Broken Brain Waves

plain talk about how peace is restored to our frazzled lives

Brain waves may not look like you’d expect. There are lots of waves, like the ocean; waves flow into other waves, and there are many going on at the same time, big and small.

When a storm hits suddenly against gentle surf or a tide coming in, the waves no longer flow into one another. They crash. Eventually, they work themselves out once the storm stops, but it takes a while. The sea has no mechanism dedicated to smoothing out the waves after a storm.

Our brains are just like that. They flow nicely from an excited state to a focused state, a visionary state to meditative state, and onward to a deep sleep state. Very frequently, more than one of those states is happening at once — you can check it out on an EEG.

If you know anything about music or about electricity, you know how waves behave and what happens when they don’t synchronize at a simple mathematical level. The intersections become jagged. They even become broken.

Now if we have some sharp edges after a rough day, usually we get back on track after some sleep if the system is healthy. Think getting some bad news, taking a fall on our skis, or getting in an argument. Often, we’ll take extra steps to guide our brains smoothly to where we can fall asleep, such as bathing, hot tea, yoga, or meditation. If that happens, we should be able to stay asleep and get some deep sleep.

But sometimes, our stress becomes chronic, like ongoing hostility at work, or a single event may be traumatic in a multifaceted way, such as a house fire that causes injuries, homelessness, and an inability to show up at work. Whether stress, past trauma, or present trauma, tea or yoga may not work when brain waves are too volatile and misaligned. We find ourselves getting less and less quality sleep and are therefore tired and more stressed during the day. We can’t recover and we feel anxious, so we try alcohol or sleeping pills.

Unfortunately, though these things can bring temporary relaxation, the problem persists because it doesn’t change the brain wave patterns. What’s literally happening is that a tight wave is crashing into a large wave type, just like in the ocean during a storm. But unlike the ocean storm, this storm doesn’t go away entirely.

It might look something like this: you read a book, get into a good frame of mind, relax, and fall asleep. Then just as your brain tries to move to delta waves from theta waves, high frequency beta waves from fast-paced, problem-solving thoughts, interrupt the flow. Suddenly, you are awake instead of sleeping deeply, or else you are having nightmares or active dreams.

I mentioned an EEG before. Dysregulation is very easy to measure on an EEG. But something else that is measurable on an EEG is what helps regulated nervous systems. One thing that doesn’t help? Regulated nervous systems. They don’t fix themselves. But there’s a very constant human thing that our brains do. Our brain waves match whatever we’re listening to. They like to adhere to something rhythmic and if there’s a rhythm to be had, whether it’s a harmonic rhythm or a natural rhythm on the Earth, we will match it. This is also measurable.

It would seem that people like to try to bring themselves to regulation by listening to music. This is an intuitive thing that we all do for our ourselves. We also bring ourselves to the woods, to the ocean, to streams, and we match those rhythms because we feel calm.

We can’t all get to the ocean, stand around in the wind, or listen to the rain all the time. Birds are great, too, but many don’t have the ability to just stand around in the woods. So we’ve started to listen to music in the past several hundred years. The thing is, some music isn’t helpful because it doesn’t demonstrate a brain wave like we need to go where we want to go. Like sleep, or concentration.

So when a nervous system is out of whack — like

• you can’t fall asleep

• you awaken completely in the middle of the night

• you’re exhausted at work

• you can’t concentrate

• you get grumpy and reactive

• you become forgetful

the one thing which will cause immediate, healthy change is sound in a frequency familiar to your own natural brain waves.

There are a lot of frequencies in a busy society to adhere to. Unfortunately, not all music will bring us to a state of calm, and in fact, our nervous system will also match the frequency of things like explosions, car alarms, and construction. We can also turn to YouTube and find lots of stuff that seems soothing and even intends to be so. But when we turn it on overnight, we find it doesn’t do the trick. That’s partially because the frequencies change when the file is compressed and uploaded, not to mention we may even get woken up by an ad.

Looking back, I was an intuitive and empathic kid by who sang before I talked. I had a lot of musical training and I understood it on a number of levels. I had no idea back then how much healing I was doing with the music that I created. Yet I’ve had many traumatic events and I now I realize that I‘ve healed because of the music in my life.

After time as an improvisation and performance clinician at universities all across the United States, a global time of upheaval known as the Covid Pandemic gave me pause to consider my role in life. I noticed how much I love helping people directly rather than being separated by a stage. Moreover, I love observing their feelings.

It turns out that my empathic nature is very specific: I sense subtle brainwave shifts and respond to them with sound. In the past, I was less organized but once I learned and brought everything together, I could match my voice to the frequencies people need to hear. And the music I create entrains internal shifts, so that people can be calm, which in turn allows them to focus, sleep, and heal.

That’s how I went from being a serious performer to an impassioned coach with an emphasis on nervous system regulation.

If you’d like to experience feeling calm every morning, reliably, without needing to figure it out yourself, you can join us at The Joyful Path | Jedi Calm Community, where you’ll also find overnight resources for deep sleep and live groups supporting PTSD, anxiety, chronic stress, and a shared desire for deep peace.

Please share this article with a friend who might need it. No one needs to navigate anxiety alone.

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