In Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel High Fidelity, the protagonist – a record store worker who has just been dumped – asks himself, “What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music?” There is plenty of evidence which suggests that listening to sad music can be pleasurable or therapeutic, but it’s not always so simple. Music has the power to affect our emotions, but this cuts both ways: it can be cathartic and consoling; it can also be self-destructive.
For the first time in almost half a decade, I recently had cause to experience romantic unhappiness – something which, historically, I have never dealt with well. This time around, though, a radical thought occurred: maybe I could try not to go insane. We can’t really control our thoughts and feelings, but we can control our behavior, and, to some extent, the former follows on from the latter. To use an unpleasant but regrettably popular modern parlance, I decided to “rawdog” the heartbreak: no alcohol, no disordered eating, no maudlin posts on social media, no buzzcuts or bleached blonde hair, no maladaptive coping techniques of any description. All of these measures met with unanimous approval from my friends, except for one: I also banned myself from listening to sad music.
There would be no Amy Winehouse, Frank Ocean, or Lana del Rey – even in the depths of my despair, I would trundle on with the 40-hour-long audiobook about Ronald Reagan to which I had already started listening. “You have to allow yourself to feel,” my friends protested. Maybe so, but I was not suffering from a deficit of feeling. I didn’t need to unlock anything. Emotional repression is an unpopular strategy these days, when we value “processing” over stoicism and the “stiff upper lip” is considered a relic of a bygone era of stifling masculinity, but in the face of overwhelming sadness, maybe it’s better to move like a Victorian butler than a TikTok therapist.
But I still had some doubts about the rule – was I depriving myself of one of the only good parts of a breakup? Like a lot of people, the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had with music have taken place while in the throes of heartbreak – one of the downsides of being happy, for me at least, is that music never quite hits the same. When you’re going through a breakup, you are able to access an adolescent intensity which can otherwise become elusive as you get older, and the meaning of some of the most beautiful songs ever released becomes more forceful than ever before. Avoiding these songs is arguably a wasted opportunity. It may be self-defeating to rub salt in the wound, but it can certainly be enjoyable, or at least grimly satisfying, like picking at a scab.
“In the early stages, or whenever you’re ready to do it, it’s good just to be fully teenage and sit in the pain,” Annie Lord, the author of Notes on Heartbreak, tells Dazed. “When I was going through a breakup, I went back home to Leeds and I was just so emo, sobbing in the fetal position non-stop – I needed to do that. Then it got to the point where I felt it had become gross and depressing, and that’s when I changed up the breakup playlist to more empowering stuff.”
“I think if someone is deliberately avoiding sad music, they’re avoiding processing the breakup. That’s fine, sometimes it’s hard to do that all in one go, but eventually it will have to happen and music is such a good way of leaning into those feelings” – Annie Lord
As Annie began working through the pain, she embraced music that was sad but more uplifting, like Robyn, and angrier, more defiant songs, like JoJo’s “Leave (Get Out)”. “It’s a bit embarrassing, but I listened to a lot of Lizzo,” she admits. When I think back to the way I listened to music following previous breakups, it’s not actually the case that I wallowed in misery for months on end. Just as there’s no singular definition of “sad music”, there are many different kinds of break-up songs; they can be about despair, self-pity and loneliness; anger, bitterness and resentment; hope, acceptance and gratitude, and everything in between – an album like Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black, which you couldn’t force me at gunpoint to listen to right now, runs the spectrum.
As long as you’re working through these stages, listening to music can allow for a helpful kind of self-narrativisation – you start out in a place of pure abjection, then work through it with some indignance, sass and feigned indifference, before eventually rising from the ashes like a phoenix. The ultimate goal is to feel like you’re in the end credits of a film about a startlingly brave and mature person who survives a breakup and is going to be OK. If you deprive yourself of the initial self-pity, it might be harder to reach that outcome – maybe you need to pass through “Love Is a Losing Game” before you can arrive at “Tears Dry on Their Own”. “I think if someone is deliberately avoiding sad music, they’re avoiding processing the breakup,” says Annie. “That’s fine, sometimes it’s hard to do that all in one go, but eventually it will have to happen and music is such a good way of leaning into those feelings.”
There is no straightforward answer about whether listening to sad music will help or hurt us when we’re trying to get over a broken heart – it can just as easily do both. According to Dr Mimi O’Neill, a lecturer at York University and the director of the York Music Psychology Group, here is a long list of pros and cons. “On the positive side, sad music can serve as a form of emotional validation and catharsis,” she tells Dazed. “When someone is going through a breakup, they often experience a mix of sadness, loss and loneliness, and listening to music that mirrors these emotions can create a sense of understanding and companionship. Research suggests that this alignment or congruence between a listener’s mood and the music’s emotional tone can lead to a phenomenon known as ‘emotional resonance’. This resonance allows individuals to feel that their emotions are recognised and validated, which can be therapeutic. It provides a safe space for them to process their feelings, often leading to emotional release, such as crying, which can be a vital step in healing.”
“Prolonged exposure to sad music during a breakup might reinforce negative emotions and potentially prolong the grieving process” – Dr Mimi O’Neill
As Dr O’Neill suggests, there is also a comfort in knowing that other people have experienced heartbreak before you and that, however alone you may feel, you are experiencing one of the most universal and inevitable aspects of the human condition. While he was talking about literature, rather music, the writer James Baldwin once made a similar point: “You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.” While it may not carry the same sense of grandeur as recognising yourself in a timeless work of work literature, it can come as a relief to listen to a SZA song and know she was going through it in the exact same way.
But there is a thin line between allowing yourself to feel sadness and loss, and allowing yourself to be trapped by those same feelings. It really is possible to spend too much time wallowing, and the therapeutic benefits are likely to diminish over time. “Prolonged exposure to sad music during a breakup might reinforce negative emotions and potentially prolong the grieving process,” says Dr O’Neill. “We can often track the four or five stages of grief during a breakup: denial, anger, bargaining or self-blame, depression, and acceptance. Music can help at each of these stages, but to move through them you might want to have separate playlists. This occurs because the repetitive listening to music that reflects one’s current mood can lead to a feedback loop, where the listener continues to dwell on their sadness rather than moving forward. We tend to call this ‘rumination’, where the continuous focus on negative emotions through music can hinder emotional recovery.”
If music is going to make you feel better, there needs to be a sense of forward momentum – you have to break out of the maudlin stage, even if this means going as far as listening to Lizzo. As for my own rule, it didn’t take me long to feel as though I was missing out – music is one of the greatest pleasures in my life, so it felt unnecessarily austere to forgo it at a time when I was already so unhappy. As a compromise, I decided I could treat myself to some sad music, but only if the lyrics were ambiguous or irrelevant to my own situation – I could listen to the Cocteau Twins, or Sufjan Stevens singing about the death of a childhood friend from cancer, but not “I Can’t Make You Love Me” by Bonnie Raitt. That way I could get the ‘emotional resonance’, and experience music as a kind of consolation, while still maintaining a degree of distance. It’s working out well so far.
I once came up with a theory that everyone can be categorised into three distinct types, based on how they behave after a break-up: you’re either a Lana (yearning and self-destructive, leaning into the melancholy), a Drake (defiant, focused on self-improvement and glowing-up, but in a slightly embittered way) or an Ariana (sunny, optimistic, and philosophical, even if this is sometimes feels contrived.) I’ve always been a Lana moon, Drake rising – but people can change: I can change. In a month’s time, I hope you’ll find me killing it in a spin class, mouthing the words to “thank u, next” as the realisation hits that everything is going to be alright; as a smile spreads across my face and the credits start to roll.
