What a Finnish rock band taught me about co-regulation, creativity and intuition
How a silly little challenge led to some unexpected insights.
Follow your intuition before it makes sense.
In 2023, when I was 5 months pregnant with my now 2 year old, I attended a yoga retreat by one of my favourite teachers. Every morning, before the first yoga class, she invited us to do some journaling - and laid out a deck of tarot cards, face down, for us to pick from randomly. The idea was to use whatever message we encountered on those beautifully illustrated cards as a prompt for reflection.
I still remember one of these cards - Follow your intuition before it makes sense.
Somehow, it stirred something inside of me.
* * *
When I started my 10 day challenge of posting funny The Rasmus lyrics daily as a note, I wasn’t thinking much of it. I followed a whim - the idea sounded fun, and I wanted to find a way to have fun with showing up here every day, so that was that. A spontaneous, supposedly light-hearted little adventure.
Soon though, I ran into my first stumbling blocks. While I could reasonably easily think of a handful of lines that, to me, are comedy gold, I soon found myself trawling lyrics, trying to either find the funny ones again, or rediscover ones I had forgotten. In that process, something interesting happened…
I noticed how many of these lyrics worked on their own, like little pieces of poetry that I hadn’t noticed before.
There was a rhythm to their words that didn’t need any music to bring out their melody.
I paused. Wowed.
You know when something is so familiar, you stop noticing the little things that make it magical?
The Rasmus was my favourite band as teenager - heck, I discovered them while I was a tween still. I remember those summer days, sitting in our little countryside cottage - the infamous Finnish mökki - glued to our radio, listening to NRJ like it was a lifeline to the outside world, always happy when songs from The Rasmus came on. Their sound was different, there was a melancholy in them in a way that felt special -personal, even.
I now have so much love for that t(w)eenage self of mine who sang her heart out to those lyrics completely unironically. In my twenties, that part of me embarrasseed me - and The Rasmus faded into the background.
Then, one summer in my early thirties, I was walking around Savonlinna, the nearest city to our little mökki, when a poster on the street caught my attention: The Rasmus were going to play at a little festival in the city the very next day. I stared in disbelief - The Rasmus? Here? TOMORROW?!
I was on holiday, so I did the only sensible thing I could: I promptly booked myself a ticket for that festival. The next day I saw them play in Finland, under the midnight sun, for the first time in my life1.
It was a slow revival, but a revival it was.
Revisits to old music I used to love.
Discovering newer discography I hadn’t yet listened to.
Going back to subscribing to their newsletter - and eventually, that fateful gig in Helsinki with my husband, which inspired this whole challenge.
***
I hadn’t planned it this way, but this challenge coincided precisely with my husband being on a 10 day work trip, meaning I was solo-parenting for that time.
I don’t know if our son was more sensitive to periods of his father not being around, or maybe it was something else entirely, but it felt like we were going through peak tantrum territory, just as I had to deal with it on my own. Everything seemed to trigger a meltdown - I picked the wrong clothes, put them on the wrong way, gave him the wrong toothbruth, worng coat, wrong shoes. Most of the time I couldn’t even tell exactly what horrible crime against toddlerhood I had committed.
I know this is perfectly normal behaviour for a 2 year old. As a neuroscientist who’s always had a special interest in development, I have a decent understanding of what is happening inside the head of a toddler when they go into tantrum mode.
But boy that does not make it any easier to live through it.
In not-one-of-my-proudest-parenting-moments, when I’d picked up our son from daycare and tried to wrestle him into his carseat amidst another meltdown, I resorted to a diversion I’m not so proud of. I decided to blast some music to drown out the screaming - and since The Rasmus was at the forefront of my Spotify playlist thanks to this challenge, I put on one of their heavier rock songs.
And then something unexpected happened.
By the time we arrived home, which was 1.5 heavy The Rasmus songs later, I had a perfectly calm and content toddler. And not only that, I myself noticed that I felt better - and I didn’t think it was just because the toddler screeching had stopped.
Later, as inevitably another tantrum occurred, I thought I’d put my observation to another test: if I play heavy rock music by The Rasmus again, would that stop the tantrum a second time?
