Sometimes, the key to reducing anxiety lies in the sounds your ears absorb. Think of it this way: if certain sounds like a honking horn, a crying baby, or a ringing cell phone can cause your stress levels to rise, it stands to reason that certain sounds can also help it to lower.
Binaural beats help to supercharge your meditation sessions by easing your mind into its meditative state, offering mental health benefits. If completed before bed, it can even help you to fall asleep.
What are Binaural Beats?
Also known as auditory illusions, binaural beats cause your brain to hear a tone that is not played. This phenomenon occurs when you hear two tones, one in each ear, that differ slightly in their frequency—for example, 130 Hz in one ear and 122 Hz in the other. While you will hear both tones at first, your brain gradually synchronizes with the differences in tone, letting an 8 Hz tone emerge. Thus, instead of hearing only the two tones, you end up hearing a third tone, as well, with a frequency that is equal to the difference between the two played tones.
There are some keys for binaural beats:
- The two tones must have frequencies that fall below 1000 Hz.
- The tones must have a difference that is no greater than 30 Hz.
- The tones must be listened to separately—one in each ear.
Binaural Beats and Meditation
It’s claimed that binaural beats allow you to enter the same mental state that is associated with a meditation practice, but much more quickly.
Meditation is a centuries-old practice that focuses on calming the mind and limiting the number of random thoughts that pass through it. It offers significant benefits for your mental health, with regular meditation practice shown to reduce stress and anxiety.
Meditation can offer other benefits for your brain, as well, with research showing that it may be able to slow down the rate of brain aging and memory loss while also improving your attention span.
Despite the benefits of meditation, it can be challenging to practice regularly, which is where binaural beats can help.
Allegedly, binaural beats are suspected to create the same brain wave patterns that you would experience during meditation. The theory is that listening to a sound with a certain frequency causes your brain waves to synchronize with that frequency, and binaural waves cause the brain to experience brain waves that mimic the low-frequency waves seen when meditating.
How Binaural Beats Enhance Your Meditation Practice
Binaural beats offer a way to fine-tune your brain waves, and different ranges have been shown to produce different effects that not only enhance your meditation practice and make it easier to focus but also improve your health and well-being.
Binaural beats, in order to work, must incorporate two tones that are no more than 30 Hz apart. However, different frequencies can allow you to focus your meditation on a target area.
There are four frequency ranges for binaural beats: delta, theta, alpha, and beta.
- Delta (1 to 4 Hz): These beats have been associated with reducing anxiety and dreamless sleep, meaning they might be a great addition if you choose to meditate before bed or have a stressful event coming up.
- Theta (4 to 8 Hz): These beats are linked to REM sleep and creative and meditative states.
- Alpha (8 to 13 Hz): These beats are believed to encourage relaxation.
- Beta (14 to 30 Hz): These beats are associated with alertness, concentration, cognition, and arousal.
Once you choose the frequency range, be sure to use headphones while listening to the binaural beat—it will only work if you send one tone into one ear.
As for the benefits offered by binaural beats, a few studies have been able to provide insight into how they can improve your health, specifically your mood, anxiety, and performance.
The greatest studied effects of binaural beats have to do with its anti-anxiety benefits. For instance, one study looked at the benefits of binaural beats in those admitted to the emergency department at a hospital and found that those who listened to audio with embedded binaural beats had lower anxiety compared to those who listened to audio without binaural beats and those who listened to no audio at all.
Another small study found that listening to binaural beats for 60 days significantly reduced the participants’ anxiety and improved their overall quality of life. Yet another study on those who were about to undergo surgery found that binaural tones were able to cut anxiety levels by an average of 26%.
Research even suggests that combining binaural beats with ASMR, a phenomenon that is triggered by certain audio and visuals, can induce the brain signals needed for sleep while keeping the user in a psychologically comfortable state.
Tips to Sleep Better with Binaural Beats and Meditation
If you’re looking to improve your nighttime routine, adding meditation is a great choice to help center your mind, reduce stress and anxiety, and relax your body. However, if you struggle with meditation, binaural beats may be able to help you see these benefits.
Here are some tips for incorporating binaural beats and meditation into your nighttime routine:
- Find a comfortable position. The primary goal of nighttime meditation is to relax, and that’s easier to do when you’re in a comfortable position. So, whether you’re sitting on your couch or lying down in bed, find a spot that is comfortable.
- Keep it distraction-free. While binaural beats can help to center your focus, it’s important to give it a boost by remaining somewhere free of distraction. This means finding a time and space where your partner, kids, family, or pets do not distract you.
- Use headphones. Not only can headphones help to keep out distractions, but they are also a necessity when you’re looking to use binaural beats since they allow each ear to hear a different tone.
- Keep the volume down. Turning up the sound of your binaural beats won’t make them any more effective; it’ll just put you at greater risk of hearing damage and headaches. So, keep the volume at a comfortable level, not too low and not too loud.
- Start small. If you’re new to meditation, the prospect of sitting still for 30 minutes may seem impossible, so start with a short amount of time and slowly build it up. Meditation is a skill that needs training; while binaural beats can make it easier, discipline is still required.
Upgrade Your Meditation with Binaural Beats
Binaural beats create the illusion of a third sound even when the ears only take in two. Research suggests that this can offer benefits for your health, well-being, and concentration, but your anxiety, in particular, can see a reduction with the use of binaural beats.
Binaural beats are an excellent adage to your meditation practice as they can help your mind focus, dispelling all distracting and stress-inducing thoughts. Try adding binaural beats to your nighttime routine and see if they can help you melt stress away and sleep better, too.
