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It is important to help teenagers understand that music can help us move through an intense or persistent mood state and arrive at a more positive mood state. It is equally important to highlight to teenagers that if a music selection maintains the mood state they are trying to move away from, or intensifies or encourages rumination, then the music selection may not by correct. This type of exercise can both provide teenagers with a tool to control and manipulate their mood states but also improve their levels of self-awareness of their own emotional worlds.

This tool could be very useful to a group or individual setting, but it should be used as one focal point in a larger program and conversation around self-awareness of our emotional and mood states. Teenagers are likely to use music as a mood enhancer, regardless of any formal learning in how music changes our mood states.

This worksheet was first published in June 2021 and is linked to the June Professional Reading,  “Helping teenagers to help themselves with music.