Brainwaves & Hypnosis

A general overview on the basics of brainwaves can be really useful in understanding where your mental state is at any given moment of your day.

Being able to identify if you're teetering toward high beta (stress) and feeling a little wired can help you pause the momentum and run some calming interventions, like deep breathing or closing your eyes to centre yourself, helping to calm the nervous system, slow the brainwaves, reducing concentration on external stimuli and refocus.

Here's the breakdown:

The Beta Wave

This is the state of our normal waking consciousness. The beta wave range is classified in sub-categories of low - mid - high. When we're in this brainwave range, we're predominantly using the part of the brain known as the neo-cortex, located just behind the forehead.

This area of the brain governs our conscious, reasoning processes. Here we consider options, weigh variables, assess data based on previous experiences and repeated patterns, make sense of things, have conversations, solve problems and deal with our regular day to day.

It's demonstrated as a brainwave with many dense peaks and troughs — quite speedy and active.

The subcategories:

Low Beta

This is a calm alertness, like having a conversation with someone you know and feel comfortable with. There are considerations to make, but the stakes aren't very high and generally you feel safe in your environment and your body. Ideas or concepts emerge somewhat spontaneously as you loosely think without much force. In low-beta, you're relaxed physically.

Mid Beta

A little more problem solving and/or mental agility is aparent in the mid-beta range. Puzzle pieces are coming together, and you might feel a bit excitable here. You might also feel like you're physically searching your mind for answers. Physically, you may feel energy pulsing through the body.

High Beta

The stakes feel much higher in high beta — this is a state of stress. Usually fright, flight or fawn responses become predominant here. Mentally, you might feel like there's too many thoughts happening all at once, many of which are conflicting. Or, you might notice an absence of being able to think at all, because you're overly stimulated.

Ideally, we don't want to exist in a state of high beta for extended periods of time, as this can flood the system with the stress hormone cortisol.

If you've even been overwhelmed or stressed, you'll know what it feels like physically; creased forehead, knitted eyebrows, pressure in the head and tension in the body. Because our sympathetic nervous system responds to intense brain activity, there may be physiological reactions like muscle tension, sweating, limited intake of breath and rapid eye movement.

Its common for those who've experienced trauma, or are in a stressful life period, or just have a lot of activities on their plate to have long bouts of mid to high-beta waves, followed by crashes into Delta (sleep) without existing too long in the in-between states of Alpha and Theta.

The Alpha Wave

The Alpha wave state could be considered as being in flow. When you're totally immersed in a task and focused, but it feels natural. You receive ideas and suggestion spontaneously — it's easy to make connections.

This is a creative state, common when immersed in a project or creation. What's cool is as our brainwaves expand into the state of Alpha and Theta — time begins to bend. You might have experienced this as 'losing' blocks of time because you've been completely immersed in an experience, forgetting the rest of the world around you.

Typically here you feel calm in the body, maybe energised because you're pointing your energy toward something meaningful which stimulates you creatively.

The Theta Wave

The Theta brainwave state is the gateway to our subconscious. We're using the Limbic brain processing here. Things are very visual or sensational here, in the sense that we're using our senses — sight/vision, hearing/auditory function, olfactory/senses, sensation/touch, and even taste.

This state is also very relaxing. Muscles aren't working very hard at all because the body feels safe in this state, and the mind feels expansive. Exising in Theta for intentional, extended periods of time can help calm the nervous system out of stress states, enabling the body to utilise energy for cellular repair.

The brainwave states of hypnosis

In hypnosis, we work to slow the brain out of the Beta range and into the Alpha and Theta brainwave states. By using breathing and muscle relaxation processes, as well as visualisation, we tap into these slower brainwaves which gives the brain and body the space and time to think differently, because we're using an entirely different processing centre of the brain. You can read more about that here.

The Limbic brain processes data experientially.

We think in pictures and symbols and scenarios. Information can come to us in a 'packet' of information, like a download of insight. We tap into creativity, flow and intuition as well as inner truths regarding our values and preferences.

This state of being is natural in our daily circadian rhythms, typically common right before we fall asleep, on our way to Delta. However, existing consciously in these states for longer periods of our day can have extremely positive reverberating effects. You can read more about that here.

How this helps you

As our brains are developing, we tend to absorb patterns in our early years which can influence us for the rest of our lives. They stay in our subconscious, remembered by the body, and can be the root of many deep seated patterns of behaviour, emotional reactivity or mental loops. These experiences form lenses for which all of our experiences are filtered through, and forms the framework through which we experience and judge subsequent life events.

The Limbic brain keeps a record of all of these experiences which influence us deeply and often, they are not logical, they are emotional or sensational — they are experienced first hand by the body, and second-hand by the neo-cortex (or conscious reasoning mind). You can read more about this here

Using the the conscious reasoning mind (aka beta waves) to deal with these patterns isn’t wholly effective because often these scenarios aren’t logical. The processing of these scenarios by remembering comes later, not during said experiences. Details are recalled by the neo-cortex when we look back on events, or when we try to make sense of things. However, the neo-cortex was likely not involved in these initial experiences — the Limbic brain, however, was.

So, to effectively deal with these issues, we need to access the area of mind which was involved in processing the scenario(s) in the first place — the Limbic brain.

This is why hypnosis can be so powerful, because we use the language of the Limbic brain — imagery, sensation, symbolism — to address held energy patterns. This is the domain of Alpha/Theta and this is where we exist and explore energy dynamics in hypnosis.

What is significant here — and how hypnotherapy differs to normal therapy — is that we don’t really need to go deep into repeating and re-experiencing "the story" to influence the residue that exists in the mind/the body.

Instead, we use the language of the subconscious, tending to the body and where it holds the energy, and relaxing the mind so it can open to new potentials and new perceptions.