Is music making you sick?
There's more to health than food, part 2
Last week we talked about all the material toxins (other than those from food) that negatively impact your health.
But health doesn’t stop there. In keeping with the theme of “you are what you consume”, the health of your physical body is greatly damaged by immaterial toxins that you absorb— influences that are not chemical in nature, but nonetheless can affect your physical body.
Today we will survey these influences and their potential solutions, which will hopefully encourage you to approach your health more holistically than the methods espoused by most conventional and alternative health practitioners.
More than matter
Addressing all the chemical toxins in our daily lives may seem daunting, but once you’ve figured it out, it isn’t really that hard.
Eat good food, breathe clean air, drink pristine water, etc.
If you’ve addressed them all, then congrats— you’ve solved the material problem.
But if your body is just a sack of cells and chemicals, then why would anything else matter?
Even if you are an abject materialist and deny the reality of immaterial concepts like the soul, there are still measurable means by which two primary forces affect your body: emotions, and the intellect.
Emotions and chemistry
The way you feel affects your health.
Why? Because emotions are inseparable from physiology.
When you’re excited, your heart rate increases. When you’re sad, your posture slumps. Anxious, and your stomach hurts.
Not only do emotions trigger a physical response, the physical state is part of the emotion. How can you feel excited without a higher heart rate? You can’t.
This is what the folks who would have you upload your brain to the metaverse don’t understand— without a body, you definitionally cannot experience emotions.
All emotions result in bodily reactions that trigger the release of different hormones, which quite obviously affect chemistry, just like the endocrine disrupters that chemically change your hormones.
And because there are healthy as well as unhealthy physical states, things that affect your emotions can harm your health.
Ideas and their effects
On a different level, your ideas— the way you think about things— also affect your health.
When I thought that all foods were toxic, I would eat something that I thought myself unable to digest, and then I’d have digestive stress.
But now that I know that a healthy body can digest (most) real foods, I eat real foods that I formerly would have considered bad for me (like spinach or bread), and I feel fine.
How many times have you heard some old man who never gets sick, perhaps an uncle or grandpa, tell you “if I ever start to feel sick, I just ignore it and go to work anyway”?
Not only that, but thoughts affect emotions too. If you come to believe that the world sucks and is falling apart around you, that thought will lead to the feeling of anxiety and stress, and stress kills.
Even without the “woo woo” beliefs of some in the alternative health world, it’s clear how impactful ideas can be.
But identifying them is not so easy.
The source of immaterial toxins
Toxic water comes from the tap. Toxic food comes from pesticides and processing. It’s easy to identify their source, and to correct it.
But where do toxic emotions and ideas come from?
Largely, they mimic your emotional and intellectual surroundings— both in the short term and long term.
If your friends start laughing at certain memes, you’ll start to find them funny.
If your friends get obsessed with a new TV show, you will too.
If everyone in college believes certain ideas, you probably will too.
While all people (some more than others) have the capacity for creativity and originality, most of our inner world is formed by mimicking others.
Even your DNA mimics your parents’.
Mimicry is a fundamental feature of life. But we can only mimic what we are surrounded by, and that is exactly how these influences appear in our lives.
So, just like you would in regard to air quality and food availability, choose your emotional and intellectual environment carefully. Because you will become like it.
Here is a general overview of all the influences, both emotional and intellectual, that you are subject to.
Your job is straightforward: to critically examine these influences in your life and change them to the extent possible from unhealthy to healthy.
Music
We start with music, which was eloquently described by music analyst/critic/philosopher
in the following way:When I tell people that music is life-changing, they think I’m speaking metaphorically or symbolically. But I’m dead serious about all this.
Seems a bit exaggerated, but there is a good reason for this.
There is a primordial part of our brain that is instantly triggered when we hear music. It brings us back to our ancestral memories of dancing around a camp fire, and there is no avoiding its influence.
It’s hard to overstate how powerful music is. Think about pop music concerts, or the opera, or Broadway musicals. No art form, except for perhaps film (the best pieces of which, I might add, are accompanies by brilliant scores) has as instantaneous or powerful of an emotional, and therefore physiological effect on us as music does.
This is a very good, albeit long, article on the topic. But the conclusion is that music is a true Amygdala Hijack— no matter what your rational brain wants to think or feel, music can override it without your knowledge or consent.
Thus music, like any powerful tool, can be use for good or for bad. By accident or on purpose.
Your goal here is simply to become aware of how it affects you, and to change your exposure to it accordingly.
In an attempt to avoid imposing my tastes on you (as much as I would like to), here are some questions that will guide you on this self-assessment:
Are you aware of when and what music you play? Or do you just “put something on” without thinking about it?
Do you notice that you play different genres of music on different occasions in your day to day life? Why or why not?
How does the music you play make you feel, and how does that affect the activities you’re doing at the time?
Where do you hear music that you don’t actively play? At the mall, at the bar, in an airplane, at church? Why do you think they playing that particular music, based on how it makes you feel?
What emotional states do different genres induce in you? Which ones are good, and when?
For me, I’ve noticed the following. All of these have a place for me, but music outside of these genres has a wholly unpleasant effect and I avoid it as much as possible.
