5.2.1 General Wellbeing
How does Sound Therapy help someone healthy?
Everyone can benefit from Sound Therapy as it provides brain recharge and enhances sleep, energy and general wellbeing.
Our Emotional Intelligence series addresses a range of functional areas including focus, confidence, anxiety, stress, and interpersonal communication.
Sound Therapy is also relevant to those high functioning individuals who just want to be the best they can be.
Everyone can benefit from Sound Therapy because we all need to keep our ears in good condition, not only for hearing but to stimulate the brain, so it can function at maximum potential.
For a healthy person, Sound Therapy improves the quality of sleep, reduces the amount of sleep needed and transforms our response to stress. It also improves memory, focus, multi-tasking, communication and learning ability.
What is stress?
A lack of brain energy and the inability of the nervous system to meet the required demands.
Stress is what happens when fear or anxiety become a constant state. The physiological effects include contracted muscles, increased heart rate and constricted breathing. The adrenal system is over taxed and blood pressure rises. Stress interferes with the body’s natural flow of energy. It cuts down our available energy and forces us to function on adrenaline.
Stress is a reaction of excess tension and adrenaline caused by not having enough brain energy.
Our energy level is determined by the functioning of chemical systems and nerve impulses throughout the body.
Neural activity (the passage of information along our nerves) resembles electricity in several ways. The potential for excitation of the nerve synapses depends on the level of energy charge in the brain. The brain acts like a battery which is constantly being either charged or discharged. Dr Tomatis contends that the most important function of the ear is to charge the brain through the stimulation of sound. Failure of the ear to provide sufficient re-charge to the brain results in fatigue and inefficient mental processes.
How does Sound Therapy help stress?
By recharging and focusing the brain, Sound Therapy resources the system to handle stress more easily.
Sound Therapy helps by replenishing brain energy with high frequency sound. When we have enough brain energy we can handle situations more easily and there is less need for stress.
Listeners report finding that they respond very differently to stressful situations and have a flow of inner calm that they can draw on. Sound Therapy balances the brain’s responses, calms the limbic system and enables gives us a greater reservoir of resilience and serenity.
How does Sound Therapy help energy?
The brain is recharged by high frequency sound. The intense dose of high frequencies provided by Sound Therapy releases latent brain energy.
Our energy levels depend on the brain, which is like a battery, always being either recharged or discharged by the sound around us.
When we are made receptive to and then exposed to enough high frequency sound our brain’s battery is fully recharged and we have plenty of energy!
Notice how different you feel after a day in the bush, hearing only the high frequency sounds of nature – bird songs, wind and running water. Like Sound Therapy, these sounds stimulate the ear in a way that releases latent energy in the brain. The nervous system can then function more efficiently, reducing stress and increasing energy levels.
Listeners often find they need less sleep but feel full of energy and ready to go, like when they were ten years younger.
How does Sound Therapy help communication?
By enhancing auditory processing, calming emotional reactions and improving connections between various brain centres that deal with language.
Good communication depends on good listening and good hearing.
Sound Therapy improves our hearing by working physically on the ear. It also improves our listening by opening our psychological receptivity to sound.
As the high frequency hearing is restored we are able to recognise and interpret the emotional meaning of
the message, because the emotion is carried in the high frequencies of the voice.
Sound Therapy also helps you to be more articulate and put your thoughts and feelings into words. It usually helps to improve communication within the family.
How does Sound Therapy help sleep?
Reducing stress and calming the busy mind enables deep and refreshing sleep to come more easily.
We don’t really need as much sleep as we think because it is mainly our brain that needs sleep, not our body.
When the brain has more energy, we need less sleep. Therefore Sound Therapy listeners usually find they need between one and three hours less sleep per night.
Insomnia is caused by stress, so when our stress is reduced by Sound Therapy, we naturally sleep better.
Listeners usually notice an improvement in their sleep even on the first night- Sound therapy cuts mind chatter.
How does Sound Therapy enhance brain performance?
Sound Therapy stimulates at least ten different parts of the brain and builds neural plasticity. As a result, focus, concentration, creativity and memory improve.
Our brain thrives on stimulus. Tomatis said the brain needs 3 billion stimuli per second for four and a half hours per day in order to function at maximum potential.
In other words, we need to listen to classical music, or do something equally stimulating for four and a half hours per day.
Doing this gets our neurons firing and wiring together, enhances brain organization and integration by activating many functional brain centres and their connections into our entire nervous system.