For a couple of weeks, I will tune everyone out who is giving me advice, so that I can make a clear decision on my own and it takes time.” – Paul Walker Normally it will take me two weeks, until the very last minute and I have to say yes or no. “What I find really difficult is making career decisions.

I always thought of myself as more of the goofy guy.” – Paul Walker “When I was younger, the pressure was just being cool. Most people never listen.” – Ernest Hemingway “When we don’t tell those we love about what’s really going on or listen carefully to what they have to say, we tend to fill in the blanks with stories.” – Sharon Salzberg “When we listen, we hear someone into existence.” – Laurie Buchanan “Sharing music helps the patient feel like the therapist ‘really gets me.“When we want to talk, we can instead listen, and let our attentiveness to another’s need to speak be our silent statement.” – Bryant McGill “A feeling of attunement can happen with music,” he says. One is “guided imagery in music,” Turry says, where a trained therapist helps a person uncover her strengths or challenges by listening to music the patient chooses. “Music therapy starts with the idea that, as therapists, we’re collaborating with a person who’s looking to help themselves to feel more complete or optimistic-or to discover parts of themselves they aren’t aware of-using music,” says Alan Turry, managing director of the Nordoff-Robbins Center for Music Therapy at New York University. To cultivate an even deeper connection between music and your health, consider a field called music therapy, which focuses on using music to improve patient outcomes. While listening to inspirational music can help you exercise harder or longer, calm music won’t help you unwind if you’re listening to it while you’re scrolling through your news or social feeds, he says. “We fool ourselves into thinking we can do two things at once,” he says.

If you’re looking to use music to de-stress, pump yourself up or otherwise shift your mental or emotional state, Levitin says you probably already have a bank of songs you can pull from that you know will have the appropriate effect. “One thing people find surprising is that music activates nearly every region of brain we’ve mapped so far.” This hints at music’s universality and power to affect us.

There’s also no single “music center” in the brain, he says. “There’s no one piece of music that will do the same thing for everyone.” “These were people who normally listened to Swedish speed metal, so to them AC/DC was soothing,” he says. Levitin says he’s encountered people who have said that AC/DC is their relaxation music. Tracks with a slow tempo, gradual chord progressions and drawn-out notes tend to be calming, Levitin says, while chaotic and up-tempo music tends to have the opposite effect. Why? The rhythm and other characteristics of the songs we select can modulate our heart rates and the activity of our brain’s neural networks, explains Daniel Levitin, a professor of psychology who researches the cognitive neuroscience of music at McGill University in Canada. One 2015 study from Finland found that music can bolster negative emotions-like anger, aggression or sadness-much the same way it can counteract these feelings. Along with inducing stress, Loewy says, the wrong music can promote rumination or other unhelpful mental states.

Quotes about listening to live musi