Rock makes me excited/rowdy/amped
Classical music for intellectual stimulation
Electronic music for focus and energy
Sacred Music (e.g. Byzantine chanting) for appreciating the divine nature of reality/connecting to God, calming down, and remembering what my life priorities are
If your music gives you fearful/angry/degenerate/anxious thoughts, then it is probably best to avoid if you are trying to be healthy, since all of those emotions are accompanied by a stressful physiological state and again, stress kills.
What is stress
I’ve said “stress kills” twice already, so it’s worth exploring what that means.
What is stress? I’ll give you my definition that I think will greatly help you in your understanding of the world— feel free to take it or leave it.
Stress is a physiological response to a state of the world in which there is a difference between the way things are and the way things should be.
When you should be asleep but you’re not, stress.
When you shouldn’t be drinking fluoride but you are, stress.
When you do something that your moral code says is wrong, stress (read Crime and Punishment for one of the best depictions of this kind of stress).
With that in mind, let’s continue.
Art/Architecture
Similar to music, visual art can also affect your emotions.
It may be less immediately jarring, and is easier to tune out (just close your eyes).
But again, you are what you consume. If you consume ugly and chaotic things through your eyes, your internal mental and emotional states also become ugly and chaotic.
Health is about the triumph of order over chaos, and for your body to be orderly, the things you consume should be orderly too.
When your surroundings should be orderly but they’re actually chaotic, what does that give you?
Stress.
When your room is messy, doesn’t it stress you out?
When you pass by piles of garbage and detritus on the streets on Manhattan, doesn’t it stress you out?
This is the reason why Tan Land is designed the way it is. Pleasant aesthetics contribute to an internal sense of order that is consistent with health.
You can read more about this here:
Here are some things to consider when optimizing the aesthetics of your environment for order instead of chaos:
Is your house a mess? Are things where they should be? When your desk is chaotic, so is your mind.
What decorations are in your house? Plastic, ugly, corporate, assembly line items? Bright artificial colors? Or beautiful art and fine craftsmanship?
What about your town/neighborhood? Strip malls and gas stations? Or well-maintained landscaping, farms and healthy animals, and an abundance of vegetation?
People/Vibes
You are the five people you spend your time with. Again, through mimicry you converge toward your surroundings.
If your friends think and act a certain way, so will you.
When your friends are depressed and smoke weed all day, what are you likely to do?
If your friends work hard and hit the gym every morning, what are you likely to do?
Questions to ask yourself:
Who do you spend significant time with (digitally or in person) on a weekly basis?
For each person/category of people, what are their primary activities and beliefs?
Do you like those beliefs and activities? Do you want to incorporate more of them in your own life, or not?
Do they look and act like how you would like to, or not?
Depending on the answers to those questions, you may want to reconsider the time you spend with others, or encourage them to act in ways that respect the health of all of you.
More on having a healthy social life here:
Ideas and Entertainment
When you see something in a video, your brain thinks it’s real.
There is no way for our brains to distinguish between seeing something in real life, or seeing a realistic video of something.
If you’ve ever heard of someone talking about a fictional TV show, this will become apparent by how they describe the characters in the show.
“I want to be just like Tony Stark when I grow up”
“Cersei Lannister is such a b*tch”
They talk about the characters as if they are real people. They might as well be talking about George Washington or Joan of Arc.
Reality vs. Fantasty
That’s because a visual story, once implanted in the brain, becomes just as real as an actual history of real events.
But not only do the events become real— so too do the characters, their beliefs, and their culture.
Tradeoff between beauty and intelligence
Here is a pertinent example: it is a running trope in many films that attractive/physically successful people are unintelligent, and that ugly people tend to be smart or clever.
The Princess Diaries, Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer, and Grease all feature examples of this trope. There are countless others.
So it’s no surprise that most people come to believe in the reality of this tradeoff in their day to day lives.
Fit guy? He’s a dumb jock. Pretty girl? What a bimbo.
But that’s simply not true. Obvious to the enlightened readers of Tan Land, who know that a healthy brain is smart as a healthy body is attractive.
Yet the trope remains, and has infected the the culture with a false idea.
Tradeoff between taste and health
Another relevant example is the idea that healthy food tastes bad and vice versa. Omnipresent in popular “comedy”, everyone knows that you can only pick one or the other.
We know that belief is false, and we know the damage it’s caused.
False ideas are bad for you
This article is long enough as it is, but suffice to say that if you believe in false things, irrespective of which things they are, you will be unhealthy.
Why? Because health means living in accordance with nature, and nature’s ways are inherently true.
Beauty = health = truth = goodness
Ugliness = sickness = falsehood = badness
You want health? Then you need truth.
What to do?
The punchline here is to be very careful with the entertainment and ideas you consume. Their subliminal teachings about the world will become your beliefs about the world.
Things to evaluate:
Music lyrics
Movies, both the stories as well as the beliefs depicted between the lines
Books, both for their obvious content as well as subliminal assumptions about the world
Teachers/professors/public figures
Everything you see on social media
The beliefs of your friends and family about basically every topic
So make sure to analyze those teachings and see if they are something you’d like to adopt. If so, then it’s great to brainwash yourself.
But if not, avoid them like the plague.
This one got a bit longer and deeper than I had originally intended, so I’m sure somethings were not as well explained as I would have liked. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments.
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