Binaural Beats

I put this page last in the area for a reason. Everything before it works with nothing but you and a chair. This is the one piece of kit I am happy to recommend, and it is still only a tool. If you have not done the daily practice, a pair of headphones will not do it for you.

What they actually are

Play one tone into your left ear, say 300 Hz. Play a slightly different tone into your right ear, say 325 Hz. Your brain takes the two signals and hears the difference between them, and what you experience is a soft pulsing beat at 25 Hz that is not in the recording at all. Your head makes it.

That is the whole trick. Two tones, one in each ear, and the brain does the arithmetic.

The reason it interests people like me is that the difference can be set to match the brain wave states I describe on the Brain Wave States page. Put 100 Hz in one ear and 90 Hz in the other and the beat is 10 Hz, which sits in alpha, the relaxed state where I tell people to begin a meditation. Narrow the gap to 5 or 6 Hz and the beat sits in theta, which is where the deeper meditation lives. The idea is that the brain, given a steady beat to follow, drifts toward it.

What the science says, and what I say

This is an area with a lot of overclaiming in it, so I will be straight with you.

The hearing part is solid. The brain making a beat out of two tones has been known for well over a century, and anyone can test it in a minute with headphones. The part about the brain settling into the beat frequency is where the research gets mixed. Some studies find a measurable shift in brain waves and in how relaxed people say they feel. Others find very little. Nobody serious claims they cure anything.

So here is where I sit. I treat binaural beats the way I treat an oil burner or rain on a tin roof. They are an aid to meditation, something that gives the busy part of my mind a rail to hold onto while the rest of me goes down. On a day when I am scattered, they get me to the bottom of the staircase a good deal faster. On a day when I am already settled I do not bother.

If you find they do nothing for you, that is useful information too. Put them down and go back to the breath. The breath has never let anyone down.

What you need

A pair of headphones. If you play a binaural recording through a speaker the two tones mix in the air before they reach you and you get an ordinary wobble that the whole room can hear. The beat only forms when each ear gets its own tone. Cheap headphones are fine, as long as they seal reasonably well and sit comfortably for half an hour.

A recording. There are thousands and you do not need me to name any. Look for one that tells you the beat frequency, so you know whether you are in alpha or theta, and that runs for at least thirty minutes without a voice talking over it. Most come layered under rain or ocean, which is fine. What you want is something that turns into white noise after a minute, as I described on the Going Deeper page. If you catch yourself listening to the music, it is the wrong recording.

A chair, and your usual thirty minutes. Nothing else changes.

How to try them

1. Ground first. Bare feet, the big toes, the tension and release, exactly as you do every day. Headphones are not a shortcut past Grounding, and people who skip it with the beats on come up feeling lightheaded.

2. Start with alpha, somewhere around 8 to 10 Hz, for the first week. It is gentle and you will recognise the feeling because it is the one you already get when the breathing settles.

3. Put the headphones on, set the volume low enough that you could hold a conversation over it, and press play before you close your eyes, so you are not fiddling with a screen once you are down.

4. Go into your breathing meditation as normal. Let the beat sit in the background. Do not chase it, and do not try to hear whether it is working. Your attention is on the breath, the beat is doing its job underneath.

5. After a week of alpha, move to theta, around 5 or 6 Hz, and add the staircase or the lift from Going Deeper. This is the combination I use when I want to get somewhere quickly. The beat takes you most of the way down and the staircase does the rest.

6. When the recording ends, stay where you are for a minute with the headphones off. Feel your feet. Come up slowly. Then write down what happened, the same as any other session.

Give it two weeks before you decide anything.

Some plain cautions

I am a technician by trade, so I will give you these the way I would give them to anyone handling a new piece of equipment.

Never use them while driving, riding, or operating anything with a motor. The whole point is to take you out of beta, and beta is what keeps you alive in traffic. Sitting down, eyes closed, at home.

If you have epilepsy, or any seizure history, do not try them without asking your doctor first. The same goes if you have a pacemaker or any implanted device, and I would include pregnancy in that conversation as well. I am a meditation teacher and your doctor is a doctor.

Keep the volume low. Low means you forget it is there. Half an hour a day of something loud in your ears is a hearing problem waiting for you in ten years, and the beat works just as well quiet. Louder is never better.

If you get a headache, or feel unsettled, or dizzy afterwards, stop, take the headphones off, and ground. Some people do not get on with them and that is simply how they are built. Go figure.

And do not use them to fall asleep every night. Your sleep should find its own way to delta without a soundtrack.

What they are not

A substitute for the practice. I have met people who collected recordings for every state and every purpose and never sat for thirty minutes without one. Thirty Minutes a Day comes first, and if the headphones ever become the practice rather than the help, leave them in the drawer for a month.

The beat gets you down the stairs. What you find at the bottom is yours, and it would have been there without the headphones. It just takes a little longer to walk.

Try them, and see what your own head makes of the difference.

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.