31:Your Playlist Is Programming You (Whether You Know It or Not)

Music isn’t just something you listen to. It’s something that’s shaping you.

In this episode of (re)Parenting Radio, Lisa explores how sound and frequency directly impact your nervous system—and how what you’re listening to every day may be reinforcing emotional patterns without you even realizing it.

Because your emotional state isn’t only coming from your thoughts.
It’s also coming from your environment.

And sound is one of the most powerful inputs your body processes.

When a song triggers a feeling, that’s not random. That’s your nervous system recognizing a pattern—repetition paired with emotion.

Which means every time you hit play, you may be reactivating a state.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why music bypasses logic and goes straight to the body
• How sound becomes a form of subconscious programming
• The link between repetition, emotion, and identity
• How your environment (even background noise) shapes your state
• Why your nervous system is always listening—even when you’re not

Lisa also shares a simple 3-step method to begin using music intentionally:

• Choose the state you want to feel
• Match your current energy, then shift it
• Use repetition to create new patterns

Because this isn’t about restriction.
It’s about awareness.

And once you become aware…
you get to choose differently.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to Reparenting Radio. I'm Lisa Watson, Architect of Human Transformation. This is a space for leaders, parents, and anyone ready to break old patterns, regulate their nervous system, and show up in their life with clarity and self-trust. If you're ready to change the way you lead, love, and live, you're in the right place. Let's begin. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Reparenting Radio. Today I want to talk about something that I'm pretty sure most people don't think twice about, but most of the things I talk about, I think most people don't think twice about. But this quietly shapes how you feel, how you think, and how you show up in your mood every single day. And that is music and sound. And I don't mean from an entertainment perspective, not from like what do you like to listen to, you know, what genre, but from a programming perspective, because music and sound are not neutral. And once you hear this, you won't be able to unhear it. There's this assumption that our emotional state primarily comes from our thoughts, that if we feel off or reactive or low, it must be something that we're thinking, or maybe it's our blood sugar, something physical. But what a lot of people don't realize is that your nervous system is being influenced all day long by what you're exposing it to. And sound is one of the most powerful inputs. Your nervous system is the operating system of your avatar. And sound is one of the fastest ways to rewrite the code of your system because sound bypasses logic. It just goes straight to the body, to the energetic field of the body. And your nervous system picks up that frequency along with everything that you've experienced when you've heard that sound before or felt that frequency. Because we're energetic beings. We have an energetic field. It's out about four feet in front of us, picking up the energy before it even gets to us. We're already feeling it. And think about it. You can hear a song from ten years ago, maybe even thirty, and instantly feel something in your body. You don't have to think your way there. You don't have to analyze it. You just you're you're just there. And that's not random. It's patterning and association. That's repetition that has met emotion. It's why we feel scared when we hear a gunshot. Like, you know, in the neighborhood. Oh no. Or we tense up when we hear a loud crash. Or maybe we get emotional when a certain song comes on that reminds us of a specific time in our life. Your body isn't asking, is this happening right now? It's recognizing a signal and responding based on everything that it's already cataloged and stored that is associated with that signal, with that sound. It's not just the memory of the sound, it's the emotional state that you were in that got paired with it. So if a certain song was playing during a time in your life where you felt heartbroken or anxious, maybe chaotic or confused, your body doesn't just remember the song, it remembers the state. And every time you replay it, you're not just listening to a song, you're reinforcing the pattern. And this is the same mechanism through which a lot of our early programming was formed. Repetition, emotion, environment. Only now you're reparenting yourself. So you're choosing it. Or is it still choosing you? So I want you to just pause for just a moment here and think about this. What are you listening to on a daily basis? Repetitively. When you get in your car, what do you turn on? When you're cooking, cleaning, maybe working? What's playing in the background? And it doesn't have to be music, it could be a TV. What do you hear? And more importantly, how does it feel in your body? Not like not what genre is it, but how does it feel? Not whether it's popular or whether it's something that you've always liked or something that's been on so often you don't even tune into it anymore or realize how it has just sort of become standard