Listening to sad songs? It may not be such a bad thing
This article is authored by Tara Venkatesan, honorary fellow, School of Advanced Studies, University of London.
You know the drill: It's 2 am, you're spiraling over your ex's latest Instagram story, and, somehow, you've found yourself three hours deep into a Taylor Swift breakup song playlist. Your friends keep telling you to listen to something uplifting. But you don’t want to because, paradoxically, listening to Taylor’s depressing bops is actually making you feel better! So why does listening to sad music make you feel better and not worse? And why do you enjoy listening to the breakup song when you don’t enjoy the sadness of your own breakup?
My research collaborators at Yale University and I tried to figure out why we like sad art when we hate experiencing sadness in real life. We pay good money to see depressing movies and listen to Sad Girl playlists but we actively try to avoid sad conversations or situations IRL. For decades, scientists and philosophers thought that this was because we perceive sad art as fictional. Art creates a safe and detached way to experience negative emotions without real life tragedy. Our research found something quite different.
We ran an experiment where we showed people identical excerpts of sad texts but we told people different things about. Half the participants were told that they were reading a work of art (e.g., song lyrics, movie script) while the other half were told that they were reading a work of not-art (e.g., Tweet, dialogue transcript). The participants who thought they were reading a work of art liked the sad text significantly more than the people who thought they were reading a work of not-art, even though both groups of people read the exact same text!
People did not, however, enjoy the sad art more because they thought the art was less real. In fact, our study showed the opposite. The more real participants thought the artist's emotions were, the more they liked it. So, we had to look for a different explanation.
We then turned to a concept known as appropriation, a phenomenon whereby people experience the emotions in art as giving voice to their own feelings. When Taylor Swift sings, “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby and I’m a monster on the hill”, you aren’t supposed to think “poor Taylor, I wish I could make her feel less insecure”. Instead, you experience the song as an expression of your own anxieties about feeling like a lumbering, uncool person. The song is not just a window into Taylor’s feelings; it becomes a mirror reflecting our own discomfort back at us. Our study found that just calling a bit of sad text “art” makes people more likely to appropriate it compared to not-art, and that increases liking for sad art.
While our study didn’t investigate why appropriating makes us like sad art, other research suggests that sad art makes us feel less lonely, and that makes us feel good. Researchers at the University of Southern California showed that people often turn to sad music when they are feeling lonely or in distress as a means of processing their feelings and connecting with memories. Our own previous research found that people enjoy sad music because it makes us feel connected to each other. It is possible that when we appropriate sad art, we might feel like someone understands how we feel, which helps us heal.
From a biological perspective, sad art can have a positive impact on brain chemistry. Scientists at the University of Oxford discovered that watching a depressing film can actually boost endorphin levels in the brain. Endorphins are the body's natural painkillers, the same chemicals released during exercise or when you laugh. Another theory is that listening to sad music releases prolactin, a hormone that provides a consoling and soothing psychological effect.
So, what does this all mean for your late-night listening sessions? It means you can reframe “wallowing” as a form of emotional validation. When you're listening to that gut-wrenching bridge, you're not just feeling sad--you’re feeling seen.
The art confirms that your feelings are real and that you are not alone in experiencing them. You are letting art do what it does best: give a voice to the parts of ourselves that feel unheard and, in doing so, help us heal.
This article is authored by Tara Venkatesan, honorary fellow, School of Advanced Studies, University of London.
