In the Mood for a Mood Change

Sometimes I think too much. Something gets stuck in my craw and my mind starts working like a garbage truck at 4 a.m., grinding and grinding. There’s one sure antidote, however, that I’ve utilized most of my life. It’s based on the alcoholic principle of more: if one drink makes you feel good, have more; if there’s noise in your head, create some more to drown it out.

It’s a little antithetical to the time-honored process of meditation, which definitely has its own hallowed place in the pantheon of recovery tools, yet there’s something exquisitely therapeutic for me in putting on the headphones and blasting out a tune or two. Nothing quite matches impossibly loud music from time to time to flush out the clutter of negativity that occasionally collects in a corner of my mind, and over the years I’ve discovered that certain moments, in fact, seem to require loud music in order to effectively clear my emotions and alter my consciousness. It’s like sticking a vacuum cleaner into my ear and sucking out everything that isn’t nailed down.

I’ve always used music as a mood-changer, both good and bad, and at least now when the prescription calls for maximum volume I’m willing to use headphones. I wasn’t always so courteous, and there were many times when I was drinking that I would slap on a disc at full volume in the middle of the night, prompting vehement thumping from my neighbors on all sides—pounding their walls, ceilings and floors, respectively—trying to get me to shut up.

There were quieter moments, too, melancholy ones, of course. I mean, what alcoholic hasn’t obsessed over a particular artist or song and played it over and over, accompanied by yet another drink, another bottle, another handful of pills? It’s a time-honored tradition among alcoholics to sit in a maudlin funk listening to Patsy Kline or Roberta Flack or any other sensitive soul singing immeasurably sad songs that go directly to the self-pitying part of a drunkard’s brain. It sets up a classic Pavlovian response and just hearing a particular song can start the alcoholic salivating.

In recovery, though, I mostly use music when I’m in need of a positive mood change, to counteract the occasional obsessive thinking that overcomes me and to redirect myself in a different vein. 

Unfortunately though, this morning, as I was blasting music and high-stepping around the living room to Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida,” I got tangled up in the headphones cord and came down awkwardly on the living room floor, twisting my ankle in the process. It’s an ankle I’ve had trouble with in the past, due to a number of sports-related injuries in high school and college and a few drunken episodes in my early twenties, like the time I tried to jump an entire flight of stairs in the subway and missed. Lucky for me, in my drunkenness that day, I didn’t even know anything was wrong until the next morning when my ankle swelled up to the size of a grapefruit and I couldn’t even walk.

At age 55, I guess I’m not as spry as I used to be, and it felt pretty lame getting tangled up in the cord and ending up on the floor. I was definitely grateful no one was there to see it. But, lame as it was, I did feel much better by the end of the song. 

In general, music is a pretty safe mood changer for me these days—certainly a lot safer than alcohol and drugs. I guess I just need to practice my footwork, though.

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