A highly sensitive person's journey through sad music
What is it about sad music that makes us want more?
I don’t consider myself a sad human being—melancholic, at times, but not sad—yet I adore sad music.
One of my all-time favourite songs is Fourth of July by Sufjan Stevens. The melody is hauntingly beautiful, and the lyrics—even more tragic—discuss his mother’s death. There are seasons when I have this song on repeat, and I feel as if I’m floating away in a gentle cloud.
Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D major is another favourite, and one of the first advanced songs I learned to play on the piano as a child. Even after quitting piano lessons when I was quite young, it’s the only song that’s stuck with me into adulthood, the melody locked into the muscle memory of my fingertips.
I didn’t realize this “sad song” theme in me until recently when I added another song to my “all the feels” Spotify playlist and noticed their dreary-sounding commonalities. These songs are sublime and melancholic, filled with longing and sadness. So why do I like them so much? Coincidentally, while pondering this question for the last few months, I picked up Susan Cain’s new book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.
In Bittersweet, she discusses how sadness creates feelings of longing, which, in turn, brings feelings of connection.
In other words, to feel sad is to feel (or long for) a sense of belonging.
This translates into physical sensations, too.
“Sad music is much more likely than happy to elicit what the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp called that ‘shivery, gooseflesh type of skin sensation’ otherwise known as ‘chills,’” writes Cain.
Can you relate?
I know I can. Sometimes when I listen to sad music, I get the same tingly sensation in my body that I do down my throat after taking a sip of whiskey. It coats my insides with warmth.
Cain goes on to explain research showing that people listen to “bittersweet” songs upwards of 800 times compared to happy songs, which they listen to around 175 times. Participants of this study told researchers that they associated “sad songs with profound beauty, deep connection, transcendence, nostalgia, and common humanity—the so-called sublime emotions.”
What’s even more fascinating is that “yearning melodies” bring our body into a state of homeostasis in which “our emotions and physiologies function within optimal range.” Cain explains studies showing that babies’ breathing, feeding patterns, and heart rates improved when hearing sad-sounding songs.
So it’s not just me, yet, as a highly sensitive person, there’s reason to believe these sad melodies impact us highly sensitive folks at a greater level.
Dr. Genevieve writes on her blog the following:
In 2018, U.S. and European researchers published a study that showed that highly empathic people had significantly higher activity in the reward centres of the brain when listening to music they enjoyed. The finding hinted at an extraordinary possibility: HSPs might actually derive greater pleasure from music than people with lower levels of empathy.
As I write this, fog spirals through the evergreens as rain showers the earth with its cool dew. What is it about the rain that makes us want to curl up with a blanket and be held like a lover? The grey sky darkening as thunder begins to serenade us to sleep, a gentle but deep sad song rhythmically beating with our hearts as we fall asleep against a mound of pillows, our dreams filling with forgotten memories that only surface in the dead of the night.
What about you? What’s your favourite sad song? What does it do for you?
Leave your thoughts in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you.
Read more: The Highly Sensitive Person Club
Read more: Do I have to wait until my 50s to be free?
I love sad music. I can relate. ❤️