My Dissertation - Music and Insomnia

Hello all.

I made a post a while back about my musical composition which is designed to help people get to sleep with more ease (if anyone is interested heres the link http://soundcloud.com/marcusknightcompo ... omposition)

Anyway, I had to write a dissertation for my degree and as I was working on the composition, I decided to investigate further. The dissertation looks into how music is/could be used to treat insomnia, while also paying closed attention to conditions surrounding it. It's not really a self help guide, but could be quite interesting to those who suffer, and are interested in learning a little more/better understanding their condition, and it's relationship with music.

It was completed a while ago, and has been assessed (I got a 1st, yay) but would love to hear what people think

http://marcusknight.yolasite.com/resour ... somnia.pdf

Keep well everyone

Marcus Knight
marcusknight.yolasite.com

Marcus,
You make some very good points in your discussion. If I may add my 2 cents, there are some specifics that could bear scrutiny.

First, the topic of depression is a difficult one. I would try to tease depression into 2 categories. There are some people with a chemical imbalance or other physiological problem which causes negative mood. Others can enter depression as a result of hopeless situation. There are situations where a person can do nothing to make things right or tolerable. It leads to hopelessness. The situation might be insomnia, but it could be chronic pain, social stress, divorce, or post traumatic stress. In a strictly behaviorist interpretation, the subject is stressed, but all actions provide no relief. Eventually, the patient learns that no action is beneficial and stops making an effort. Here is the typical lethargy that is so profound in many depressed patients. Removing the cause will remove the depression. However, it is never that simple. The Cognitive Behavioral Therapy forces the patient to try anew to solve the problem. The CBT might encourage the patient to review the situation and say that the problem is not solvable and therefore, it is time to find new meaning or another course. It does not always work. However, CBT does require exiting lethargy and making another attempt on life.

The idea that music can alleviate or abate insomnia is interesting, but the simple explanation is probably not the correct one. Saying that music is relaxing is not enough. I propose that music allows the subject to focus and therefore displace distracting or even unpleasant thoughts. Personally, I find that playing guitar is more relaxing than listening to music since it is a more complex activity. It forces me to concentrate, and in that time, the unpleasant memories of the day or the divorce from 25 years ago are chased away for a while. With training, meditation can also remove the unpleasant memories or moods for long enough to get to sleep.

Perhaps the cognitive acceleration observed when people listen to music is the mind focusing on one thing and crowding out other thoughts. It increases sleep latency, but the path to sleep from a single thought is shorter, and more certain, than the path to sleep from many thoughts. Meditation, when properly performed, provides a path from no thoughts.

I'm not sure any of this is of any value, and I am completely willing to be utterly wrong. We need insomnia to be studied, and we would be very grateful if you can provide even a small improvement to the treatment and understanding of insomnia. We desperately need it.

regards
Gary M

Hey Gary.

First of all, thanks for taking the time to read my dissertation, and second, thanks for allowing it stimulate some thought and opinions on the subject, I strongly believe all research should be challenged in order to generate progression.

You make some really good points, and many of them I agree with, the problem with this piece is that was my first piece of formal research, and I was unfortunately restricted to a word limit meaning I had to miss out important debates in order to stick to the overall structure of the piece. As well as that I do not come from a music therapy background, and so this was all new territory for me, and to add to that there has been very little research in the way of Music Therapy and Insomnia (which kind of inspired me to carry this out) I hope in the future more people take an interest in this area, and that more academic work discusses this theme.

You seem to have a stronger knowledge of depression than myself, and so I can see how you comments add more to the topic of depression and cbt, but it was important for me to approach music and depression, as a method of treating the cause of insomnia (in some cases depression) in order to help sleep. And I also agree that a good method to help produce healthy sleep and break bad cycles is to implement some form of distraction, in this case music. I thought I did cover this in the dissertation (although it's been a while since I read it lol) but maybe it wasn't clear.

Anyway once again, thank you for taking an interest, I don't really have any plans to pursue further academic research but if you want to chat more just drop me an email marcus.b.knight@hotmail.co.uk

Cheers

Marcus Knight
www.marcusknight.yolasite.com