"I really enjoy the therapeutic aspect of playing and writing music. It's a great way to express yourself and clear your mind"

Slash’s observation captures how music-making functions as a personal clinic: a room you can enter at any hour where noise turns into meaning. Playing and writing give shape to sensations that otherwise swirl without direction; once a sound is chosen, a tempo set, a phrase repeated, interior weather becomes organized. Therapeutic here is less about diagnosis than about regulation, finding a steady pulse that the body can trust and a vocabulary the heart can use.

Expression through sound bypasses the bottleneck of language. A bend of a note, a clipped rest, a sudden modulation can tell the truth faster than sentences. Composing translates raw feeling into form; it asks you to decide beginning, tension, release. That act of choosing restores agency when life feels uncontrollable. Even sorrow becomes workable when it can be voiced as a motif and varied, echoed, resolved. The page or fretboard becomes a mirror and a map at once, reflecting what’s there while suggesting where to go next.

Clearing the mind is the companion gift. Repetition entrains breath and heartbeat; attention narrows to touch, time, tone. This focused absorption resembles meditation: distractions fall away as the hands negotiate muscle memory and micro-decisions. The result is not emptiness but lucid space, a mental room swept of clutter so one clear line can sing through it. Afterward, the world feels sorted, the edges softened.

Importantly, the medicine resides in process, not perfection. It’s available to virtuosos and beginners, in solitary practice or loud rooms with friends. Discipline provides the container; spontaneity fills it with oxygen. To pick up an instrument or a pen is to choose presence over numbness, curiosity over rumination. The song that emerges is a bonus. The real reward is having met yourself honestly and left the session lighter, steadier, and more awake.