Music to Help You Through the Day

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Last updated on April 4th, 2021 at 10:52 am

Part of what makes us sluggish is that we get tired of the same stuff all of the time. Same food, same place, same job, same people—and music is no exception.

I listen to all SORTS of music over the course of any given day. New music. Old music. Video game music. Ending themes from anime episodes. Obscure disco music. Music from countries where I don’t even speak the language. All of it speaks to me, though, for some reason or another.

But like anything else, if you listen to the same stuff too many times, it gets old. You start skipping songs after recognizing them within the first second of play. The magical feeling you may have once gotten from a song eventually resembles something more like a dull ache. You, along with your tastes, change over time—so why don’t we change the music we listen to in order to keep up?

“Music makes me high.”

— Lost Boyz, “Music Makes me High”

Music is awesome—it can sway our moods, it can make or break an event—it’s one of the things that keep the world revolving.

But how can we harness music to make our lives better? How can we make music work for us instead of just something constantly playing in the background?

Peace and quiet is an amazing thing, but nothing matches the motivation that music can provide. I refuse to leave my house without my iPod: maybe I’ve become way too reliant on blocking ambient noise out while I work, but I find that having familiar background noise makes all the difference when it comes to productivity!

Let’s take a look at how we work. We all know work is tough. We’re essentially paid to operate in a foreign environment for several hours a day, expected to perform at optimal levels when nothing in our spaces or tools are customized to how we best learn and operate. Many of us work best with uninterrupted streams of thought, left to work on our tasks for hours on end, from start to finish. But work is full of both direct and indirect distractions that throw you off your game.

Phone calls. Emails. Sudden visits to your cubicle to chat or check up on a project. And on the indirect side, sometimes we have that too-loud coworker a few doors down. Or the soothing hum of construction work. We can be prisoners to the cage of noise that forms around us.

That is unless we find a way to cancel it out.

Music helps you regain control and reassert your ideal environment, no matter where you are. Frustrating day at work? Solve your woes with some smooth jazz. Need something to pump the adrenalin up in those final hours of the day? Your workout mix of 90s dance might do the trick. Or sometimes those songs linked to some of the happier times in our lives will be just what we need to change the course of a particularly crappy day.

So keep exploring. I doubt there’s any way you could exhaust all the possible options for music out there, and don’t just completely dismiss a genre because you heard one song and decided that “you don’t like _____”. Experiment. Investigate. You might be surprised by what you find! And always remember that music is simply one small part of the grand and constant reinvention that is who we are and what we stand for.

The second logo for Casey Palmer, Canadian Dad

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By Casey E. Palmer

Husband. Father. Storyteller.

Calling the Great White North his home, Casey Palmer the Canadian Dad spend his free time in pursuit of the greatest content possible.

Thousand-word blog posts? Snapshots from life? Sketches and podcasts and more—he's more than just a dad blogger; he's working to change what's expected of the parenting creators of the world.

It's about so much more than just our kids.

When Casey's not creating, he's busy parenting, adventuring, trying to be a good husband and making the most of his life!

Casey lives in Toronto, Ontario.

2 replies on “Music to Help You Through the Day”

I am an information junkie and averse to advertising in any form. For this reason I listen to CBC Radio 1, which plays little music. However, I love Saturday programming starting at 5pm when, except for 1/2 hour world news, they play music until 1am Sunday.
When I could afford it, I frequented a used CD shop and bought random discs when I liked the cover art and the names of the songs or albums that had a positive review in some article I read.
I never had a job where I could listen to music but often recalled a song that would get stuck in my mind’s ear. (Not always a positive situation!)
I listen to many genres of music and dislike few. It doesn’t happen often but I love to hear why others like the music they do.

Thanks for the comment, MPaula 🙂 My music tastes would change a lot over time — I did another version of this exercise a couple of years later, looking at what songs I listen to and why they matter to me.

It’d probably be useful to try it again and see what the new list looks like 🙂

I hope you continue to find great music that drives you!

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