It did.
And a third and a fourth time, too.
I was stunned. This went against all the parenting advice around toddler tantrums that I knew of: to model calm for my child so they could find it too. Blasting heavy rock music was pretty much as far away from that as you could get - yet that’s what worked, and not me trying to desperately summon my meditation and zen skills in the midst of a heated moment.
So I took a moment to contemplate: why was this working?
Most of us know the power of music intuitively. We have all experienced how swiftly a song can take us back to another moment, or change our mood altogether. But in this instance, I wasn’t trying to achieve either of those - instead I realised I had accidentally created a musical mirror to both of our moods. My toddler was going through the typical frustrations that come with being a toddler who knows precisely what they want but can’t communicate it yet, or understand why they can’t always get their desires fulfilled. And I was getting frustrated because, well, dealing with toddler tantrums can get pretty frustrating.
In that moment I realised that I had stumbled upon an unexpected but potent tool for (co-)regulation: by playing music that reflected my son’s (and at times, my) mood, I validated his feelings much more effectively than I could through words, and in addition, provided a safe and easy outlet for the emotional storm too.2
Of course, I still try to create calm for my toddler too, but now I can model to him that regulation can take different forms, and whatever works is ok - sometimes that’s blasting some loud and heavy music.3 If it hadn’t been for this silly little challenge that I set for myself, I probably would have never stumbled upon this rather helpful parenting hack.
***
I didn’t think I could love this band any more than I already did.
I love them for how they’ve kept going for almost three decades; how they have boldly moved across genres, not letting any one style define them - yet all the while retaining a signature sound that makes their music unmistably theirs. I love them for adding a kickass female player to the band after their long-term guitarist left, and for playing gigs in Ukraine amidst the war to bring hope to the people there.
Then, at that infamous gig that started this whole venture, I bought the book about their story - and it opened a whole new level of respect for their craft to me.
The passion they bring to their music shines through the pages and takes me back to the energy I feel every time they play live. Their determination and willingness to keep experimenting while staying true to themselves showcases a creative jest I find infectious - one that gives me inspiration for my own endeavours in a way I didn’t expect.
They have, by all means, been an incredibly successful band. Howevere, it isn’t their success that earns them my credit - but the way they consistently put love for their art and for expressing something sincere above all else. We live in a world that wants to mold us into its desired trajectories and categories - and to watch people choose to not conform, again and again, for several decades and instead stay true to their mission, despite it all, is nothing short of remarkable.
***
Some people consider intuition to be almost like a connection to another rhealm - a spirit voice, helping us move towards a destiny we can’t yet see. The romantic in me thinks that’s a lovely idea - the scientist in me, though, has a slightly different view.
I like to think of intuition as our brain’s way of creating ‘embodied wisdom’ - the parts of our brains that create the rational, analytical mind are not the only ones that pick up on information from our surroundings. In many ways, our intuition is the short-cut way our brains use to make judgement calls - prone to errors (hello implicit biases), but when used wisely, it can help us see things we miss if we only use our rational mode.
Follow your intuition before it makes sense.
Trust yourself before you understand why. Not blindly - but enough to give your intuition a chance.
Me running this challenge came from a hunch. A sense that this would be worthwhile, even though I couldn’t quite explain why. And look at where it led me: rediscovering my teenage favourite band and their poetic lyrics, which in turn kindled my own creativity; stumbling upon a fun new tool of regulation for my toddler and I; and even having this quiet aha moment about how this is a perfect example of why it’s worth listening to our intuition.
This is such a human thing to do, isn’t it? Sifting through our sea of experiences, looking for that golden thread that ties it all together.
***
I’m Finnish but I didn’t actually grow up in Finland - I only ever spent my summer holidays there, which is how I discovered them. Up until this point, I’d seen their shows in many other places - but never in their - our - home country.
In moments like that, verbal instructions are unlikely to land anyway because the developing parts of the brain that deal with language would be overwhelmed and effectively shut down by the intensity of activity in the emotional processing centres of the brain.
Of course this is subject to being in an environment where doing so would not create a disturbance for other people.