background noise. But what is it actually doing to your mental, emotional, and physical state? Do you need to hear these sounds in order to feel stable, calm, or regulated? Or are you choosing? There's a difference. I don't need the music I put on to keep me regulated a lot of the time, but I choose to put music on because I really enjoy it. It makes me feel even better. But if we have to turn the television on because we just can't be in a room by ourselves without distraction and noise, that's another lens that you're looking at things through. What I've noticed is this: a lot of people are unintentionally dysregulating themselves through the very thing that they believe maybe helping them to relax or escape. You've got lyrics reinforcing heartbreak, chaos, anger, urgency over and over and over again. And on top of that, promiscuity, violence, disrespect. And your body is responding to that, even if you're not consciously paying attention. Because your nervous system is always paying attention. So that it's important just to understand the environment that you live in and how it's impacting you. I truly believe that it's our responsibility to this incredible avatar that we are to actually learn how it really works. Because none of this is personal. Your body is constantly taking in information and it's adapting based on what it's exposed to. So the question is, are you living in a way that supports your regulation? Because this avatar, it heals itself. It can create realities for you with its thoughts and its frequency and its emotion and action. We build cities. We're creators. So if we're in our optimal state, if we're utilizing all aspects of our physiology and understanding them deeply, it just makes living this life more enjoyable when you're empowered. And you feel like you're in control and you learned the gifts that you have and how energy really works. It's so exciting to me. But none of us, honestly, were taught this. It's something you have to study yourself. Because we weren't we weren't taught how our physiology works. We weren't taught how deeply our environment and frequency and chemicals truly impact us. We weren't taught that we're energetic beings. And there's a reason for all that, but I'll save those details for another episode. But for now, the reality is we have access to information in a way that we have never had before. And there's just such a huge opportunity here for us to find new information, to stay open, to keep learning, to start understanding ourselves as the energetic beings that we are that have the power to turn energy into form. We're not just a thinking being. We're magical and powerful. And this kind of information, it doesn't have to feel like, oh, you're now restricted from doing sort, you know, things. It's a everything's a choice. Because once you become aware, you get to choose differently. And this is where this becomes really powerful. Because music isn't just something that influences you, it's something you can use intentionally. You can use music to regulate your nervous system. You can use it to shift your emotional state. You can use it to install new patterns and programs. Children learn three thousand times faster through play than they do from just sitting and like writing or listening or three thousand times faster through play. So when we're playing, when we're hearing music that makes us happy and is of uplifted and it's playful, we're learning. And we're regulating our nervous system. So instead of asking yourself, you know, what do I feel like listening to, or just popping in that same thing that you tapping that same thing that you usually um, you know, play, ask yourself, who do I want to be in this moment? Like what state do I want to be in this moment? And what would support that version of me right now? And I want to give you a simple way to start, you know, to start working with this, just like a little three-step process that you can remember. So, first, before you, first you have to, step zero is like you gotta have awareness, you gotta know what you're listening to. It shouldn't take you very long to figure that out, but what are your go-tos? What do you generally listen to on a regular basis, you know, the last say three months? Because we're constantly changing and evolving. So we don't have to worry about things you used to do that you don't do anymore, okay? Just wherever you are right now and where you've been for a little bit. Have awareness over it. And then step one is choose the state. So before you hit play on anything, decide how you want to feel. Before you slump down on that couch and watch that show you normally watch, think about it. Is this how I want to feel right now? What will this watching or listening to this thing make me feel? How will I respond to it? So then step two is match and then shift. So if you're if you're feeling really like overwhelmed, dysregulated, don't jump straight into something like super calm. That usually doesn't land. It's too much of a jump. So instead, meet yourself where where you are and then gradually shift your energy. You know, if you're feeling really angry, play some angry songs and and scream and dance and move your body and release the energy, and then take it a notch down until you can get to where maybe you can just listen to some something really soothing. And step