This is very different to anything i’ve ever previously written, but after seeing how music has made a massive impact on my own health, and watching it help Arsenal win the Premier League this week, I decided to write this very personal, intimate post.
For decades, I hid parts of myself.
I’ve had a stammer since childhood. In the 90s, I listened to Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Mariah Carey while my peers argued over Blur vs. Oasis. I felt uncomfortable in my own body, though I couldn’t explain why. I wore tights as a comfort blanket because they calmed my anxiety. I kept all of this hidden for years, until the silence around it became heavier than the truth itself.
Then my body forced me to stop hiding.
At 52, I had a pacemaker fitted urgently after complete heart block. For months, I’d been having random fainting spells. My GP initially thought it might be vertigo and told me to go to A&E within a few days. On the way to the bus stop, I fainted and hit the pavement. Someone helped me up, and moments later I fainted again. This time, I went straight to A&E.
They suggested one of the issues could be sleep apnea and, a few months later, I was diagnosed with severe sleep apnea. I started CPAP therapy six weeks ago, and those weeks have been a struggle. I’ve since learned that sleep apnea is an invisible illness. Most people don’t realise they have it, and many may live with it for decades because the symptoms look like so many other things: tiredness, weight gain, brain fog, anxiety, ageing, even laziness.
But the week in the hospital was a strange gift. I was helpless, peeing in a bottle, a nurse wiping my bum hours after surgery, standing naked in front of her without any strength to cover myself. And she saw none of what I saw. She didn’t see a weird body. She saw a patient. For that week, I didn’t think about the little things I’d treated as massive.
It made me think of James Earl Jones, the world’s most famous voice, who couldn’t speak at school. He once said, “I was mute from first grade through my freshman year in high school. Talking was too embarrassing, too painful. I couldn’t cut it, so I just stopped.”
That was me with my stammer. I had stopped speaking in so many ways – hiding behind silence, hoping no one would ask me to say the words I couldn’t get out.
But a high school teacher saw James Earl Jones. And I had finally found doctors who saw me.
After that, a blood pressure diary felt easy.
My cardiologist asked me to keep one. And I did something a little strange, I listened to music while I took my readings.
I monitored my blood pressure without any background noise (without music: 152/104) and then with a wide range of music from the 60s to the present, and found Taylor Swift’s 10‑minute version of All Too Well, Sabrina Carpenter’s On Purpose and Olivia Rodrigo’s Book of Love bring it down from a high of 150+ to 110-120.
- All Too Well: 105/70, 120/76, 118/73
- On Purpose: 115/73, 122/77
The Real Discovery
It wasn’t just tempo or melody. It was nostalgia. I grew up hiding my love for pop music. Now, in my 50s, I finally let myself feel it. When Taylor sings about a scarf left at an ex‑sister’s house, I don’t think about a breakup, I think about every time I felt like I didn’t belong. Every time I hid. Every time, I kept quiet.
The music taps into a part of my brain that remembers when life was simpler. Before I overthought everything. Before, doctors blamed my weight. Before, I was scared to speak.
The Power of Music (What the Scientists and a Football Manager Know)
A few weeks after I finished my diary, Arsenal won the Premier League. Their manager, Mikel Arteta, later spoke about how the team’s mentality had shifted when they started playing music before games. He became the team’s DJ, explaining: “Music has the capacity to change our mood, to change our energy. You play a song, and immediately you feel different.”
He is talking about the same thing I saw on my blood pressure monitor. Music triggers dopamine, the brain’s reward chemical. It shifts your nervous system from fight or flight to rest and digest. It lowers cortisol. It slows your heart.
Arteta uses it to build energy. I use it to find calm. Either way, it works.
Don’t know what was on Mikel Arteta’s playlist during training sessions or pre-match, but they surely had a massive impact on the team against the nerves of the crowd, waiting for them to score a goal and then try to hold on to a 1nil, I should have been listening to music while watching Arsenal’s games, as they couldn’t have been good for my blood pressure.
A study of over 1,500 people found that pop music from the 1980s was the most effective genre for lowering blood pressure, because of positive nostalgia. The familiar songs flood you with happy memories, releasing endorphins and serotonin. That is not magic. That is neurology, people keep returning to familiar music, films, and stories because they are trying to reconnect with versions of themselves they thought they’d lost.
As Terrance Mann says in Field of Dreams: “They’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it. For it is money they have and peace they lack…The memories will be so thick, they’ll have to brush them away from their faces.”
I did not know the science when I started. I just knew that All Too Well made me feel safe. But it turns out my blood pressure was telling me what my heart already knew.
The Speech That Explains It All
There is a scene in Field of Dreams that has stayed with me. James Earl Jones, a man who had a stammer, says:
“The one constant through all the years has been baseball. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”
Change “baseball” to “music.” That is what Sabrina Carpenter singing with Paul Simon did to me during SNL50 singing Homeward Bound. That is what All Too Well does every time I press play. It is not just a song. It is a field I have built in my mind, where I can be the boy I was before I learned to hide.
“People will come, Ray. They’ll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past.”
My blood pressure readings are the money they pass over without thinking. Because it is money they have, and peace they lack.
So, What Is the Point?
I am not saying Taylor Swift cured my heart block. I still take my medication. I still use my CPAP machine. I still have a pacemaker. But the music is not a replacement, it is a bridge. It connects my medical data to my soul.