I’m no stranger to talk therapy. I’ve seen a few different therapists, and I’ve told them to varying degrees about my life and my struggles with anxiety and depression, both of which run in my family.

Have You Ever Gone to a Therapy Session Only to Feel Worse Later?

Having therapy as an outlet is helpful, but there have been a couple of times when I left my traditional talk therapy sessions feeling worse than I did when I walked through the door. Talk therapy (aka psychotherapy can bring up a lot of emotions, and especially if you are someone with anxiety, it gets stressful when you realize an hour has passed and the session is over.

Some days after talk therapy I felt more anxious than I did before the session. I would take the train home and barricade myself in my Chicago apartment and either write like a fiend or clean the whole apartment in order to placate my nerves. The anxiety would build until I grew exhausted and spiraled into a depression on the kitchen or bathroom floor, pressing a hot and sore forehead into the cold tile, wishing the panic I felt would evaporate.

Yep, that’s textbook for major depression. And at that point in time, I was also highly insecure about my life and where I was headed, which made my panic attacks that much worse.

Where Should Anxious Energy Go?

In those days, I didn’t know how to best place my anxiety in a way that was productive and helpful. I figured, writing is good for me and so is cleaning, right? These things should make me feel better. I kept operating on the highest speed, fussing over my environment or writing down all the negative thoughts that were spinning inside me, but that didn’t offer much relief, and I grew more and more frustrated.

At that time, my doctor had prescribed me Xanax (alprazolam) for these occasions. I had just finished college at 20 and had no idea what the hell I was doing or how I was going to make my rent as a writer in Chicago.

After working as a fact-checker at a magazine for eight abysmal contracted months, I nailed my first full-time job and — thank God — my own health insurance. In addition to my therapist, I started seeing a psychiatrist, who put me on a low dose of Prozac (fluoxetine), to treat generalized anxiety disorder, and Wellbutrin (buproprion), to treat chronic major depressive disorder. Many of my symptoms — including full-body hives, phantom itching, suicidal thoughts, and panic attacks — gradually subsided over the next couple of years.

But I was aware how differently the medication made me feel, and though it helped my symptoms, I knew the depression and anxiety were still inside me. I wasn’t looking at why I was feeling these things; I just wanted them to stop. Sometimes I would have breakthrough episodes. They still happen, but they are never as often or severe as they were in that period right after college.

What Do You Do With the Nervous Energy That Comes Out in Therapy?

The answer might be in art therapy practices, music therapy in particular. You don’t have to have the words to describe how you’re feeling. Instead, you can hit a drum or some piano keys, shake a maraca or your hips, strum a bass guitar, and find your groove.

For me, music therapy is play therapy, a way to connect with my inner child, that person who wants to express; and it doesn’t matter if it sounds good, because my therapist and I are the only people in the room.

I’ve had tightness in my throat for years. During college, I thought I was allergic to something, and when I felt the muscles in my neck seize, I panicked, thinking that I was going through an allergic reaction, or anaphylaxis.

Turns out the tight throat was a different type of symptom. I was "allergic" to stress, and it was largely my own doing, mostly from perfectionist tendencies and the fear I felt when reading my work out loud in class (social anxiety, anyone?).

It comes back once in a while, and since I’m not taking medication anymore, I have to find ways to calm myself down when I do feel the physical symptoms of anxiety.

“Have you ever tried singing?” My music therapist asked me during one of our sessions.

“No,” I replied sheepishly. The last thing I wanted to do when I felt the anxious squeeze was to sing. Sometimes my throat got so tight that I didn’t think I could speak, let alone sing.

Then my therapist played a couple of random chords on a keyboard and asked me to hum and sing along, whatever I felt like singing, and in a neutral way that included absolutely no judgment. She harmonized with me, which made me feel more comfortable, and soon I was belting out notes with a vibrato I didn’t know I had. Something deep inside my belly was resonating with my anxiety and opening up my throat. What once felt like an 8 on the throat tightness scale felt like a 4.

