Why I don't work without music (except in these few cases)

If you ask any of my friends, they'll tell you my headphones might be surgically attached to my head. I've always got music playing. When I write, when I code, when I answer email, when I'm doing the dishes.

But there are a few moments when I take them off on purpose. Understanding why I put them on, and why I take them off, is one of the most useful things I've learned about focus.

The cup

I picture my mind as a cup. It can only hold so much at once. Psychologists call it working memory: you can only consciously hold a small amount of information at a time.

Here's the catch. If the work in front of me doesn't fill the cup, my mind fills the rest by itself. Worries. Plans. Regrets. That thing I said last weekend. Mental chatter.

And chatter is expensive. In part one, I wrote about a Harvard study that found our minds wander almost half the time, and that we're less happy when they do.

Flow State is the opposite: the mind goes quiet and the work takes up all of it. So the question becomes, how do you quiet the chatter?

Every way to quiet your mind has a cost

There are a lot of ways. They all work for the same reason: they leave less room for thoughts. The difference is what they cost.

• Alcohol quiets the mind by changing your brain chemistry. I remember startup offices with a beer fridge, and how my code got better after the first beer. It also got worse after the third 😅
• Exercise quiets the mind by capturing your attention. It's why runners and snowboarders call it meditative. But it's hard to write code while flying down a mountain.
• Meditation quiets the mind by watching thoughts instead of following them. It's the most powerful of all, and it takes the most practice.
• Music quiets the mind by filling the rest of the cup, so you're free to focus on a single task.

Music is my favorite. It's the only one that lets me sit at my desk and do the work at the same time. It takes up the space my thoughts would have filled, so what's left goes to the task.

Why the music matters (no lyrics)

There's one important rule: the music shouldn't compete for the same space as your work.

In a 2014 study, psychologists Nick Perham and Harriet Currie gave people a reading test while they listened to songs with lyrics, music without lyrics, or nothing at all. With lyrics, people scored the worst, even with songs they loved. With music that had no lyrics, they did just as well as in silence.

My guess why: lyrics are words. When I'm reading or writing, my brain is already busy with words. Replacing my own stream of words with someone else's doesn't solve the problem.

That's why every track on my playlists has no lyrics. Calm, steady, mostly electronic. Enough to fill the cup, never enough to steal it.

The few times I turn it off

So when do the headphones come off? Three times.

1. When the work fills the cup on its own.

Music is an assist for work that isn't demanding enough to take all of my attention. Some work doesn't need the assist. When I DJ or perform live, there's track selection, effects, reading the room, anticipating what's next. There's simply no room left for chatter. The challenge fills the cup for me. Adding anything else would only get in the way.

2. When I want my mind to wander.

Sometimes chatter isn't the enemy. It's the point. When I need to process something, a big decision, a hard week, an idea that isn't ready yet, I need space, not input.

A while back I realized I'd been avoiding time alone. So I started small: 15 minutes on the treadmill with no headphones. No music at all, which is rare for me. My mind ran wild in every direction. By the end I was laughing at my own jokes, old memories came back lighter, and ideas connected in ways I didn't expect.

The research backs this up. Neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang has shown that quiet, inward time is when the brain makes meaning out of what we've learned. If music fills every gap, there's no room left for that.

3. When I've had too much.

Everything has a dose. Even the good stuff. For the first time in my life, after a stretch of non-stop DJing, producing and listening, I felt a little overwhelmed by music itself. That's information, not failure. When the thing that usually helps starts to feel heavy, I take a break from it, and it comes back better.

How to decide for yourself

Next time you sit down to work, ask two questions:

• Is the work already filling my whole mind? Then you don't need anything else.
• Do I want my mind to wander right now? Then go for a walk without headphones.

If the answer to both is no, and most of the time it will be, put on something without lyrics and press play. And if music still feels like it's too much (this happens to me when I'm working on a really complex problem) then I use soundscapes, like nature or cafe sounds. Those help fill the cup a little, but not too much that I can't think deeply on an abstract problem.

Of course, you can find both of these, instrumental music and natural soundscapes, at Flow State Radio.

Sources

• Perham, N., & Currie, H. (2014). Does listening to preferred music improve reading comprehension performance? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 28(2), 279–284.
• Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932.
• Immordino-Yang, M. H., Christodoulou, J. A., & Singh, V. (2012). Rest is not idleness: Implications of the brain's default mode for human development and education. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(4), 352–364.