Eight to Ten Hours a Day: What Music Actually Does to My Brain

Today’s a better day. Good night’s sleep, stuck to my routines, got through my priorities, and even picked up a little good news. But I wanted to do an early entry, because I want to introduce one of the sub-projects I’ve got going on this site: a deep, hyperfocused dive into music, and what it actually does to me.

Music is more than anything else to me. I listen to it probably 8 to 10 hours a day — I know that’s on the high side. But it’s the way certain kinds of it make me feel, and I’ve never found a substitute for that.

I’ll start from the beginning. When I first got into music, I was completely shaped by my environment. Rap was the default, partly because that’s what everyone around me listened to. Eminem was a huge influence — I’d dissect his music line by line and internalize whatever lined up with my own childhood. I was way too young to be absorbing some of what he said, and I know that now. Somewhere along the way, something flipped, and I went from rap to being completely against it, hooked instead on Slipknot, Drowning Pool, Korn, that whole world. For years I dressed like the music — chain pants, a mohawk, fully confrontational and rebellious. I honestly don’t know what pulled that out of me.

Got a little older and realized I liked more than one genre. Middle of my teens is a blur — probably a mix of rock and rap, if I had to guess. But the real turning point was getting introduced to electronic music.

Here’s the thing about EDM and a brain like mine: the unstructured sound with limited words was one of the biggest sources of happiness I’d ever found. Pair that with party drugs, which I also got hooked on, and it clicked into place fast. Some of the science behind why ADHD brains gravitate toward EDM specifically comes down to the fast, repetitive beats and predictable structure — but the deeper layer is dopamine. The predictable build-and-release cycle is its own reward. The fast-paced changes drown out scattered-thought noise and drop you into a flow state that’s easy to stay in. And for people who struggle with time blindness — sitting there feeling time pass is its own kind of torture — hyperfocusing on a tightly structured 8, 16, or 32-bar phrase gives you an external sense of time actually moving. Music was already valuable to me before any of that. But the dopamine hit and the buildup to a drop had me completely infatuated, and I went all in on exploring that world.

In college, a friend introduced me to the rave scene, and my first festival was EDC Las Vegas, 2013. I’d barely left New York State at that point, let alone the West Coast. The whole experience was mind-blowing — and yes, I added substances that only heightened it, mostly things built around serotonin release. But underneath the drugs, feeling the music in my chest, watching the crowd, soaking in that energy, being able to just be myself for a few days straight — that was the best feeling I’d ever had. Three days, a long list of artists I loved seeing live, and I came home and immediately started figuring out how to get to the next one.

I had no car that summer. I was staying at my grandmother’s house on my father’s side and working for him. My father told me flat out that if I went to the next festival, I wouldn’t have a job with him anymore. So I made the choice — get screamed at by him every day, or go be around people who loved the same thing I did. Looking at it now, that was one of the first stepping stones toward surrounding myself with people who did drugs.

The next festival story is a wild one. It was upstate — I took a tour bus out, showed up with a tent strapped to my backpack, met up with college friends who’d gotten us in a night early to set up camp. Naturally, I stayed up all night doing drugs before the music even started. The next day, one of my college friends — who’d never done acid before — had a grand mal seizure the second she saw the strobing lights at the stage, and got carried out by paramedics. I was on multiple substances myself and barely functional, but I caught her as she went down. Security got in my face screaming, asking what she’d taken, and I couldn’t even get words out. She was okay in the end — went to the hospital, and they actually let her back in for the rest of the weekend. But it set the tone for everything after. I felt horrible, because at that point I felt like I’d been the one who pulled her into all of it that day.

There’s a harder side story from that same festival. A close friend’s fiancée had something happen to her there the year before — she suffered a severe brain injury, spent time in a vegetative state, and eventually passed away. That was one of my first real lessons in how dangerous this stuff actually was. And I ignored it anyway.

But back to the music itself, since that’s really what I wanted to sit with today. I use it as a reset for my mood, or sometimes as an expression of it. Angry or upset, I reach for dark rap or metal, and somehow it makes me happy — it doesn’t erase whatever caused the feeling, but it softens it. Trying to get things done, I put on house music — that steady 1-2-3-4 tempo puts more motivation in my bones than almost anything else. It makes me smile like an idiot, dancing around my kitchen where nobody can see me. Then there’s a whole other side of me that loves country, specifically Midwest and Southern rock, and string bands. I love a good story in a song. I love being surprised. I love anything that isn’t cookie-cutter.

I could go on about this forever, honestly, and I know I need to wrap it up. This is just a window into how my mind actually works, and like always, I hope someone out there relates to some piece of it. For a while I took a break from electronic music altogether, because every time I heard it I’d end up back in some memory of how messed up I was at a specific show, or what I was doing at the time. Now I actively push past those old associations and focus on what part of the music I actually love — which sound, which note, which lyric — instead of what it used to be attached to.

Today’s point was just to share some facts, share a story, and share how I relate to it all. I know I drifted and chased a few squirrels along the way, but that’s how my brain works. As always, thank you for reading this — for taking time out of your day to sit inside the chaos going on in my head. Might come back and write something later, might not. This one was completely spontaneous. Have a good day, everybody.