Music as a Weapon

There are many tools available to the Aspie in his or her battle against anxiety; we are not just limited to medication when it comes to defending ourselves. I have already (if briefly) described how to use mindfulness, as well as CBT and touched upon some useful herbal remedies. However, you cannot have too many methods for combating stress and anxiety and with that in mind I will introduce another of my personal favourites. Anchoring is a neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) technique where an individual associates a mental state with a specific stimulus. That stimulus can be anything, such as a smell, image, sound or even a physical sensation, for example a pinprick. NLP seems to be derived from the behavioural branch of psychology, which is also the simplest, albeit with a lot of over-complicated words and phrases. 

A lot of websites that offer to reduce anxiety (for a fee) use NLP and anchoring in particular as the basis of their service. However, you don’t have to pay a supposed expert to teach you anchoring; it is easy enough to master on your own. Before I was even aware of anchoring and NLP, I had already developed my own form. I use all sorts of stimuli to anchor to a state of calm, but media, and music in particular are the most effective in my opinion. Music is designed to elicit an emotional response in the listener. Have you ever listened to a piece of classical music and felt like your very soul was being gently caressed, or heard a piece of heavy metal and experienced the pain and anger woven into it. Everyone has a song that reminds them of a particular moment in time; if you do then you have already experienced anchoring (albeit sub-consciously). 

The simplest way to anchor a feeling of calm to a song is to pick a song that is suitable to that emotion (so heavy and thrash metal are out) and every time you are feeling mellow, whack it on. To speed this process up, sit in a darkened room, with a mug of camomile tea, listening through some big headphones so that the rest of the world is blocked from your mind; or even whilst meditating. Eventually you will notice that you can play it when you are stressed and it will instantly bring back that mellow. It takes time to build up an extensive library of songs, but it is behavioural psychology at its simplest. It depends upon what kind of music you like, but I would recommend chilled electronic as I find its repetitive nature very comforting. Artists such as Solar Fields, Asura, Aes Dana and I Awake are a good place to start in this respect. 

Once you have gotten anchoring music to calm down to a T, you can start applying the technique to other forms of media like movies or games. After that, the world of anchoring is yours to command.