I teach Music 101 at a small private university in New England. The primary skill I teach, starting from day one, is non-judgement. For most students, the only thing standing between them and competent musical analysis is judgement: they hear a song, and it can cause an emotional response, and that emotion impedes their ability to do the work I ask them to do.

Let’s be more specific about that moment of emotional response.

An emotion is a a cycle that happens in your body. That’s it. It’s a physiological response of neurotransmitters and electrical signals that has a pattern, a beginning, a middle, and an end. Most emotion happens below the level of conscious awareness, which is why I teach my students explicitly to notice their immediate emotional responses to music. I don’t ask them to change their immediate judgments, because it doesn’t matter to me whether they love or hate any particular piece of music. What matters is that they can recognize the response, and keep listening anyway. What they’re really doing there is practicing non-judgement not just of the music, not also non-judgement of their own response to the music. Love it? Hate it? Fine. That’s your nervous system suspecting that stimulus is either safe or unsafe, approach or avoid. But the reality is no music is dangerous. All music is approachable.

The reason they need this skill in MUS 101 is that some of those neural patterns interfere with other patterns your brain is usually in charge of. For example, when we are stunned by something, we literally get speechless. The parts of our brain in charge of language gets shut down by the parts of our brain that are dealing with whatever the shock was. That’s an extreme example, but it happens in more subtle ways, too.

Let’s say you hear a song you love. Your brain fills with activity! Intense neural activity changes how you feel, and even what kinds of decisions you make. We know from one experiment, for example, that students experiencing high allostatic load (the feeling that your brain is full) are more likely to choose cake as a snack rather than fruit, whereas fruit was the nutritious choice made by students in the “control” group who had space in their brains for making an intellectual choice of snack.

A lot of music is designed to evoke an emotional response, a physical response (again: emotions are in your body). We want to move, dance, clap, sing along. Or it makes us smile or cry or gasp. “OMG I haven’t heard that song in forever!” That’s our nervous systems telling us “there is an incoming stimulus that resonates with our familiar patterns.” And now your nervous system is busy flooding you with those feelings, and it has no interest in completing the assignment from you Music 101 professor.

I anticipate that some of my students will be listening to a lot of music while they’re sequestered. For many of them, music is a safe place for emotions. It reflects their feelings back to them, or it coaxes them into feelings they didn’t know they had. If you didn’t use music as stress relief before now, you may find that it’s really effective not just at entertaining and distracting you, but potentially for guiding you all the way through the cycles of emotions.

But this is also the reason some of my students may find listening more difficult.

Music floods your nervous system with the chemical and electrical activity that is emotion. If you’re already in a state of heightened emotion, and your nervous system suspects more emotion might be dangerous or exhausting, it’s going to want to avoid music. You’ll sit down to do your MUS 101 assignment, and your nervous system will say, “wouldn’t you rather check social media or play a game or shop for fun socks or do your taxes or wash dishes or really anything else?!?!??!!!”

If that’s happening, here’s what you need to know: we’ve already learned the skill that will get you past that hurdle. It’s non-judgement. Your nervous system is telling you the music and/or the emotions it evokes are dangerous. But they’re not. Your nervous system is even more likely to be suspicious of intense emotion if you:

have a trauma historyexperienced of childhood adversityare in an insecure financial and/or housing situationyou don’t have a solid network of emotional support at the moment…

Yeah, let’s be real: almost all of you have at least one of those things going on. Which is why I’m writing this. I recognize that I’m asking you to engage with an internal experience that might have been no problem a few weeks ago, but is much harder now.

Remember that emotions are cycles that happen in your body. Only if you keeping ignoring them, stopping them in their tracks, never letting them go all the way through their cycles will emotions cause problems in your life, damage your health, or influence your decisions and behavior in negative ways. If you let an emotion go all the way through its cycle, you’ll probably feel better afterward, no matter how uncomfortable the emotion itself was. Your protective, helpful, lovely nervous system might be shouting DANGERDANGERDANGER but it’s a scared little hedgehog, freaking out and trying to keep you safe. You’re a grown up human who knows better. Turn toward that hedgehog and tell it, “I know you think this is dangerous, but it’s okay. It’s just an emotion, and once its cycle is complete, we’ll be comfortable again… as comfortable as we can be under the circumstances.”

Here are instructions for what to do when your subconscious is telling you to avoid intense emotions, or when you’re flooded with emotion.

Complete the emotion’s cycle. The first step is non-judgement.

Notice the feeling, let yourself feel it even if it’s uncomfortable.Notice the discomfort and let yourself feel that, too. It’s not dangerous, it’s a cycle, and it will end.Notice the physical sensations: heat, chills, tension, tears, fatigue, pain, etc.

Observe those sensations without evaluating them, because they’re not good or bad, they’re just sensations. The important trick is to notice when you’re tempted to feed the sensations thoughts. Emotions thrive on thoughts, and they will keep going past your capacity to complete the cycle if you keep feeding them. So, for a few minutes, when you notice the thoughts about how mad your are, or how sad, or angry, or what someone said, or how someone acted… set the thoughts aside. You can think about them later, or vent about them to a friend on the phone in a little while. For now, go back to observing the sensations. Heat, chills, tension, etc. Observe until it fades. It will just go away on its own. Because that’s what emotions do. And if you’re still overwhelmed after, like, ten minutes? Ask for help. Reach out to someone who will turn toward your feelings with kindness and compassion. For my students, that includes the mental health providers at school. They are available for exactly this kind of help, for exactly this reason.

If the emotion comes on in response to music, you might find it helpful to keep listening while you observe the physical sensations brought on by the emotional response. Or you may need to turn it off, then come back to it after the cycle is complete. If you turn it off, cry yourself out, then turn it back on and start crying again, then maybe the music is acting as a thought and feeding the sensation. In that case, try listening all the way through while noticing the emotion. But maybe do it after a break. You might need a nap or a snack to refuel all those chemicals and electricity.

Be gentle with yourself. Take your time. Ask for help. Do the best you can with the resources you have available. That’s enough.

Bonus content: a photo of my dog, Thomas, when he was about two months old. Because puppies are soothing.

Thomas as a puppy, chewing on a toy bigger than his head