Happiness Strategies | How to be Happy

This week’s Scientific American blog ‘Mind Matters’ reports that classical music can ease depression.

Researchers at Alzahra University in Tehran took depressed participants and administered Beethoven’s 3rd and 5th piano sonatas in twice-weekly, 15-minute doses. Participants’ depression scores improved significantly – and without side effects.

Mind Matters blogger David Dobbs notes that ‘if classical music publishers could match the drug industry’s marketing budgets, we’d be listening to a lot of Beethoven sonatas‘.

Source: Scientific American Blog: Amusing pain, elevating music, and other jewels from the Society for Neuroscience meeting

Several of my own mood stabilizers of choice are included on the Swoon Gold compilation.

At the shops today I heard this wonderful lyric – expressing what I believe about happiness – over the speakers:

I choose to be happy
So I am, so I am

Turns out it’s Belinda Emmett, who last year lost an eight-year battle with cancer -  first breast cancer and finally bone cancer. She’d been working on the album for several years and it was released posthumously in April 2007.

She sure had an excuse to choose to be miserable, making these lyrics all the more encouraging.

My friend Dave loves vinyl. He’s made small concessions toward CDs, but his true love has always been the turntable.

So it was something of a surprise to find out he’d won an iPod Nano. The little silver device had been confined to its box for months, bursting with unheard melodies, a tiny bud of unrealised musical delight.

Yesterday  I went over to Dave’s to help this small bundle of joy make the transition to life. First I checked that Dave’s broadband was adequately dilated; it was. Then I helped Dave get comfortable as the iTunes waters broke onto his computer. He was so excited as we searched for and purchased long-desired songs and organised them into playlists that I had to keep reminding him to breathe, Dave, breathe. At last it was time for Dave to push – the sync button. Songs rushed forth into the Nano, filling it with musical life.

‘Is everything all right?’ panted Dave, overcome with excitement and anxiety. I checked the screen – It was OK to disconnect.

‘It’s perfect’, I replied.’

I cut the USB cord and handed the little silver package to Dave. He cradled it, his face glowing as the screen came to life with album art. ‘It looks just like the vinyl’, he sniffed.

If you’ve ever doubted whether technology can bring happiness, I wish you could have seen the look on Dave’s face when I left him cooing over that Nano yesterday. It put a song in my heart.

“What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”
From the film High Fidelity, based on the novel by Nick Hornby

Of course the misery follows the music, Rob! It’s SISO – sadness in, sadness out. You ingest misery, and you give your brain lots of negative stuff to process.

I used to listen to sad songs and let the melancholy move me – just as I used to read earnest, but usually depressing, books (especially Booker Prize winners and short-listers) and watch serious-minded films with pointlessly tragic endings. And I used to feel very sad. Way sadder than I feel these days with my generally gloom-free diet. There’s a lot of genuine tragedy in the world that should be faced. But for me, I’ll have my pop culture misery-free, thanks.

If you’re looking for a dose of feel good music video, here are my three faves. (You can view them from my vodpod at the bottom of the sidebar.)

No Rain (Blind Melon).
I just love love love how the little tap-dancing outcast finally finds the place where she belongs. How many of us take off the bumble bee outfit and quit dancing instead of enduring the blank stares and persevering in expressing who we are? I totally identify with that little girl. She’s one of my role models.

Digging in the Dirt (Peter Gabriel)
OK, so if you’re halfway through and watching decaying bodies and angry family holidays you may be questioning my sanity about now. But stick it out and you’ll see how the pain of life eventually gives way to something better. The final image [HEAL] is my favourite.

Teenage Dirtbag (Wheatus)
If the third-act turning point of the girl asking the boy to an Iron Maiden concert doesn’t melt your stone-cold heart, then I hope you’ll at least appreciate the subtle wit of using fruit for percussion. A flash of genius, wouldn’t you say?