But at its worst, our overdependence on AI could easily “atrophy the better angels of our nature” as so eloquently stated in a recent post by Thaddeus G. McCotter. He pointed out that the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle deeply believed in the importance of leisure and said, “When it comes to living well, the quality of our leisure matters more than our work.” The problem we 21st-century folks have is that we are as likely to waste our leisure time as we are to put it to constructive use. McCotter blames that on the fact that we haven’t been “educated on how to spend leisure time constructively.” What we do with our free hours is up to each of us. How we relax enough to reap the mental and physical rewards of our leisure time is just as important and, as McCotter realized, takes some doing. Truly relaxing is becoming an increasingly important part of our health, especially as our world spins us around in ever-deepening layers of confusion.
This fits right in with another topic we talked about a few months ago, “agitation of the heart,” a condition called Commotio Cordis, which almost took the life of NFL linebacker Damar Hamlin on the field during a prime time football game. The opposite of a condition that agitates the heart would be something that’s calming to the heart, achieving a degree of “cardiac calmness” that allows us to put our downtime to good use and achieve true mental relaxation. Methods to “calm the heart” have been known for eons in psychology, and there’s a long name for it in the medical literature with the obligatory conga line of syllables. It’s known as tonal neuromodulation, a collection of methods and treatments to reduce stress, anxiety, blood pressure, and production of stress hormones in order to obtain the biological and psychological benefits true relaxation offers.
We’ve spent a lot of time in this space on the devastating effects of stress on our health and longevity. Keeping our stress levels under control is especially important for us pilots since a clear head is critical to our safety and decision making in the sky. One way to help reduce stress that we talked about is taking a “dopamine holiday” from all the hassles of our modern lives. Besides exotic trips, medications, alcohol, and implanted nerve suppression devices, there’s a simple way to ease tension and “calm the heart” that’s been getting a lot of recent attention in medical literature. It’s music, and there is clearly medical value in listening to music as a treatment modality to reduce stress and even promote healing in critically ill patients. The American Music Therapy Association advocates for music to be used in medical care and defines music therapy as “the use of personalized listening to music as a therapeutic tool prescribed by healthcare professionals.”
The history of music is basically the history of humanity, with the earliest known musical instrument, the Neanderthal flute, dating back more than 35,000 years. Written music dates back over 4,000 years to the Babylonians in 1400 BC. Prehistoric folks probably started making music as a way to imitate the sounds of nature, likely for religious and recreational reasons. The relaxing effects of making and listening to music were soon apparent. Our modern times are full of all types of music; some are not always “calming” and many of us find them actually anxiety-producing. “Upbeat” tunes are meant to be just that since music can also be energizing. But the calming effects of softer tones from the Baroque and Classical music period of the 18th and 19th centuries that toned things down (pun intended) have been around much longer and are still widely popular.
The medical literature documenting the calming effects and therapeutic benefits of music is growing rapidly. A nice review with the conveniently eponymous title, “The Effect of Music on the Human Stress Response,” summarizes recent findings for those of you who want to take a deeper dive into the topic. Just last month, research was presented at the American College of Cardiology meeting documenting the calming benefits of music for heart attack patients in the cardiac intensive care unit and was credited with improving their recovery. The study results showed that simply playing soft music to critically ill patients admitted to the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU) resulted in a reduced heart rate, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, and fewer arrhythmias that were statistically significant when compared to a control group treated in the conventional way. They concluded that music therapy is an “effective non-pharmacological intervention to improve outcomes in critically ill patients.” Another study of ICU patients who required mechanical ventilator support showed that listening to music can be “a cheap, safe, non-invasive, non-pharmacological method of reducing anxiety in ICU patients.” They found music was also useful to relieve pain, nausea, delirium, confusion, and depression. A recent study presented in the European Heart Journal looked at patients undergoing a minor cardiac surgical procedure known as “Transesophageal Echocardiography.” Their findings were similar; listening to music significantly reduced anxiety, blood pressure, and heart rate in these awake but lightly sedated patients.
Stay tuned—next month we’ll take a deeper dive into just how music interacts with our brain to give us all the psychological and biological benefits of true relaxation. Till then, chill and listen to some soft tunes, and as always, FLY SAFE.
