Brainwaves & Hypnosis

Understanding the basics of brainwaves can be really useful in measuring where your mental frequency is at any given moment of your day.

Being able to identify if you're existing in high beta (stress!) for example, can help you pause the momentum and apply breath and do whatever it is helps you calm your energy.

Let's go a little deeper:

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The Beta Wave

The Beta Wave is the state of our normal waking consciousness. It's classified in sub-categories of low beta, mid beta and high beta.

In Beta, we consider options, weigh variables, assess data based on previous experiences and repeated patterns. We make sense of things, have conversations, solve problems and deal with our regular day to day.

The subcategories:

High Beta

The stakes are high in high beta. Usually fright or flightresponses become predominant here. Mentally, you might feel like there's too many thoughts happening all at once, many of which may be conflicting — or, you might notice an absence of being able to think at all, because you're totally overly stimulated and the body is already preparing for attack (real or imagined).

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. Chronic stress over time can have us existing primarily in High Beta much of the time without really realising we're at peak levels.

If you've even been overwhelmed or stressed you'll know what it feels like physically; creased forehead, knitted eyebrows, pressure 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.

Mid Beta

This brainwave range is little more relaxed. Physically, you may feel energy pulsing through the body as you problem solve or exercise mental agility. Puzzle pieces are coming together — you can feel yourself thinking, but you're not tense with thought. You might also feel like you're physically searching your mind for answers and may be able to open doors to your mind that you don't frequent too often. 

Low Beta

Low Beta is a calm alertness, like having a conversation with someone you know and feel comfortable with in a safe environment. Sure, there are variables to consider, but the stakes aren't very high and generally you feel safe in your body. Ideas or concepts emerge somewhat spontaneously as you loosely think without much force. In low-beta, you're relaxed physically — low/no muscle tension.

The Alpha Wave

he Alpha wave state could be considered as being in flow. When you're totally immersed in a task and focused, but it feels natural and easy and effortless. You receive ideas and suggestion spontaneously — it's easy to make connections and you may think in whole packets of information, getting the whole picture of scenarios, or different angles, without searching for them.

This is a creative state, common when immersed in a project or creation. 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. You can explore different realms of reality in the Alpha wave state.

This is an imaginative state, but you're also in action.

The Theta Wave

The Theta brainwave state is a sensational state; in that we're using a different part of the brain connected to our senses — sight/vision, hearing/auditory function, olfactory/senses, sensation/touch, and even taste.

We're using the Limbic brain processing here.  This part of the brain processes information in a non-linear way — more like everything, everywhere all at once. It's intuitive, emotional, and instinctual. It speaks in images, symbols and sensation and things don't make sense, but the feeling of truth is very easy to identify.

Beyond the logical mind, the Limbic brain provides us access to aspects of our personality and experience that are more nuanced than or conscious reasoning mind.

We exist in the Theta range state predominantly until the age of about 7 years old. A child in these years is absorbant to the environment around them — sensing moods and energy and actively building neural network based on hundreds of tens of thousands of pieces of data in the environment that they're not consciously sorting — but naturally attuned to.

The body feels relaxed and open in this state, and the mind feels expansive, open and receptive.

The Delta wave

The Delta wave range is our sleep state, where our alertness on physical reality is minimised and attention turns inward — to our dreams.

Our body uses this parasympathetic state to repair (as it's not alert to incoming stimuli in the environment it must contend with for survival) and our subconscious mind processes and sorts the days data.

In Delta, we are in full subconscious mode. Our dreams speak in symbols and pictures and abstract ways that make no sense logically, in terms of interpreting meaning, it always comes down to the direct perceiver. Symbols in our dreams are targeted to our own brain's fabric of understanding, and when we can view them from that eye, they have guidance for us to navigating our waking hours.

The Gamma wave

The Gamma wave is known as a state of super-consciousness — a state of oneness with all that is. This is the frequency of being connected to all available data in the field, but being so naturally alert that it doesn't lead to overwhelm. Instead, those who can reach the Gamma state can access multiple dimensions of time-space and merge fully with it.

If you've seen the movie Contact, when Ellie travels through space and had that otherworldly experience which contained within it a lifetime of open potentials, but had only been unconscious for 18 seconds — this is a good example of the quality of the Gamma wave.

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The brainwave states of hypnosis

In hypnosis, we work together to slow the brainwaves from the Beta range into the Alpha and Theta range by using breathing and muscle relaxation processes, as well as visualisation.

Tapping into these slower brainwave states gives the brain and body the space and time to think differently, because we're using an entirely different processing centre of the brain — the Limbic brain.

As mentioned before, when we're young, we're mostly processing the world in Theta — or with our Limbic brain.

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).

The Limbic brain processes data experientially.

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.

Using the conscious reasoning mind (aka beta waves) to deal with these patterns after the fact isn’t wholly effective because often these scenarios aren’t logical. Often times (especially with early childhood trauma when the conscious reasoning mind isn't fully developed, or highly charged traumatic events in adulthood) the neo-cortex (conscious reasoning mind) was likely not involved in these initial experiences — the Limbic brain, however, was — through experience.

The actual processing of these scenarios is not wholly a mental process —it's an experience.

Remembering comes later, not during said experiences. Details recalled by the neo-cortex when we look back on events, or when we try to make sense of things are converted in to language, yet the unconscious — or the limbic brain — has stored the details of these scenarios physically and energetically too. This is the first hand imprint — like the negative of a film, where the photo then becomes the language/reasoned memory).

This is why hypnosis can be so powerful, because in hypnosis we exist and explore the Alpha/Theta states using the language of the Limbic brain — imagery, sensation, symbolism.

To effectively deal with any lingering energy which is inhibiting our present, we need to access the area of brain which was involved in processing the scenario(s) in the first place — the Limbic brain.

What is significant here — and how hypnotherapy differs — is that we don’t really need to repeat and re-experience "the story" with language to influence the residue that exists in the mind/the bod.y.

Instead, we use the language of the subconscious — awareness of energy and sensation — tending to the body and where it holds the energy patterns, and allowing the mind to open to new potentials and new perceptions.