The Brain Wave States

People come to me puzzled by their own practice. Why they drop off to sleep every time they sit. Why some nights they are gone in two minutes and other nights they finish as wound up as they started. Why a good meditation feels like something, a heaviness, a floating, a sinking, and what that something is. Nearly all of those questions have the same answer. You are moving between brain wave states, and the states have names, and they can be measured. I like having one piece of this map that comes from a laboratory. It just tells you where you are.

The five speeds

Your brain gives off electrical activity with a rhythm measured in cycles per second, or hertz. Five bands matter here, and I give them in the order you travel through them, fastest to slowest.

Gamma, 30 to 50 Hz. The fast end. Gamma is the brain fully switched on and holding several things at once. Peak concentration, the flash of insight. You cannot stay there long and you would not want to.

Beta, 13 to 30 Hz. Ordinary waking life. Talking, working, driving, reading this. Beta gets things done. At the higher end of the range it tips into anxiety, and most of the people who come to me are living there, in high beta, from the alarm clock to the pillow.

Alpha, 7 to 13 Hz. The gear down. Eyes closed, body settling, the chatter thinning out. Daydreaming is alpha. This is where every meditation starts, and for the first few weeks it is where most of them stay, which is fine.

Theta, 4 to 7 Hz. The place I want you to get to. Deep meditation, the drift just before sleep and just after waking, the state where images arrive without you making them and time goes strange. Creativity lives here, and so does most of the psychic work and the healing. When I talk about going deeper, I am talking about theta.

Delta, 0.5 to 4 Hz. Deep dreamless sleep. The body repairing itself. You are not conscious here, and if you reach it while meditating you will know, because you will wake up twenty minutes later with a crick in your neck.

What each one feels like from the inside

You do not have a meter on your forehead, so you need to know the states by feel.

Beta feels like being awake. Thoughts come in sentences and they come fast. If you sit down to meditate and five minutes later you are still writing emails in your head, you have not left beta yet. Everybody starts there.

Alpha feels like softening. The shoulders drop. The breath gets slower without you forcing it. Thoughts still come, but further apart, and you watch them go past rather than climbing on board. There is often a pleasant heaviness in the arms and legs, and some people get a gentle swaying feeling even though they are sitting still.

Theta is the one people write to me about, because the first time it happens it can be a shock. The body goes very heavy or disappears altogether. Pictures and scenes arrive on their own, vivid and odd, and you are not sure whether you are making them up. An hour passes in what felt like ten minutes. Sounds in the room seem far away. You may feel yourself sinking, or floating, or both at once. That is theta, and it is exactly where you want to be.

Delta feels like nothing, because you are asleep.

Why you keep falling asleep

This is the most common thing I hear from new students, and I give the same answer every time.

Congratulations.

If you sat down to meditate and woke up forty minutes later, you went through alpha into theta, and your body, short of rest for years, took the opportunity and dropped you into delta. It got what it needed, and your mind proved it can go deep. Keep doing it. In time you will learn to hover in theta without tipping over the edge, and that is when the good stuff begins.

The trick, when you are ready for it, is posture. Sit up rather than lie down, spine straight, chin level, hands open on your thighs. The small effort of staying upright keeps one thread of awareness awake while the rest of you sinks. Lying down is for when you actually want to sleep.

The exercise: walking down the states

This uses the breathing meditation from Thirty Minutes a Day and adds one thing, noticing the state change as it happens.

1. Sit upright and comfortable. Do the tension and release from your feet to your head so the body is settled.
2. Close your eyes and breathe slowly, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Say to yourself, silently, "beta". Notice what beta feels like right now.
3. Keep breathing. When you notice the shoulders drop and the thoughts spread out, say "alpha". Do not chase it. Just name it when it is there.
4. Keep going. If the body goes heavy or distant, if a picture arrives you did not make, if time goes strange, say "theta", once, and then stop naming things and let it be.
5. When you come back up, and you will on your own, sit for a minute with your eyes closed and notice the climb. Theta to alpha to beta. Then open your eyes.

Do this daily for a week. The naming teaches you the feel of each state so you recognise it without the label, and it keeps a thread of awareness running through the descent, which is the whole skill. Within a couple of weeks you will know within a breath or two where you are, and that is what lets you go deeper on purpose rather than by luck.

Setting the speed from outside

You can also nudge the brain toward a state with sound. I use binaural beats when I want to get to theta quickly, and there is a whole page on them, see Binaural Beats. Learn to walk down the states on your own breath first. Then the beats become a shortcut you understand.

The mistakes people make

Trying to skip alpha. You cannot go from the shopping list straight to theta. Alpha is the hallway. Walk through it.

Grabbing at theta when it arrives. The moment you think "I am in theta now, this is great", you have climbed back up to beta to think it. Name it once and let go.

Judging a sit by how deep it went. Some days you will stay in alpha for the full thirty minutes. That is still thirty minutes out of high beta, and it counts. Depth comes from regularity. Chop wood, carry water.

Lying down before you are ready. Fine in the first month. After that, sit up.

Where this fits

Grounding keeps you safe to go down. The daily practice gets you there. Knowing the states tells you where you are once you arrive, and Going Deeper shows you what to do there. None of it is complicated. Your brain already does all five speeds every day. The practice teaches you to choose.

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