Using the Power of Singing/Music to Manage Fear

With halloween coming up I wanted to do a something fun and explore a different side of my creative practice by testing if singing could help manage my fear levels. I got this idea from class when we learned about how having patients participate in creative practice can help pain management. An example of this is when we see patients with chronic pain use dance in order to shift their brains focus from their pain while moving their bodies. I thought that this also could also be applied to fear. I could potentially use singing to distract my brain from the fear of a haunted corn maze. I hate scary things, but I love my friends. They all wanted to go to a corn maze in Ocala for halloween, and I hesitantly agreed. I figured that If I was going to do this I would also test the principles we had learned in class and make this into my experimental practice for the week. 

The first time we entered the maze I decided to do a test run. I would go in the first time without singing to get a baseline for my fear levels. Safe to say I was absolutely terrified. There were no lights in the maze so you had to rely on your listening to assess if there was a scare actor in the nearby area. This also reminded me of my experimental exercise earlier in the semester where I had to listen without my ears. When you take one sense away your other senses will overcompensate. When you removed the vision aspect in the corn-maze I noticed I was putting much more attention to my surroundings with my ears and with my body. I was hearing stuff I would not normally notice or typically label as "background noise". It ranged from harsh, louder sounds such as crickets chirping to quieter, softer sounds such as the rusting of the corn. Walking through the corn maze in silence had me feeling full of dread and anticipation waiting for someone to pop out at any second. 

I then exited the corn maze and walked around to do some other activities for 20 minutes, giving myself a break from the maze and making sure I wasn't used to being scared before I headed back in. The second time I went in the maze I gathered my friends and started singing while we made our way through the corn maze. I had a completely different experience the second time I walked through the maze. This time instead of just focusing on where the next scare actor was going to be I shifted my focus to singing. This time I found myself actually having fun. It broke up the suffocating feeling of silence combined with the darkness of my surroundings. Having my friends join in brought life to this very scary situation that we were facing. I was filled with joy reminding myself that I have the power to shift the feeling of my surroundings through my singing. The songs we were singing were empowering/fight songs like"Eye of the Tiger" by Survivor and "Just keep swimming" from finding Nemo. Singing in the maze completely changed my experience and allowed the prominent feeling of fear to subside while I focused on the fun I was having with my friends.

After we left I couldn't help but think of the parallels I found in the maze to things the experiences of many patients in a hospital. Just like the dark and scary silence of the maze, this is often an environment that many patients face in their hospital stays. I kept thinking about the CT and X-ray rooms being pitch black and silent, and how they must have been experiencing similar levels of fear. I may have been scared about a clown popping out in a brief moment of fearing for my life but they are facing life or death situations on the daily. I also kept thinking about the style of songs we were singing. Having the uplifting message of the music in the maze could be applied the same to a hospital setting. Shifting the mood of the music let me focus on the message of what I was singing rather than the reality of my situation, which I think can be applied to the type of music we have patients interact with in the hospital. It also helped to be singing with my friends, hearing all of our voices made me more powerful and less alone in the maze. Having people come sing with the patients can help them feel a sense of human connection that is often missing from the sterile environment of hospitals. 

In conclusion, I definitely think that music can be a powerful tool for fear management along with pain management. It allowed me to see the direct impact that music has on not only my mood but the mood of my surrounding in the situation I was facing. It helped me shift my focus from my fear to my singing which made me feel safe in an otherwise scary circumstance.