Music Is My Oxygen: What Happens When Sound Meets The Soul

Part II in a series on Rewiring the Brain

I will travel for music. I always have. If an artist moves me, if their songs linger in my car at midnight or have gotten me through a hard day, I will get on a plane. I will rearrange my schedule. I will show up. People who know me will either understand it completely or look at me as if I was slightly unhinged. Both reactions are fair because from the outside, dropping everything to stand in a room full of strangers and listen to someone sing might look like a lot. From the outside it is one of the essential things I do for myself.

Music is not something I casually consume. It has never been that for me. It is something I need the way I need air. It has carried me through grief, through joy, and through the long stretches when life is neither dramatic nor particularly meaningful, just moving. Music has been there through all of that. In the car, in my kitchen, in my headphones, at six in the morning when I’m not ready yet to be a person, but I’m trying. Music finds me wherever I am and it brings me back to myself.

This week I went to a concert. I had been following this artist for a while. His music had found me the way music sometimes does, quietly and then all at once. One song leads to another and before you know it someone’s voice is living inside you. I did not know exactly what I was going to feel walking in. I never do. But what happened inside that room was something I’m still trying to find words for.

My body felt like it left itself.

I know how that sounds. But there was a moment, standing there with the music washing over me, when I was not thinking about my week or my to-do list or anything that usually runs on a loop in my head. The noise that lives inside me, the planning, the worrying, the replaying of conversations, all of it went quiet. I was just there. Fully there. And at the same time, I felt like I was somewhere beyond there. Connected to something I can only describe as Hashem. One with something larger than the room, larger than the moment, larger than anything I could have manufactured on my own.

It was not what I expected from a concert. It felt like davening on the best day you have ever davened. That rare davening where the words stop being words and become something more, where you’re not reciting but actually speaking. That is what the music did to me. It cracked something open and what came through was not just emotion. It was presence. Real, undeniable, holy presence.

I have thought about this a lot since I got home. What is it about music that can do that? What is it about sound and rhythm that can take a person out of her ordinary mind and drop her somewhere sacred? I am a psychologist. I am trained to look for explanations. But I also believe in things that live beyond explanation, and I think music is one of them. I think it operates on two tracks simultaneously, one that science can map and one that it cannot.

I came home and told my sister about the concert. And she said something that stopped me.

She told me that she can’t listen to music just anytime. She has to be in a specific mood first. And even then, it has to be the right kind of music, something happy, something nostalgic, something that feels emotionally safe. Anything too intense or too raw and she has to turn it off. It does not feel like relief to her, it feels like too much. She has learned over time that her brain simply processes music differently than mine does, and she has made peace with that.

She’s right. And the science backs her up.

Research shows that people have genuinely different neurological relationships with music. For some of us, wired like me, music is a full body emotional event. Dopamine floods the system. The limbic system, which governs emotion and memory, activates intensely. The motor cortex fires even when we are standing still, which is why we cannot help moving. There is even a phenomenon researchers have documented called musical chills, that shiver that moves through you when a song hits exactly right, and not everyone experiences it. It is not about being more sensitive or deeper. It is simply about how the brain is built to receive sound.

For others, like my sister, the emotional processing of music is more conditional. The brain needs to already be in a regulated, open state before music can land as something pleasant rather than something overwhelming. Too much stimulation and the nervous system will read it as a threat rather than a transcendence. That is not a limitation. That is a different architecture. And knowing your own architecture is actually a form of wisdom.

This is something I think about in my clinical work too.

I had a client whom I’ll call Maya, who came to me drowning in anxiety. Not the everyday nervousness most of us carry around, but the kind that started shrinking her life. She was turning down opportunities, avoiding conversations, talking herself out of things she actually wanted before she even tried. Her nervous system was in a near constant state of alarm and she did not know how to turn the volume down.

We tried a lot of things. Some worked more than others. But one of the most powerful shifts came from something she almost didn’t tell me because she thought it sounded too simple.

She started putting on music before hard things.

Not just any music. Specific songs she had chosen intentionally, ones that made her feel something other than fear. A playlist she built for herself almost like a prescription. She would play it on the way to the conversation she was dreading. She would put it on before she walked into a room that scared her. And she told me that something in her body would shift before her mind even registered what was happening. The music moved faster than her thoughts. It reached her nervous system directly, bypassing the anxious mental chatter and landing somewhere deeper.

We made it more intentional from there. We talked about what was actually happening, that her brain was learning how to associate certain sounds with safety. And that she was essentially rewiring her threat response, teaching her nervous system a new language. Music was the teacher. Repetition was the method. And slowly, steadily, the fear started to lose some of its grip.

Maya is not unique. Research on music and anxiety consistently shows that intentional listening can reduce cortisol, slow heart rate, and shift the nervous system out of fight or flight into something more regulated. Music therapy is an entire clinical field built on exactly this. But you do not need a therapist to use it. You need a playlist and the willingness to be intentional about what you put in your ears.

This is what brought me back to something I wrote about last week. I talked about the Endel app and how ambient sound vibrations can shift the brain into different states depending on what you need. Sleep. Focus. Morning energy. That piece was about neuroplasticity and the fact that the brain can be reshaped by what we deliberately feed it. Music is that same idea but with a soul attached. Endel is the science. A concert that makes you feel like you left your body and touched Hashem is the miracle.

And I do not think those two things are in conflict. I think they are the same truth arriving through different doors.

There is a reason niggunim exist without words. There’s a reason music plays at the moments in life that are too big for language: at weddings, at funerals, at the moments when we need to feel something larger than ourselves and we do not have the words to get there. The brain stores music differently than it stores anything else. Deeper. More protected. More lasting. Long after words fade, a melody remains. I have songs that are tied to my mother so tightly that hearing them is like being handed something of hers. Not a memory exactly. Her. Something of her actual presence preserved in sound.

I think that is not an accident. I think the soul recognizes frequencies it came from.

We spend so much energy trying to manage our inner world through thinking. We analyze and process and talk and journal and try to use cognitive behavioral therapy to find our way to peace. And sometimes that works, but sometimes the answer is older, simpler, and more immediate than all of that. Sometimes your nervous system does not need another thought. It needs a song.

So, if you’re someone like me, someone who uses music like oxygen, take that seriously. Do not treat it as a guilty pleasure or a distraction. Treat it as a medicine. Curate what you listen to with the same intention you would bring to anything else that shapes your mind and your mood. Notice what lifts you. Notice what keeps you circling in something heavy. Notice what you reach for when you need to feel less alone. That instinct is not indulgence. It is your brain doing something very sophisticated. It is finding its way home.

And if you’re more like my sister, someone who needs the right conditions, the right mood, the right kind of sound, that’s okay too. Know your architecture. Know what your nervous system can receive and when. Find your version of the concert experience, the thing that takes you out of yourself and drops you somewhere true.

The brain is always listening. The soul is always searching.

Give them both something worth finding. 

Tamara Gestetner, LMFT, is a psychotherapist and certified mediator based in Cedarhurst who helps individuals and couples navigate relationships, career questions, and the challenges people face in everyday life. She is also the host of the podcast Talk2Tamara. Readers are welcome to submit questions or topics they would like addressed in future columns. Tamara can be reached at TamaraGestetner.com, [email protected], or 646-239-5686.