Slowly but surely, music has returned to my life. I started the day off with some instrumentals by Bethel Music — "What Does It Sound Like" and other tracks from the Without Words album — and have listened to some stuff by Switchfoot and Owl City these past few days. I'd estimate that the time spent listening to music is significantly less than before, and strangely I'm more productive.
When playing music, I have lately been more creative in my style. With writing, my output has increased in both quantity and quality. I'm glad to see that a break from something I loved did some good in my life. Now, I'm not planning to go without music forever, but I think it was a good experiment to see how much I relied on it. There were times I felt I couldn't do work because I needed that background noise. Thankfully, I surpassed those moments and have survived listening to less music.
I'm aiming to stay on the path of intentional listening, on which I will only listen to music by itself and not play a video game or write an article while doing so. We'll see how that goes.