Brainwave entrainment is a method to stimulate the brain into entering a specific state by using a pulsing sound, light, or electromagnetic field. The pulses elicit the brain’s ‘frequency following’ response, encouraging the brainwaves to align to the frequency of a given beat.
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People always perceive us the way we perceive ourselves or worse, but never better. And even if they happen to be fooled initially, their perception will fall in line with ours sooner or later. If you lack confidence in yourself, others will lack confidence in you. If you don’t respect yourself, others will not hold you in high regard or respect you either. In other words, your self-image or self-concept literally dictates your results. Since your subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between perception and reality, whatever you perceive to be true about you and however you view yourself tends to manifest as reality essentially all the time. Hence, whatever you want to do, be, or have is something you can will into existence by changing the thoughts and emotions running in your subconscious mind as well as your core values, beliefs, and generally your predominant state. This concept is extremely important and has to do with how you feel most of the time. As Earl Nightingale said, “you become what you think about most of the time.” Thoughts and emotions are interlinked. A single negative thought will spawn a slew of negative emotions such as hate, anger, jealousy, fear, greed, etc. which will keep us from attaining what we want. A negative emotion leads to negative thinking and the vicious cycle of negativity continues, keeping us at a low vibration and unable to achieve our goals. So how do we break this cycle? Well, there are a number of ways:
1) Affirmations
Affirmations are essentially positive statements in the present tense that we repeat over and over again to ourselves by saying them out loud, sometimes in front of a mirror for enhanced effect since we can see ourselves as well. The key is to keep them positive (“I make lots of money” instead of “I don’t have debt” or “I’m not poor”) and in the present tense (“I’m healthy, vibrant, and whole” instead of “I want to be healthy, vibrant, and whole”). The more you repeat an affirmation such as, for example, “Every day and in every way, I’m getting better and better” the more it will start to sink into your subconscious mind. Everything that’s in our subconscious got there through repetition, whether positive or negative. They say that “a lie repeated a thousand times starts to become accepted as truth”. The point is that even if you don’t believe what it is that you’re saying, if you say it enough times your mind will start to accept it as truth. And since it’s something that you want, that’s all that matters at the end of the day. Just make sure to be persistent and consistent in your repetition and you will start to see changes over time.
2) Visualization
The top performers in the world, whether it be in sports, music, arts, business, politics, science, or any other area of human endeavour all credit the practice of visualization as one of the key factors to their continued success at the highest echelons of their professions and industries. What is visualization? It’s simply picturing yourself in a situation of peak performance, in your “flow” or “peak” state where everything clicks and you’re simply doing as well as you possibly could at the given time and with the given activity. It’s about being able to close your eyes and imagine in vivid, life-like detail, what you would smell, taste, touch, hear, see, think, and most importantly FEEL in a situation where you’re at your best, whether it be like in our industry giving an amazing product/opportunity presentation or in sports for example where a Tiger Woods would visualize a perfect shot with all five senses before he executes it or a Michael Jordan the perfect drive and dunk on the net or even a jump shot. Continued repetition and visualization of what peak performance would look like for them are some of the key reasons for the continued success of such professionals and if you take and apply this key concept to your life and business you’ll be able to enjoy the massive benefits for yourself as well!
3) Subliminals
These are essentially audio recordings which contain words, sounds, and music recorded at an extremely high frequency and are therefore unsuitable for listening using headphones and at a high volume or it would result in hearing loss/damage. Rather, they are listened to in the background through speakers of various kinds (on your computer, smartphone, etc.) at low volume, barely audible so you can just make out the words, sounds, and music. The key purpose of subliminals is to provide a subconscious reinforcement of your daily conscious efforts to change your subconscious programming and therefore your life through spoken affirmations and visualization by taking the affirmations and recording them in a format that cannot be detected by your conscious mind and which therefore automatically “slips past the gatekeeper (the conscious mind)” and goes directly to where they can have the greatest effect (your subconscious mind). Subliminals are most easily listened to while you sleep since there is essentially ZERO conscious resistance while you’re sleeping.
4) Hypnosis
This is a healing and personal change modality that has existed for thousand of years, since ancient times. And while there are many misconceptions surrounding hypnosis and many people who have tried (and sometimes succeeded) in using it for not-so-noble purposes, the fact remains that there are few personal change methods that works as quickly or as powerfully as hypnosis or self-hypnosis. In a traditional hypnosis session, the client is lead through a series of suggestions and hypnotic inductions while in a relaxed position for the purpose of progressive relaxation of the entire body-mind system. They are then led into a trance-like state where the conscious mind is turned off and the subconscious is exposed and open to suggestions from the hypnotist or clinician. Here many suggestions can be planted in the hypnotee’s mind such as suggestions for quitting smoking, losing weight, improving one’s golf game or public speaking/presentation skills, improving one’s self confidence and self-esteem (crucial in our industry), etc. The suggestions are typically long lasting and can be reinforced through further sessions with a qualified hypnotherapist or other clinician trained in hypnotherapy. Self-hypnosis is a slightly newer development which allows regular, ordinary people like you and me to either create their own hypnosis CDs with self-selected music, sounds, and suggestions as well as inductions and/or purchase a professionally made CD or CDs that contain suggestions for virtually any topic under the sun and every area of one’s life which one would want to improve.
