brainwave music

What is brainwave music to help with anxiety, insomnia or just music to relax to?

You have obviously heard about ‘BRAINWAVE MUSIC’  and ‘BINAURAL BEATS’ that’s why you are here reading this, but do you know what it is, what it really does?

I didn’t until I recently! I was feeling very down due to a number of financial problems; our business was hardly moving and we were on the edge of bankruptcy. I kept telling myself that it wasn’t our fault, we were doing well until this current economic meltdown, and we were, but like so many other people we were suffering now.

“I was under quite a lot of stress and feeling anxious all the time. You may know that feeling, where there is a knot in your stomach clenching and unclenching, sometimes feeling sick and on top of this, not sleeping very well, finding it difficult getting off to sleep until the early hours, or drifting off, only to wake up with a feeling of dread, leaving me even less able to cope with everyday things, such as trying to help the business and my marriage was suffering too”.

I didn’t want to go to the doctor, as he would just tell me I was depressed and prescribe me a load of pills which I didn’t want. I knew the cause of my anxiety I just needed to find another way of dealing with it.

So I went looking for remedies to help me move away from this negative cycle

There is lots of information out there and this is where I came across the term brainwave music and binaural beats.

It was fascinating, but at times quite technical (for me anyway)! So I have broken the information down into what I hope, are easy to understand, bite size chunks, that are interesting and helpful at the same time. I needed to do this for myself to be sure I understood what it was all about. So the first question I had was:

What are brainwaves and what is brainwave music?

I need to give you this bit of information below as it is fundamental to how it all works. This bit explains the different states are brains are in at any given time and whilst we are in one of these states we give off electrical vibrations

EEG (Electroencephalography) technology is used to measure brain’s electrical vibrations from the surface of the scalp. The resulting EEG pattern will contain frequency elements mainly below 30Hz. The frequencies are categorized into five mind states:

The fifth state is known as gamma, it has the highest frequency of 40 cycles per second and above. Advanced meditation and yoga practices associate the Gamma brainwave frequency with a state of pure compassion. Researchers have also discovered that the Gamma brainwave range is associated with a heightened sense of perception, mood and information processing.

So, the brain waves have been grouped according to their frequencies and labelled with Greek letters. The  frequencies  are alpha, beta, delta, gamma and theta.

What are binaural beats recordings and how do they work?

Binaural beats are a sequence of sounds that are produced in the brain when you put on a stereo-headphone, and the music you hear in both the ears is essentially the same, but one ear receives music at a pitch different from the other. The difference is very small. When the sound waves from the two ears reach the neurons, they begin to tap-dance at a frequency which is equal to this difference. Interestingly, these are frequencies that the brain likes! And naturally vibes with!

The easiest way of applying stimulus to the brain is through our ears. However, humans cannot hear sounds low enough to be useful for brainwave stimulation so specialised techniques must be applied, and one of these techniques is called binaural beats

Binaural beats recordings are specially generated sounds, designed to alter your brainwaves – bringing about different states of mind, such as happiness, creativity, or relaxation. They’re perfectly safe, non-addictive, and can be used as often as you like, although, there is a caution! If you suffer from a seizure disorder such as epilepsy, or a serious mental illness such as schizophrenia or a psychotic disorder, or have had a head injury or brain trauma, we advise you to NOT use binaural beat or sound therapy programs.

However, if you do not have any of these issues, these audios use the exact same frequencies that we touch upon every day in our daily lives but now you can reach certain states as and when you want to, as the sounds themselves would be difficult to listen to, they are incorporated into pleasant, relaxing music – brainwave music!

This is where I discovered a new word ‘brainwave entrain’. To entrain the brain means to change the brainwave from one frequency to another, say from a beta state of mind (highly focused and alert) to alpha (relaxed but alert), through applying brainwave music dedicated to that frequency.