How the healing power of music helped me navigate my anxiety.

Written by Thomas Hughes

Around April 2020, I took photos for a story about a homeless shelter at Bellingham High School. I had no idea I would find myself surrounded by a group of homeless men barking at me to delete the photos I took.

I made the mistake of taking landscape shots of the shelter, thinking it might suit the story well. One resident spotted me and pointed, and in seconds six figures were running towards me. I fled in a panic, not understanding why they were giving chase.

Some were shouting, “You take pictures of me, I take pictures of you!” One of them had a knife. They cornered me at a bush, and had it not been for one of the volunteers, I might have been hurt.

I came away from that experience unscathed … or so I thought.

A week later, I experienced my first panic attack. I remember a stark and unfamiliar feeling in my chest, like my heart was struggling to keep up with a marathon’s pace. I was lying in bed. I decided to go for a walk to get a breath of fresh air, but as I meandered down the street I started to feel worse. I was starting to panic.

I had no way of knowing if this new tugging feeling in my chest was a heart problem or a symptom of the new coronavirus, so I dialed 911 to ask what I should do. They sent someone to check my vitals, which to my surprise were fine. They told me to seek medical help if the symptoms I reported returned or worsened.

The next day I woke up feeling normal, but by the end of the day the tugging in my chest returned. I was devastated. The feeling became a presence that I associated with the nightly stresses of life in my apartment.

I dreaded going to bed. I contemplated what death might feel like.

When I couldn’t handle the feeling anymore, I checked myself into the hospital. I told the doctors I had trouble breathing and that my heart was pounding, so of course they gave me a COVID-19 test. This was before self-administered tests were the norm, and even before the standard nasal swabs were used regularly.

A friendly doctor came in with a nasopharyngeal swab, which reaches deep into the nasal cavity, just above the roof of your mouth. I spent the hours after that harrowing experience playing Q*bert and waiting in isolation to find out if the COVID-19 test was positive.

After some time, the doctor returned and told me my test came up negative. He, like the initial crew that checked my vitals, said I looked to be in good health. The doctor then told me that the cause for my pain could be anxiety-related.

This did not sit well with me, but I was discharged from the hospital and I went home.

My unrest manifested in me spending hours on the internet, trying to understand exactly what I was experiencing.

According to the Anxiety & Depression Association of America, about 40 million Americans — roughly 18% — experience an anxiety disorder in any given year. Many don’t know that the disorder is real or are too embarrassed to admit that they suffer from such feelings, so this number is considered a low estimate.

I became familiar with terms like Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Panic Disorder. I associated what I experienced with Panic Disorder because its symptoms — heart palpitations, chest pain and shortness of breath — matched mine nearly exactly.

Knowing this was helpful to me; at least I knew the feelings were not a symptom of something potentially life-threatening, and I felt less alone knowing how many people experience this. However, I did not seek out therapy or talk about it with anyone.

Balancing school and a job made me feel like I didn’t have time to commit to therapy. So I lived with it through 2020, still uncertain of what to do when I felt my heart start to race.

It was February of 2021 when my roommate and fellow musician Mason Ellis became fascinated with singing. “Music has always been a voice for me, in a way, and I think singing is just putting the actual voice aspect into it,” Ellis remarked. He started sharing videos with me about how to find your voice and project it.

As an avid musician and a student at the music department at Western Washington University, this was not an alien concept to me. I had taken voice lessons and aural skills training before. At this time, however, I had recently dropped my cello performance concentration and had finished a bachelor’s degree in music instead.

Taking cello lessons over Zoom was not working for me, and practice felt more like a chore than anything. In this way, music also had a lot of stress associated with it.

I noticed that when I would sing and play guitar at night, feelings of panic were diminished.

I started to acknowledge this way of interacting with music as a way to help me control my panic when my heart started to race or my breathing became shallow.

Logan Brichta, a music therapist who works in Bellingham, says that singing is just one of the many ways that he and his patients interact with music.

“I really try to get everyone to sing,” Logan said. “It’s such a great way of engaging in music because it’s so visceral, you know, it’s coming from inside of you.”

Logan works with a variety of patients in his own personal music therapy practice, but he got his start working as an intern at Silverado, a memory care community that helps people who suffer from Alzheimer’s and dementia.

“The primary approach in Alzheimer’s and dementia groups is sing-alongs and singing together as one, where you find that you’re not alone and you’re a part of a bigger sound,” Logan chimed. “Singing together also gives you an opportunity to look someone else in the eyes and make a social connection, connecting over something as beautiful and relatable as music.”

One of the patients who Logan has worked with is blind and suffers from short-term memory loss. The kind of anxiety that she experiences is heightened by physical trauma that has had lasting effects on her. What Logan has found to help during their sessions was composing music with her.

“Writing a song with someone who has short term memory loss and is also blind — it took a long time,” Logan mused. “It took a lot out of her to share these emotions about what she’s going through. It just makes her so delighted to know that she’s expressing them.”

To Logan, therapy is about meeting a patient where they are at the moment. Interacting with music, he says, is one of the best ways to ground yourself while you are experiencing anxiousness.

The ADAA gives many suggestions on how to cope with anxiety: take deep breaths, count to 10, talk to someone, accept that you cannot control everything, etc. In my experience, music has the potential to help check all those boxes and more.

From my own experiences and from what I have learned, I have taken away the fact that anxiety is a common experience that can become a disorder if it is left unchecked or resisted for long enough. With the right intention, music can help create a safe emotional space to make powerful new memories or to process old ones.

Singing with my roommates was a huge turning point for me musically, mentally and physically. In the dark hours after work and school were over, we would put our favorite records on and belt the lyrics that we knew by heart. It made music feel free again. I noticed I felt lighter, my lungs felt fuller and I generally felt happier.

I have come a long way from the person I was at the start of the pandemic; lying awake in my room alone each night thinking as if I might not wake up in the morning.

Of course I still face panic in my daily life. I still don’t know for sure if it was a direct result of that regrettable day at Bellingham High School or if it was a culmination of traumatic events preceding it. What I do know is that I have found a way to navigate through it, and I have music and a host of friends to thank for that.

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Click here to listen to Thomas’ podcast where he interviews certified music therapist Logan Brichta.