5) NLP
This stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming and has to do with a technology developed in the 1970s by two psychologists, Dr. Richard Bandler and Dr. John Grinder, in order to address phobias and other issues people had that they were not able to find adequate help for with traditional cognitive-behavioural psychotherapy. NLP has to do with the idea that the mind has its own language, which is very abstract and unlike any human language. The mind functions best with abstract concepts or images; it does not “speak” the same language we humans do. In order to effect personal change, according to NLP, we need to find people who have patterns in their subconscious mind that have led them to be successful, and use them as behavioural models in order to attain the results they have attained, or in other words, do what they do, say what they say, think what they think, and feel what they feel. These patterns can be anchored into the subconscious mind through mechanisms such as NLP to effect massive and lasting personal change which might otherwise be unattainable through another method. The world’s top peak performance coach, Tony Robbins, credits NLP for much of the success he has experienced in his life and the astounding transformations and success stories he has seen in the lives of people who have applied NLP or his own version of it which he later developed called NAC (Neuro Associative Conditioning).
6) Brainwave Entrainment
This is one of the newest and quite possibly the most effective personal change modality ever invented. Brainwave entrainment has to do with exposing the brain, with or without headphones, to pulsed sounds/frequencies in different brainwave frequencies such as Alpha (relaxed concentration), Beta (alert awareness), Theta (lucid dreaming), and Delta (deep, dreamless sleep). The key with brainwave entrainment is that it uses, for instance, a Theta Frequency at the same time as a Beta Frequency, allowing you, for instance, to have a lucid dream, do astral travel/projection or an OBE (out of body experience) right in the middle of the day. By using slower brainwaves such as theta with quicker ones such as beta, your body goes to sleep but your mind remains awake, or in other words, you retain your consciousness while gaining access to your subconscious mind. Of course, in this state, you can combine the brainwave entrainment with affirmations or visualizations or any other method of personal change already mentioned to directly affect your subconscious programming and change your life. You can also used colored lenses and/or light and sounds machines to combine the sounds with flashing lights that break up the subconscious patterns running in your mind and allow you to install new, positive, life-empowering ones instead of the old, destructive programming.
7) Energy Healing
This is another development which is relatively new to the West but has been practiced in the East for thousands of years through methods such as Yoga, Meditation, Qi Gong, Tai Chi, etc. The key is energy cultivation and the idea that all illness, dis-ease, and dis-comfort starts as a blockage in the body’s energy system/field. There are some individuals such as certain psychics and energy healers/bioenergeticists that are incredibly sensitive to energy and can detect problems in one’s aura/energy field. And while this may sound a little estoric or New Age to some of you, consider the fact that the existence of a life force within us that animates all living matter, coursing through, surrounding, and binding it (think of the androgynous, neither good nor evil “Force” in the Star Wars movies that can be used for both positive and negative purposes) has been proven scientifically through experiments documenting the existing of bioenergy or “chi/qi/prana” within each of us and the fact that when this energy is not flowing properly through our chakras/meridians/dantians we do not feel well and eventually get sick. The methods listed such as Qi Gong, Tai Chi, Meditation, Yoga, etc. are all valid ways of restoring energetic balance to our body and releasing energetic blockages, old patterns, and subconscious mental or emotional trauma especially from our childhood and having to do with our Inner Child which a lot of us carry around and which stop us from reaching our highest potential.
Brainwave entrainment is a method to stimulate the brain into entering a specific state by using a pulsing sound, light, or electromagnetic field. The pulses elicit the brain’s ‘frequency following’ response, encouraging the brainwaves to align to the frequency of a given beat.
This ‘frequency following’ response of brainwave entrainment can be seen in action with those prone to epilepsy. If a strobe flashes at their seizure frequency, the brain will ‘entrain’ to the flashing light, resulting in a seizure.
On the positive side, this same mechanism is commonly used to induce many brainwave states; such as a trance, enhanced focus, relaxation, meditation or sleep induction. The brainwave entrainment effectively pushes the entire brain into a certain state.
Brainwave entrainment works for almost everyone. It is a great way to lead your mind into states that you might usually have difficulty reaching, allowing you to experience what those states feel like.
THE HYPE
There is a lot of marketing hype around brainwave entrainment. It is sold with promises of increasing IQ, promoting weight loss, ‘mind-tripping’, enhancing creativity, concentration, inducing spiritual states and more.
While these claims are not entirely true, they are not altogether false either. In practice, the claims are based on an overly-simplistic view of how the brain and the brainwaves function.
THE RUB
People are very seldom deficient in a certain brainwave type in all areas of their brain. Usually the distribution is much spottier, with an excess in one area and a deficiency in another.
We are all different, especially when it comes to the distribution of our brainwaves. Boosting a certain brainwave state may be beneficial for one person, and emotionally uncomfortable for another. Without knowing each person’s starting position, entrainment can be rather ‘hit and miss’.
If brainwave entrainment leaves you with unwanted side-effects (see below) or discomfort, you’re probably encouraging a range of brainwaves that are already excessive in some area of your brain. The way around this is to get a brain map to see what your brain’s strengths and weaknesses are, and see what (if any) brainwaves could use some encouragement.