Now when my throat feels tight, I try to hum or sing. Placing anxiety into a physical place before my body tries to do it itself tends to help me. I do try to hit the gym a few days a week, but sometimes, as a freelancer, obligation calls, and I take a break to turn on some music and just belt it out, even though it feels a little goofy.

Everyone has a history with music, sometimes a tough one. In music therapy, you work through that, too.

Music brings up stuff that you thought you dealt with. Memories resurface, and you’re like, Wait, is that really still affecting me?

I never felt like music was really mine. I thought that I had to be practiced or trained. I'd had boyfriends who were musicians. I adored them because they acted so carefree, yet they were so serious about their music. I wanted to express myself fully like them and have the right knowledge to do it. I played bass in a band in college very briefly, but I felt constricted by the boys I played with — that everything I did had to fit within what they had already created. Instead, I wrote music reviews, and that’s how I really got my start as a journalist. I felt as if I were on the outside of the music, always on the periphery.

I worked through that, too, first by signing up for bass lessons after college when I could afford them, next through music therapy. That’s when I really started to dig into this love quadrangle: me, my anxiety, my depression, my art (music included).

In therapy sessions, we listened to Dave Matthews, music that I grew up listening to with my sisters and mom in her 2001 tan minivan. We talked about the scene in the film Lady Bird when Saoirse Ronan’s character yells at her date after he insults the Dave Mathews Band's 1996 hit single “Crash Into Me” in the car on the way to prom. (Spoiler alert: She ends up slamming the door and heading to her best friend’s house to hang out with her instead of going to prom.) I cried hard at that scene in the theater (I had just moved to New York and was feeling homesick for my friends in Chicago and my family in Columbus), and I cried just as hard retelling it to my therapist.

We also talked about my experience this summer seeing Kim Gordon’s band Body/Head in San Francisco, and we listened to a track from their recent album. I’ve idolized Kim Gordon since I was 13, when she was Sonic Youth’s bassist. At this show at San Francisco’s experimental art venue the Lab, she was standing right in front of me, swaying her hips, the strings of her guitar resonating with me as if she were plucking my own ligaments. To me, she’s the queen of improvisation, noise rock, and doing what feels good. The experience I had watching her was transcendent, and I was able to share that fully with my music therapist, who listened to Kim Gordon with me and gave me the space to cry and to profess my love to a rock god whose music stood by me through my battles with anxiety and depression as a teen and young adult into a healthy and productive 23-year-old person.

It’s hard to believe how timid I felt when I first started music therapy. In March, I could barely hit a drum, and just a few months later, I can spend half an hour pounding my heart out.

Now I feel that music is mine.

Music is everyone’s, and through it we can better understand our stories, anxieties, and depressions.

If we can successfully place our worries into sound, perhaps we can release them.

There's Much More to Learn About Art Therapy

A study published in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology in March 2015 showed that music therapy significantly improved symptoms of anxiety, depression, and self-esteem in male Chinese prisoners. Benefits may go beyond mental health. A small pilot study published in July 2016 in Indian Journal of Palliative Care suggests that, in addition to standard palliative care, music therapy is effective in reducing pain in cancer patients with moderate to severe pain.

Music therapy (and art therapy in general) is an emerging field. A review published in Frontiers in Psychology in August 2018 looked at 17 art therapy studies and concluded that more research needs to be done on certain populations in order to determine who is best suited for this new treatment.

One Year Later: My Personal Research Findings

As for the effectiveness of music therapy in my own life? I can tell you this: Since starting music therapy a year ago I have stopped taking antidepressants and have been able to notice how many of my mental health issues stem from childhood sexual abuse. And I’m able to express that pretty openly without fearing the stigma. Along with my weekly music therapy, I will be starting an ongoing group for survivors of sexual trauma at the Art Therapy Project this summer.

How to Feel It for Yourself: Music Therapist Locators

If you're anything like the people surveyed for the USOS stress report story, you might benefit from a new therapeutic outlet. To connect with a local music therapist, try searching the databases that these organizations maintain. You may also want to search your health insurance provider’s database for a selection of in-network music therapists. I hope that you find music or art therapy as helpful as I have.

Stress Hack: Music Therapy Helps Relieve Anxiety, Depression, and Stress Symptoms