(((O))) : Mood Music

For me, anxiety brings two kinds of insomnia. One is the heart-racing, frantic kind. The one that keeps me hovering on the edge of a full-blown panic attack for what feels like hours. The one that has me envisioning all kinds of horrors that will probably never come to pass. The one that when I do eventually drift off, wakes me every few hours, heart still pounding and unsettled. This one requires music that will distract me, but not engage me too much. So I choose classical pieces or post-rock, and nothing in between. I don’t want lyrics because I don’t want other thoughts to intrude; I want background noise. It’s comforting, I suppose – if I want to focus on it, I can, or I can let it just be. And having that choice is important, because panic totally and utterly robs you of any sense of control. ‘Winter’ from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is a favourite, for the way its pacy violins move from chilly and insistent to pure and joyful. Sigur Rós and some of Mogwai’s sunnier moments also do the trick, as anything too heavy or clashy jars in my head. ‘How To Be A Werewolf’ is a good soundtrack to a freak-out, as is ‘Letters To The Metro’. 

The other kind of anxious insomnia is more subdued – which sounds like a contradiction, but isn’t. My fears are low-level but unrelenting. My body seems resigned to the fact that it will not sleep. And so I go to Radio 2 – easy listening. The sound of my grandparents’ house, where I spent most of my childhood. It’s the sound of home. I hear the music I was raised on, singers my uncle introduced me to when I was 10, 11, 12, and just beginning to find my way around a guitar fretboard. Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, Sheryl Crow, Blondie, U2, Alison Krauss, Jewel. Songs I could sing along to without thinking about it, songs that are just there, as if by osmosis. 

Usually I’m something of an insufferable hipster when it comes to music; I love the thrill of discovering an artist or band that no-one’s heard of yet. Anxiety drives me back to the familiar, the music I’ve known for most of my life. Back to a time when I wasn’t prone to panic attacks, when I didn’t know what it was like to be scared of everything that may or may not happen.