I have trouble falling asleep at night. Even if I am exhausted, the moment I lay my head down all of the events and thoughts of the day start swirling in my head. To deal with this barrage, I turn to Metallica.

I crave sleep. My days are pretty busy between classes, sports, meetings, and daily navigation of high school, my head is bursting by the end of the day. As I drift towards sleep, all of my anxieties about what I said, did, should have said, and shouldn’t have start to flow. With all of these thoughts, it’s hard to sleep. Sometimes I would lay awake at night for hours trying to shut down my mind, to no avail. Now, I focus on the repetitive nature of Metallica’s songs to sort these thoughts out.

Somehow, the music of Metallica helps me sort these out. The beat of the songs helps me filter out my daily anxieties. Once I plug in my headphones, the drumbeat of thoughts gets replaced by the drumbeat of heavy metal. When I listen to music, the music blocks out the noise, and I can fall asleep.

Before I listened to Metallica, I tried to listen to other, softer music. I would listen to classical, the Beatles, even Elvis. Nothing worked. The songs just weren’t stimulating or loud enough to break my unintentional focus on my thoughts. I couldn’t focus enough on the songs to get lost in their rhythm. I finally tried “Enter Sandman”, by Metallica, and I fell asleep very quickly. From then on I only played Metallica when trying to sleep. I still experiment with different songs, but only within Metallica. I don’t try out other genres or bands anymore, now that I have something that works. The rhythm and aggressive tone of the songs breaks me away from my focus on my thoughts and allows me to focus on something less changing, the constant beat of a song, and I fall asleep to that.

The other benefit of Metallica is that it blocks out all of the other noises around me, so that all I hear is Metallica. I have fallen asleep to Metallica many times. Over time it has gone from a way to deal with too many thoughts, to a soothing song that lulls me to sleep. Once I have blocked out my racing mind, I focus on the song, the music envelopes me and finally I fall asleep.

As I fall into a trancelike calm, a stark contrast to my mind just minutes earlier, I lose all sensation. I feel as if I am falling through a cloud, without the gut-wrenching falling feeling. I feel as if someone has poured molasses through my body and I become still. Including my racing mind.