But here’s the plot twist: in the age of TikTok breakdowns and aestheticized sadness, we stopped using music to feel — and started using it to avoid. What was once a tool for emotional processing has become the background noise of our emotional numbing.

Let’s get clinical for a second. Listening to music you love activates your brain’s dopamine centers — the same ones triggered by food, sex, or drugs. That’s real, peer-reviewed neuroscience. (See: Frontiers in Psychology, 2013.)
It’s a chemical high. But like any high, it can soothe — or it can distract.
Here’s the paradox:

• Music can help you process emotion — if you’re ready to face yourself.
• Or it can become emotional anesthesia — when all you want is to avoid the pain without asking what’s underneath it.

Psychologist Susan McLean, in her work Music and Emotion Regulation, notes:
“We often don’t realize we’re choosing music based on a desire to enhance, suppress, or escape emotions.”

And this is where affective looping comes in — when a person keeps listening to sad music not to move through sadness, but to stay in it. It’s a trap. And it works beautifully, because your brain gets quick relief. But that’s not healing — that’s a delay tactic.

Music only works as medicine when it’s used in the right dose, with the right intention. Otherwise, it’s just stylish self-numbing.

Welcome to the era of aestheticized sadness. Crying to Phoebe Bridgers? Totally normal. Dancing to Frank Ocean with a shattered heart? Been there. TikTok playlists titled “songs to cry to in the rain”? Millions of views.

Pain is the aesthetic. Mitski turned loneliness into a genre. Billie Eilish made anxiety into a stadium show. Even The 1975 makes clinical depression sound like a glossy editorial. And no, this isn’t about the artists — it’s about the pattern.

The problem isn’t them. It’s us. We don’t just listen to pain anymore — we depend on it. We sing along with Florence Welch like a spell: “I am in misery, and it’s just the way I am.”And deep down, we start agreeing: yeah, this is who I am now.

Labels saw this and started selling sadness with auto-tune. Music doesn’t just express emotion anymore — it sells it. Pain became a product. And while the artist gets a Grammy, you’re sitting there having another anxiety episode — with a killer soundtrack.

Mental health is everywhere now — in marketing, in blogs, in sneaker ads. And at the same time, anxiety, burnout, and loneliness are at record highs. We talk about “self-care” more than ever — and yet we drown in digital noise.

Music, instead of opening a door to deeper connection, has become the background noise we use to avoid ourselves. We’re not feeling pain — we’re putting a Spotify cover on it. We’re not processing emotions — we’re collecting them like NFTs.

If we don’t start telling the difference between music that helps us move through pain — and music that just helps us avoid it — we’ll keep looping the same cycle. Each stream reinforcing what was supposed to be relieved.

How Not to Drown in Your Own Playlist

• Ask yourself honestly: Am I listening to this to process something — or to avoid it? That answer alone is already progress.
• Change your playlists with your life. If you’ve been spinning the same heartbreak songs for months, you’re not nostalgic — you’re emotionally frozen.
• Seek out music that gives you release. Dance. Scream. Let go. Just don’t stay stuck.

Music can heal. But not if you’re using it as a placebo for emotional surgery.
Because honestly? Listening to sad songs on repeat when you’re heartbroken is like taking cough syrup for a broken leg.

In the end, the best playlist is the one that makes you want to get out of bed. Not just lie there, beautifully suffering under Florence + The Machine.