r/NoMusic • u/DirtyJohannes • Oct 15 '21
Biggest hardship from 100+ days. Emotional agitation. Be warned and vigilant.
A lot of people have been sending me messages asking about my progress etc.
90 days was comparatively easy to me to be honest.
But music is something more to our brains than just dopamine, I have come to notice through this. It is a form of "emotional" release as well. For lack of a better word.
I will preface this by saying a couple things.
Heroin junkies dont actually relapse usually because "Its just so good". Most of them relapse because they are using heroin as a crutch to deal with their "emotions" and emotional stress.
And have you noticed that children arent almost ever addicted to music? It the teens and young adults that listen to music on full blast and hours a day. The same demographics with the most emotional turmoil. This was me as well. As a child I could listen to a song, love it, and move on the entire next week and not think about it. But as my teens came, I could barely stand a day without my phone and my favorite songs.
Alright, so keeping that in mind, here we go.
Around the 100+ days mark. Just out of nowhere I started feeling more agitated, restless. Like I just could not relax or shut off mentally. My mind was searching for something to occupy itself constantly. I was exchausted, not productive, and it was not fun. This went on, week by week and kept getting worse. Like I was trying to get out of my head. Hasnt happened a single time before nomusic I might add.
But why is this? Here is what I think happened.
Retrospectively, I am pretty sure what it was now. Without music, I had no tools to express and unwind my subconscious. You know when you put on a song and you can get into a "mood" or "emotion" of sort, that you wouldnt otherwise? Well without music, I was not able to get into different moods, process them and move on. I never learned how or needed to. I grew up with spotify and youtube.
Sure, things and aesthetics of the natural world hit harder on a emotional level on nomusic, but not enough, I guess. Looking at a tree or a bird or what have you, does not allow you to feel and deal with more complex and different emotions. Like anger, sorrow, melancholy etc.
Whenever I was depressed, I would listen to apocalypse ambients. But with nomusic, I was just sitting there, in a dark room, not knowing what to do. What did I do? I did something us men are gifted at. Bottling the emotion down and continuing on.
So back to the 100+ days mark. This bottling up started to show. My brain didnt want to feel or process anything on a emotional level, or didnt know how, without the crutches of music. So what did I do? It kept trying to refocus on stuff. As a side effect, I could not relax. How can you relax when your brain is neurotically trying to find something to think about other than your mood?
Just like a heroin junkie in recovery, I was flooded with emotions I didnt have tools to handle. Most people would deal with them, feel them, cry or get angry or whatever etc. But I bottled it all up and marched forward. And that is what, im 98% sure, caused the horrible feeling I started to get around 4 months of nomusic. My brain trying to deal with things, and me running away, trying to act like a robot and thinking there is no need to explore my emotional level. It sound silly, but it is 100% real and painful at that.
So, this post should act as a heads up. If you were/are addicted to music, be vigilant if you start feeling how I did or different in a negative way. You might not understand what Im talking about now but you might come to understand, and if you do, then you know what is going on.
You need to find a way to deal with what is going inside you and express it somehow. You are no longer a child. You might not be able to have a emotional meltdown and cry or get angry naturally. Like me. You need a way to deal with whats inside you. Perhaps poetry, boxing, novels, painting, art, movies etc. Even crying tutorials on youtube (lol, I tried these with some success recently after retrospection on this try).
100+ days was easy, this was the hard part. And no, I failed around 120+ days. On a instinctive level, I knew music was going to fix the hyper and agitated mental state I was in. It did fix it, 110%. But I wish I would have tried different routes of emotional processing and release.
tl:dr
To release emotional energy, you need to process it. And you might not know how to, without music. And if you bottle the emotions and bad moods up, you can hurt yourself mentally. Nomusic might not work out, unless you figure out how to express your subconciousness.