Quit Treating Music Like a Drug

Is 40+ hours a week too much? Spoiler alert: yes it is.

Note: after this went viral, I filmed a 1-hour, in-depth masterclass on productivity techniques and this very topic. It’s got thousands of students, and is one of the top-rated courses on Skillshare. Watch it (& all my other stuff) for free with this link.

Reality check: the typical person listens to a lot of music.

A recent industry report by Nielson suggests that the average millenial spends approximately 40 hours per week blasting tunes. That’s 6 hours every day of the week, nonstop.

That means that my generation is literally spending as much time listening to music as they are working at full-time jobs. And 40 hours is just the average — many younger people are listening to 50, 60, or even 70 hours of music per week.

I’m not hating on music, per se. I actually think it’s amazing that we live in an era where technology allows us to consume as much as we do, and rest assured I don’t take my Spotify playlist for granted. But I don’t think enough people are talking about the degree to which music has permeated our modern lifestyle, nor are we talking about whether or not listening to 40+ hours of music a week has consequences.

In the 1950’s, everybody smoked cigarettes. Not because they’d done industry-leading research into the pros and cons of tobacco, but because it was just the thing people did back then. Only after a staggering death toll did governments and individuals finally decide to take action, and we’re still feeling the fallout today.

I don’t want music to be the next chapter in humanity’s book on overconsumption. And as optimistic as you might be, nobody can deny that 40+ hours of rhythmic, pumping — and often loud — stimulation is going to have effects on the human brain. It’s just a matter of how significant these effects are, and what we can do to mediate them.

Long Term Music Consumption

Physiologically speaking, music’s mechanism of action is similar to that of a drug. We’ve…