As a musician, it’s likely that you see yourself as someone expected to impress and to express. You are supposed to be iron willed and quick quitted.
You should be able to give people new information and express intensive ideas all without making anyone feel uncertain. You should have the self-confidence to express these ideas in a self-deprecating manner.
Most importantly? It should all come in a musical format that makes people feel the rhythm, get the message and want to listen again and again.
Naturally, a creation on that level and quality is very hard to create. For any artist, though, this is more or less the template reason for why you even create content in the first place.
This becomes a huge drain on your mental health. You will soon begin to feel quite weak and drained of all enthusiasm and desire. Before long, you might find it hard to really want to keep going.
This is why you need to be ready to take the time to look at mental health, and work out why ignoring mental health issues isn’t ‘being strong’ at all.
Why, then, does music have such a huge impact on our mental health as musicians?
Independent artists: learn how to build a fanbase and make money from your music.
Music prods your emotions
First off, it’s important to note why you feel so drained emotionally as an artist. Think about what you do for a living: you talk to people about subjects that matter, in a way that requires huge creative skill.
This is going to force you deep into the mind as you hunt, scavenge and search for the answers to the questions you pose in your music.
This is going to make it much easier for you to hit a raw nerve or push on emotions that most normal people allow to lie dormant.
By using your own personal history and story to make your music better, you do take a bit of a toll on your own mental health.
When writing music, it’s important that you work with someone who can help you clarify the message in your music without forensically dissecting your own life, too.
Music opens up previous pain
Since the best music is built upon previous actions and events you have experienced, it pays to go deep into your emotions.
Doing so though, you make it much easier to unearth feelings that you would have rather not confronted again.
This is why so many musicians feel pain. Their music is a direct delivery of the emotional stress they have endured in life.
This has the knock-on effect of making them think about their pain on a regular basis, creating a scenario that ensures it’s easy to really keep investigating long after you stop writing for the day.
Old pains and wounds will remain open until you either close them again or resolve the issues at hand. Remember that if you want to write good music, you often need to lean into your own memory bank.
This will cause various mental health challenges of its own, though, so keep that in mind. You need to be ready to confront the issues in your life, as music will make you look at them in close detail.
Music forces you to have a social conscience
For most artists, music forces you to be more socially conscious and to look closer at deeper societal issues.
Your best music will come from a place of education and of concern; that is why you should look to put so much effort and attention into developing a clearer musical conscience.
If you get used to writing about tougher issues, then you should feel much less pain when you do so. Many musicians find this causes them the most anguish.
If you are to write convincing music, spend time researching: but be prepared for the doors that it might open you were not really prepared for.
Musicians often feel more pain because they are so close to the issues that they write about. It’s important that you take the time to really look at the pain you feel, and why taking the time for mental health is so important.
Understanding these mental health quandaries helps you to write from the heart.
Independent artists: learn how to build a fanbase and make money from your music.
Music forces you to answer tough questions
One of the most salient reasons why you might find it hard to write, though, is the challenge of answering the tough questions your music poses.
You will need to dig deeper into history or into your own mind to find the answers. Such close inspection of personal or historical tragedy though, places itself heavily on the mind.
If you would like to avoid said problem, then it pays to invest some more time into appreciating these questions to come.
If you spend more time readying yourself for having to dig so deep into the mind, or the annals of history, you will come out the other side feeling much more optimistic.
Keep that in mind, as it’s one of the key reasons why musicians often struggle mentally.
Musicians natural creativity causes mental health issues
Another key reason for a musician to have mental health issues during their writing is due to the nature of what you do.
Your chosen profession means that you are often much more immersive and investigated into subjects than others would be.
This forces you to get very close to the subject, as well as pay a lot more attention to things like the impact that what you are writing had/would have on the individuals involved.
This natural creativity – the very reason that allows you to be a great artist – is what also makes your mind engage with an extra layer of depth.
It’s this extra depth that can cause you to think things more thoroughly. The end results are not often quite what you would have wanted, either.
It’s for this reason that we recommend all musicians make time to think about the above: understanding this might make it easier to avoid the second-hand impact of mental health as your musical career grows and develops.
Independent artists: learn how to build a fanbase and make money from your music.
