I don’t know why listening to sad music makes me feel better, although we did commission an article for musicto that answers that exact question – check it out here: How Listening to Sad Music Can Make you Feel Better
While I may be unsure of my why – I can remember when I found out that it did. I can picture it clear as day. I was in Germany, in my parents’ backyard. It was the summer, and I had been with my girlfriend for three years – I think three years – and I knew it had to end. I’d fallen out of love, we’d been together all the way through college, but the future was coming. I knew that she wanted to continue it, and I didn’t, and I knew that I would have to end it.
It was going to be sad.
It was going to be really hard.
Ending a relationship is shit – I mean, it’s fucking awful being the one that somebody leaves. When somebody ends the relationship with you, it’s so painful, because so many questions of self-worth come up, your own validity: If they don’t love you, what does that say about you? I mean, that’s awful.
If you’re a sociopath or a psychopath and you’re finishing the relationship, it doesn’t affect you at all, because you don’t give a shit about the other person. But if you’ve always loved someone, and you have fallen out of love, and you no longer want to be with them, but you still care about them – you know you’re going to hurt them. You know you’re about to do something that is going to cause them pain. And that’s a horrible place to be in.
That’s where I found myself. Sitting on the patio on a kitchen chair in my parents’ house in Germany, and my mum, who’s a classical music freak, was playing Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major, D.956 – I think it was the second movement, the Adagio, that got me.
I was sitting there contemplating the action I was about to take, and this music just overwhelmed me. And I cried. I mean, like – ugly cry. I was sobbing. The music played through the rest of movements. And I remember sitting at the end of it, and I felt drained. I felt as though I’d been on this massive, kind of almost physical journey. And yet, at the end, I didn’t feel bad.
I’d lived with the emotion, I’d lived with how I felt and how I was going to make her feel. And yet, by the end, it was okay. I was okay, and this was going to be okay. Somehow the music took the emotional state I was in, and it didn’t ignore it. It transmuted something so that by the end of it I wasn’t feeling as sad.
I did actually feel better. I knew I was on a path that I needed to take. At that point I had started the upswing. I knew, yes, nothing had changed. It was going to be painful, there were going to be tears, but I knew that it was going to be okay.
That sad music at that sad time – it did make me feel better.
So, yeah, the bottom line is: I know sad music makes me feel better, because it has done and it continues to do so consistently in my life.
This article is part of The Human Collective. Each week we take a prompt and create a playlist and accompanying articles. This week we were wondering when did you last laugh out loud? Check out the playlist: Sad Songs To Make You Feel Better Learn more about The Human Collective here.
Image by Andrew
About the Curators
Andrew
The first visual memory I have is that of the white upright piano in Singapore, Hell and the Dark Forces lived at the bottom, Heaven and the Angels at the top, they would play battles through my fingers and I was hooked.
As a psychology graduate I studied how sound affects human performance.
As a musician I compose instrumental music that stimulates your brain but doesn't mess with your language centers, leaving you free to write creatively without distraction.
As a curator I research how music can improve your life and create flow - I can tell you what music to listen to when studying for a test and why listening to sad music can make you feel better.
As a creator / contributor at musicto I believe that music can make the world better.
What I'm doing now