Music Therapy
Music therapy is a clinical and evidence-based healthcare practice that uses music interventions, such as listening, singing, playing instruments, songwriting, improvisation, or movement to music, to address physical, emotional, cognitive, social, and spiritual needs. A credentialed music therapist conducts assessments and designs personalized therapeutic sessions where music serves as the primary tool to achieve non-musical goals. These might include reducing anxiety and depression, improving communication and social skills, processing trauma, enhancing motor function and coordination, supporting neurological rehabilitation, fostering emotional expression, or providing comfort in palliative care.
Music therapy is particularly effective for neurodivergent individuals—including those with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and dyspraxia—because music can bypass certain neurological barriers and offer alternative pathways for connection, regulation, and expression that verbal or traditional therapies may not provide.
How it might help creatives:
Music therapy can support creatives by offering a non-verbal processing avenue for working through creative blocks, emotional struggles, or psychological patterns without having to articulate everything in words. It provides structured creative exploration through improvisation and songwriting, addresses performance anxiety and creative fear using music-based nervous system regulation, and supports emotional regulation for managing the psychological demands of artistic work. It facilitates somatic and embodied creativity by reconnecting you with your body through rhythm, movement, and sound. For neurodivergent creatives specifically, music therapy offers sensory regulation tools, supports executive function through rhythmic structure, and validates different creative processes as natural variations rather than problems to fix.