Pain Management: Make some noise

Did you know MUSIC helps with pain? Studies prove it!

Anyone who listens to music knows this, I imagine.
But music is distracting when I'm reading or writing, which I often am (distraction is one of its powers when you're in pain), and I don't listen to much music.

I am starting now--part of my Preemptive Pain Reduction Plan.
No, really, because I miss it.

I am making a playlist.
Here're my first three selections:
ELO's "Sweet Is the Night"
Sly and the Family Stone, "Everybody Is a Star"
Zero8, "Change the World"

A comment on "Sweet Is the Night":
"I used to have to go to the library to listen to this record. That was over 40 yrs ago now. Wow, so much has changed"

Yes. I mostly stopped listening when music went digital. I didn't make the leap.

I found the medical studies about music & pain this morning,  following up my video "Can we stay centered, when in pain?"
It wasn't a rhetorical question, I want to know. I hadn't expected music to pop up--I was thinking meditation and quiet, inner stuff.

Yes, but also--make some noise!

I'd bet making music is even more effective than listening alone (depending on the pain, of course).

I went looking for sacred harp singing (I love that clanging twang) and ended up at the Alan Lomax library on youTube:
youtube.com/@AlanLomaxArchive

Here, "the extended Wootten-Ivey family of Sand Mountain, Alabama, sing "Wondrous Love" from the Sacred Harp. Shot by Alan Lomax and crew, June c. 4-6, 1982":

How many of us sit around together and sing? I NEVER do.
__________________

I also want to know where people stand on the diagnoses of personality disorders and other psychological or neurological states, some of which are thrown around lightly in pop/culture, seems to me.

A few years ago I swore to stop doing that myself--casually labeling someone, "Oh, they're a narcissist; must be on the spectrum", or whatever.
That casual labeling is prevalent in the society around me.
I find it is often more reductive than expansive--making the labeler (me!) more comfortable maybe, but no better than that.

And then at the high school, I saw certain students were diagnosed with heavy-hitting permanent labels when it seemed likely that their behaviors were reactions to impermanent situations around them. (I'm no expert, but talking to them, sometimes I could see and hear this.)

I tried to make a video about that but felt myself too far out on a slim limb. I worried I'd sound like I was dismissing the very real HELP that better understanding of disorders can bring.
Like, I hear people dismiss help for psychological suffering as if it were unnecessary "coddling".
No!
We do not want to go back to the dark ages here.

But, yeah, there're medical papers on this too, like,
"Too Much, Too Mild, Too Early: Diagnosing the Excessive Expansion of Diagnoses" (Int J Gen Med. 2022):

"[Diagnoses] do very much good ....
In this article, however, I focus on the less good aspects of expanding diagnoses. The aim is to enhance the good side of diagnoses (expansion) by avoiding the bad ones...

To halt excessive diagnosing, we must stop diagnosing
a) ordinary life conditions like loneliness and grief (potentially better dealt with by others or left alone)
b) mild conditions, and
c) early signs that do not give pain, dysfunction, and/or suffering (precursors of disease that do not develop into disease, such as obesity, high blood glucose...)"

I hope this all is a regrettable but predictable side-effect of a good thing--the better understanding of and help for human suffering.

 I wish we (I?) would take up more group singing.