Overcoming Depression Through Music

Hello, and welcome to Overcoming Depression Through Music, a Hustle and Grind dot page post that explores how music can affect positive change in our lives and mental health. 

This post is divided into 3 parts: 

Part 1 covers the personal and professional background on the author of this post Ben Ruppel. We’ll cover Ben’s struggle with schizoaffective disorder and, ultimately, how he overcame the highs and lows of manic depression and fought the delusions of psychosis to find inner peace and strength through music.

Part 2 covers how we can use Ben’s story in our own lives to help us gain control of our thoughts and feelings. By doing so, we will gain insight into what we can control and what we cannot. We will also discuss how we can benefit from the shared experience music provides.

In Part 3, we will go over techniques to help limit the noise of outside stressors and find ways to overcome the obstacles in our way between where we are and where we want to be in terms of our thoughts and deepest emotions.

Welcome to part 1. 

In case you haven’t kept up with Ben on his blog at Hustle and Grind dot page, Ben Ruppel is a dance musician and blogger from Orange, California USA who has been making beats and recording vocals for the past few decades. He regularly posts his music on popular streaming sites like YouTube, Spotify and countless others. Though you may not be able to tell it by listening to his music, Ben suffers from a lifelong affliction called schizoaffective disorder. Ben has been treated for the disorder since he was 19, which was in 2006 and has taken medication as prescribed by his psychiatrist for as long, as well.

Many of the symptoms Ben experiences affect his everyday thoughts and choices. Although all of us experience many of the things described in this post, not all of us will have the same symptoms Ben has. You see, Ben’s mental health disorder is a combination of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Ben’s day to day life is limited by his mental health diagnosis and, at times, even the treatment for it itself. But over a period of decades since Ben’s initial hospitalization and first steps in treating his condition, Ben has found that, through his music, he’s been able to overcome the obstacles in his path and largely live in peace with little to no anxiety.

By isolating the root cause of what it is that makes him anxious, and eliminating the stressors that produce anxiety, Ben has largely been able to reduce the symptoms that plague his day to day life. It is through music that Ben has been able to cope with the constant racing thoughts and social anxiety that would otherwise have overwhelmed his interactions and thought patterns. You see, by separating himself from stressful situations to take steps to pursue his dream of being a musician, Ben has made his own way forward to find his own truths. In a world where addiction and untreated depression symptoms have overwhelmingly plagued the places Ben was living, Ben decided to move back home with his parents to pursue a life of creating music. By taking this step, Ben was able to escape the endless cycle of depression that followed him from medical institutions to assisted living facilities to everywhere else Ben went. 

It was through finding solitude in his passion for music that Ben was able to find the strength and inner calm that allowed him to see the light at the end of the tunnel and escape the prongs of addiction and the continual pursuit of temporary euphoria. Though Ben will be the first to tell you he still struggles with these things, through his music and blog writing, Ben has been able to share his thoughts with the world. This therapeutic technique of sharing (and at times over sharing) has allowed Ben the opportunity to address his thoughts on his own terms and in his own way control the narrative of his life and goals in both music and his personal life.

Welcome to Part 2 of the Overcoming Depression Through Music post.

We all can appreciate Ben’s story in some way, but we came to this post for was to learn how to overcome our own problems and struggles with depression. It’s important to remember that while Ben’s life and the ideas he lives by are true for him, it may not be equally true for you. However, there are some valuable insights we can learn from what we’ve discussed thus far about Ben’s life.

What we learned about Ben is not all that uncommon. Many people live with anxiety and depression or experience the highs and lows of mania. It’s not the point of this video to make a decision about the steps you take towards your own treatment, but know you are not alone when dealing with the reality of the world we are in. Seeking professional help from a doctor is a step we can take to help ourselves overcome depression. With that said, the steps we will outline here are things we can all do, whether we suffer from a formally diagnosed form of depression or not, to help organize our thoughts and be the best version of ourselves we can. 

The first step to take is to connect with the world around us in some small way. Whether that’s through music, blogging, visiting a coffee shop, going to the library, going to a concert, or whatever way you decide to connect, it’s important to find a way of breaking down the barriers that exist in the world to find a commonality with someone else in some way. From there, whether we end up making friends with the person we share our perspective with or not, we find the world understands much more about us and what it means to be ourselves. By doing this, we participate in what the world does now.