three is repeat it often. So you're going to reparent yourself, retraining yourself. This is where the programming happens in the repetition. Not from doing it once, but from repetition. So maybe this is a practice you take on in your car on your way to work or your way home or picking up the kids from school, or maybe it's what you turn on first thing in the morning or what you do at night. Those are my rituals. Morning. I love to start off with some Indian flute music. It's my absolute favorite. Listen to it over and over and over again. And then I in the morning switch to something that is very alive and awakening that I can like dance to but feel really good. Like the lyrics are super clean and beautiful. Um, Maestra is one of my favorite artists, and some there's some Spanish artists that I really love. And then at night, my um ritual, because the set like when you turn the sound on, okay, and you get into that calm state and you keep practicing that. Maybe you're not there yet, but you're playing the calm music, but maybe you still feel anxious, but you're breathing and you're working also on in other ways to help yourself to relax. Instead of just tuning out to a television show and ignoring your nervous system, take the time to retrain it. And you'll find after a while you could just turn that music on, and then now that soothes you. So you're intentionally doing what's been happening your whole life. You know, we we hear the same songs for those of you who grew up like I did with the radio. We hear the same songs on the radio, we know them. Um and we know them by heart, and they induce certain feelings in us when we hear them. So we're now intentionally doing that. At what times do you want to feel certain things? You're about to get ready to do a presentation or something, you know, you create a Spotify list that will get you into a certain state. You know, I go, I go to work out, and you know, at certain points in the workout, you turn the music up, you put it on something super inspiring with a great beat, right? And you it it helps you. So use. We take these gifts that we have and these abilities that we have for granted, or we just simply don't fully understand them. And there's no shame there because, as I said, we were not taught these things in school. So it's nobody's fault. It's just time to learn them and move forward. So you don't just become what you think, you become what you repeatedly feel. And if you're constantly feeding your system sounds that reinforce stress, urgency, or emotional chaos, then that is going to become your baseline or stay your baseline. But if you intentionally choose what you expose your nervous system to, you will begin to create a more regulated nervous system. And this matters, not just for how you feel, but for how you show up. It matters in your relationships, in your work, in your abundance, in the quality of your life. Because your state is not private. People feel it, you feel it, and if your internal world is constantly being pulled into dysregulation, even subtly, that impacts your life. So take this as your invitation, not to overhaul everything at night, and there's no judgment and no shame for anything. We're here to live and learn and grow. So there's no mistakes. Then that's really important that we're just not hard on ourselves if we're trying to change a habit and we're having trouble or we know something's not good for us, but we do it anyway. Be gentle, be kind, and be patient with yourself. And pay attention to what you're listening to. Notice how it affects your body and start experimenting with using sound and music more so than maybe you ever have before. Use it as a tool for regulation and reprogramming. You can even say um affirmations. I do that, I say affirmations on uh this app that I love. It's called Parrot, and it just loops them. Um, so I'll put some, you know, the music to match the affirmation in the background as I'm saying each of each of them. And so I'm getting, you know, not just my voice and the repetition of the words, but I'm also getting it reinforced with the sound of music. So when I hear that music, and at other times it's like my brain is already saying the affirmations, the code's already running under the surface. This is where our power is. In knowledge, understanding how this body really works and using it to our advantage. All right, well, that's all I have for you today. And I would actually love to hear from you on this one. So if you start playing with this and you notice shifts, if you create a playlist that really supports you and you want to share it, please reach out, send me a message, Lisa at reparent-yourself.com, and I will talk to you all next week. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Reparenting Radio. If today's conversation supported you, take a moment to subscribe, leave a review, or share it with someone who knows they were made for more than the patterns that they inherited. If you're ready for serious inner work and real transformation, personally or professionally, you can explore my leadership pathways at Lisa-Watson.com. And if you're raising little ones alongside your own healing, you'll find my children's books at awakintheone.org. Until next time, stay grounded, stay open, and keep reparenting the parts of you that are ready to come home to their authenticity.