Conscious Minute #6

What Will Your 2021 Soundtrack Be?

President Biden and Vice President Harris this week released a 46-song playlist articulating empowering themes for their administration. This news brought to mind a moment from President Obama’s first Inauguration Concert when my favorite band, U2, played City of Blinding Lights, which thereafter became part of President Obama’s presidential soundtrack.

Scientific researchers report that music has the power to enhance our well-being. Conducting my own (non-scientific) experiment this week, I decided to merge two “positive interventions” — well-being amplification exercises from the field of positive psychology. I engaged in a positive music intervention, fusing a “positivity portfolio” exercise suggested in Barbara Fredrickson’s book, Positivity, and an activity called “PERMAfy Music” proposed by music professor, Jonathan Coopersmith. PERMA is a well-being framework created by the founder of positive psychology — Dr. Martin Seligman — and stands for Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement.

If you want to try a well-being boost this week, here’s how the experiment works. First, we choose one of the 10 Positive emotions listed in Fredrickson’s book: joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, love, or awe. Next, we ask ourselves: What piece of music sparks this emotion? What song makes our skin tingle, jars our senses, snaps us out of our pandemic funk?

After choosing a song, we then research its Meaning. What do the lyrics, imagery, metaphors, analogies in the song mean? What does the song mean to us? (Although we are taking the M in PERMA out of order, identifying the Meaning of our song has ripple effects through the other PERMA steps).

Next, we mindfully Engage with the song. Coopersmith recommends we plan different listening sessions for distinct purposes, alternating between pure emotional absorption and analytical observation of its chords, its beat, its rhythm, its texture. Tune everything else out. Just us and the song.

Then, we can listen to the song with Relationship partners: family, friends, fellow fans of the genre or the band.

Finally, we can seek to Accomplish a task through the piece. Can we interweave a lyric into a writing project? Can we translate a line of lyrics into another language? Can we sing along, play an instrument, or dance around our living room to it?

U2’s Bono says, “Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.” As we navigate the ups and downs of 2021, let’s keep our hearts porous, creating space for hope, replenishment, and magic.

As you step into new challenges and (hopefully novel delights) in 2021, what will your soundtrack be?