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So, lately I’ve been feeling kind of hyper, unfocused and generally kind of bored with life. These feelings are mostly because I have issues with Fall. I hate Fall, with a passion.

I can’t stop the seasons from changing (which is probably a good thing), so I needed to find a good way to relax and focus.

I’ve mentioned in a couple of places on this blog that I’m a fairly frequent meditator. I started a regular meditation practice about a year and a half ago and got fairly serious about it last fall when I took an actual meditation course at my health club.

In that time, I’ve experimented with several different types of meditation including everything from good ol’ breath counting to complicated affirmations. I soon realized that I needed to begin with the end in mind when it comes to my meditation practice. Since I strongly identified a need to relax and focus, I decided to make that the goal of my meditation.

Naturally, I immediately started scouring the internet for meditation tools that could help me with that goal.

Enter Entrainment
In the past I’ve enjoyed listening to meditation CDs. You know, those things with the spacey-sounding music and a woman’s low-pitched voice whispering sweet nothings like, “I am One with the Universe. All that I desire will come to me,” in your ear? So I started to look around for different kinds of audio to use. Over and over again, I came across products for “Brainwave Entrainment.”

The sellers of these products made wild claims like “INSTANTLY Meditate More Deeply Than a Zen Monk,” and “Overcome Any Problem In Your Sleep.”

I instantly believed everything they said and spent $750 on a set of 3,000 CDs.

Just kidding. I didn’t believe a thing, but I did notice that there were lots of freebies available, so I ordered them all, read their “reports” and tried the audio out. The “reports” had the typical information product hype, with a smattering of pseudo-scientific sounding language about how these audio tracks can actually change brainwaves to induce feelings of deep relaxation and laser-like focus.

The audio tracks I listened to all sounded pretty odd. Most entrainment products use binaural beats, which means that there are two different rhythms in the track. To listen to them properly, you have to use headphones, which direct the beats to different ears. The background noises sound like helicopters, or static, or crackling plastic wrap. Hardly what I imagine a Zen Monk’s head sounds like in deep meditation.

Is This Science?
Well, no. Actually, yes.

Maybe?

Cognitive science is a relatively young field, and so far hasn’t seemed to pay a lot of attention to the interactions between the brain and sound frequencies. However, I did find some academic material about this subject thanks to Stanford University’s Symposium on Music, Rhythm and the Brain. In particular, the paper Auditory Driving as a Ritual Technology: A Review and Analysis is quite helpful in explaining just how sounds such as drumbeats can “entrain” human brainwaves.

The author, a Stanford scholar named Gabe Turow, did a study of the use of chanting, drumming, bell chimes, and other “religious technologies” to determine if there is an scientific basis for the use of sound and music in a therapeutic setting. His findings are that sufficient exposure to repeated rhythms and tones can affect the frequency of brainwaves.

The brain operates at a wide range of frequencies, which are labeled (in order from Highest to Lowest frequency) Gamma, Beta, Alpha, Theta, and Delta. The lower the frequency, generally speaking, the more relaxed the person is. Delta, which has a frequency of 1-4Hz is generally only experienced by people in deep sleep.

What Turow found, is that the right combination of rhythm and tone can essentially slow the brain down, until it is working at the same frequency. For example, listening to a piece of music with a 4Hz beat will eventually slow the brain down to 4Hz, which is about as relaxed as a person can get without sleeping!

In reading through the study, I realized that we have probably all experienced entrainment at some point in our lives. Have you ever been to a really huge concert and noticed that everyone in the crowd will at some point sway in time to the music? Have you attended a sporting event and done “The Wave” or stomped along to “We Will Rock You?” The next time you’re in that type of situation, notice what happens to your heart rate and your mood. Chances are, it will start to match whatever the external stimulus is doing.

Does it Work?
Like everything else related to meditation, the human brain, and just being alive, your mileage definitely may vary. Everyone responds differently to sounds and tones. All I can tell you is that for me, there are some entrainment tracks that have a positive effect. In fact, as I write this, I’m listening to a track designed to increase focus.

