow @nikkiroy.collection on TikTok for more videos.