Imagine if you have a brilliant idea. Instead of creating something that exemplifies that idea through art, you find a video on YouTube about a similar topic and write a comment describing your idea in full. While it may be an effective way for some people to see your idea, it’s not the most effective way to share it, since you’re using someone else’s space to do so, and for a whole host of reasons that are outside the scope of this video. In this way, it’s important to put the best spin on things we can and put the best foot forward in terms of how we communicate. But to truly ensure you get a good result in your own social interactions, you mustactively organize your thoughts in a way that is consistent, easy to understand, and ultimately is the most effective for you to achieve your goals.

Organizing your thoughts might sound complicated but it’s really very easy once you realize that all it takes is taking the time each day to do the things that allow ourselves to take one small step closer to being the people we want to be. In a small way we can incrementally achieve this everyday by thinking about things positively and putting the best spin on our situation in our mind in order to put the best foot forward in terms of what we want to achieve in life. Though there are always going to be problems to deal with and things that get in the way of our goals, it’s important to remember that, by simply wishing it into existence, we can allow our minds to function in a more organized and efficient manner. It’s up to us to decide how we solve the problems before us, but doing so in an organized way is something that we can and should all strive to improve upon.

So, you might ask, how can I change my mindset to focus on positive change in my outlook? The answer is simple: by focusing on what we can control. What we can’t control isn’t something we should concern ourselves with, at least in our thoughts and inner dialogue. It’s by focusing on the things we can control that we can make incremental change in our day to day thoughts. By putting our minds at ease and simply alleviating the stressors that increasingly obscure our vision of the world, we can better prepare ourselves for the problems that obstruct our goals.

It’s by sharing his music and creating blog posts that Ben was able to share his thoughts, vision and understanding of the world. In this way, Ben was able to create a shared experience that he (and, sometimes, others) could participate in. It’s through this shared experience that we can examine our lives and what it means to be alive. In this way, by sharing the narrative of what it means to be human, we can collectively find meaning in things that are otherwise trivial.

Imagine, for a moment, that life was presented as a movie. You watched the life of one man unfold before you for about 90 years, perhaps in a condensed form, from when the man was born until the man died. Would the events of the man’s life have meaning? Yes, they would. But would they have meaning relative to the cosmic narrative of the universe? Maybe not as much, but they’d still have meaning. Now think of a day in the life of a man. Does that one day have meaning? Probably less so still. So, it’s by sharing the things that give our lives meaning that we create a narrative from things, and how we create the stories that make up our lives.

Welcome to Part 3 of the Overcoming Depression Through Music post. 

By taking small steps towards a more organized mind each day and focusing on what we can control, we take control of the narrative of our lives and what happens to us. Some people may say you should take responsibility for everything that happens to you in life. It is not the point of this post to say that this is the case or that this is incorrect. But by taking the steps necessary to control our own thoughts, we can take action towards a future that is more closely aligned with our own goals and truths. It is through this process of self improvement that we may find our own narrative and what it means to be us. In turn, we can then share this experience with others and thus participate in a small way with the gigantic number of stories that make up the universal story of life. 

But that is not the end of how we shall deal with our stress, anxiety, and depression that has plagued us. It is merely the starting point in terms of organizing our mind and bettering ourselves. How we decide to cope with things ultimately rests in our own hearts and minds. It’s important to examine ways others have dealt with anxiety and depression before us. Treatment is the culmination of years of study passed down over generations who have come and gone before us. It would be remiss to say that we can go without treatment if we experience symptoms of mental health problems such as depression. But how does one treat the underlying cause of depression and not the symptoms? How does one treat solve the problems that arise from life that we can’t solve that create a general sense of sadness that persists for years, if not decades?

The answer to that remains unsolved. What Ben’s story teaches us is that by sharing what we’ve experienced in life with the world, we can make gains in our own mindset and how we interact with, and even perceive, the world. It’s not without some irony that by accepting the things we can’t change, we gain immense control over what we can change. Taking small steps each day toward a healthy, positive mindset about things has increasingly been helpful for Ben, and it’s something we can all learn from. Though there are few things that will eliminate sadness and anxiety from life entirely, we can take steps to control our thoughts, feelings, and, ultimately, the story of our lives.