The good news is, listening to an audio track at a reasonable volume will never hurt you. Some of the tracks I’ve tried out have made me feel annoyed or agitated, but that feeling went away almost immediately after I stopped listening. If you’re at all interested in trying entrainment out, there are a wide variety of free tracks available. You may want to check out:

• Gnaural Java. This is a free, online Binaural Beat generator. You can listen to the default track or customize it.
• SBaGen is a free, downloadable application available for Mac, PC and Linux systems. The software works much like Gnaural Java, but it comes with several sample tracks.
• CenterPointe Research Institute offers a free demo of their Holosync technology CD.
• The Quantum Mind Power System also offers a free demo of their Alpha Flight track, which is designed to relax the brain into Alpha state.

There are many, many more entrainment tracks available on the old WWW. I don’t know that any of these will change your life, but I certainly think they are worth trying out.

As always, if you have any experience with using Brainwave Entrainment, or if this post inspires you to try it out, please share you story in the comments.

There are some pretty crazy sounding ideas floating around in the personal development web space. One of the craziest sounding I’ve encountered is called Emotional Freedom Techniques, or EFT for those in the know. According to Wikipedia, EFT is “a psychotherapeutic tool based on a theory that negative emotions are caused by disturbances in the body’s energy field.”

The main tool of EFT is called “tapping.” It is supposed to function a bit like acupuncture without the needles. Basically, a person using EFT uses his or her fingers to tap on key meridians to alter the energy flow in the body. When done effectively, the body’s energy balance is restored and the negative emotions go away.

A Rocky Start
I first read about EFT and tapping over a year ago when I was browsing through some personal development sites. Like many people, I thought the whole thing seemed a little silly. However, I know that acupuncture has been shown to be at least scientifically plausible, so I decided to give it a try. I printed out a guide, practiced it a few times, and was pretty disappointed with the results. Basically, it didn’t seem like tapping did anything to get rid of negative emotions. I thought that was the end of the story.

Tapping Revisited
About a month ago, I came across an EFT website called Tapping.com. It didn’t take me long to discover that this site features some great (free) videos that explain all of the fundamentals of the techniques. I downloaded the Introduction to Tapping video immediately.

…And it sat on my desktop for about 3 weeks. I just couldn’t get interested enough to watch a 15 minute video.

That all changed when I woke up this morning. I’ve been feeling a lot of anxiety lately about a big work project that is taking me quite far out of my comfort zone. When I sat down to try to accomplish something on the project, I realized that my anxiety was distracting me, preventing me from getting any work done, and making the situation worse.

Since I was already sitting at the computer, I figured I had nothing to lose by watching the tapping video. I dutifully followed all of the instructions and tapped on my anxiety. At the end of the 15 minutes, my anxiety had decreased from about a 7 on a 1 to 10 scale all the way down to a 2 or 3. I was able to work the rest of the day with only minor distraction or feelings of anxiousness.

Enough About Me, What About You?
Advocates of tapping and EFT say that it can be effective for a variety of emotional and psychological issues such as anxiety, depression, and even addictions. There are a lot of outlandish-sounding claims made on some of the websites (“Cure Your Heroin Addiction in 3.2 Seconds!!!”), so I don’t blame anyone for taking all of this with a grain of salt. However, it really only takes 15 minutes to learn the techniques, and it isn’t going to hurt you – unless you poke yourself in the eye when you’re tapping

Tips for Tapping Success

• Be very specific with the emotion you tap on. Really take the time to feel it, locate it in your body, and give it a name.
• Keep your focus on the emotion. As you tap, the emotion you’re working on will change. It change location in your body, or change intensity, or even transform into a different emotion. It’s important to track those changes and adjust your focus appropriately.
• Practice with the video. My biggest mistake with my initial encounter with EFT was trying to pick it up from printed material. I’m sure that works for some people, but I’m too much of a visual learner. Tapping.com has provided hours of video that explain all of the fundamentals. I highly recommend them.
• Keep working on it. By the end of my workday, I felt my anxiety coming back up to about a 5 on a scale of 1-10. This overwhelm is not productive, so I tapped on it some more to keep it at a low level.