You're Damaging My Calm, Meditation and Training Wheels

Photo: John Grillo

I am solution-oriented. Nearly to a fault. When faced with a problem, I find solace in dissecting the problem, trying out solutions and being able to move on, confident in the problem having been solved.

So, the constant sine wave of stress that flows through my life (and the life of pretty much each of the people I know) is a problem that often begs for a solution. Often, the solution has been an adjustment in circumstances.

Thus, the urge to tell a particular source of stress to quit damaging my calm can lead to them doing exactly that and that particular source of stress backing off.

Unfortunately, while changing the circumstances can be part of a good solution, it's rarely a singular, long-term solution. That's because, when circumstances change, you can end up right in the same spot, stressed out and eating TUMS like they're candy.

If the circumstances need to change for rational reasons, I can certainly work to change them. However, to rely on being able to get out of bad situations, avoid stressful people and otherwise skate around stress just doesn't fly.

Thus, any long term solution to stress has to include my own handling of it. Over the past few stressful peaks, I've looked into the research on relaxation techniques and the clinical studies on things like meditation and their results on stress levels.

Intrigued by the results, I went to a couple of meditative centers to try things out. While I enjoyed the experience, there were a couple of reasons it wasn't likely to stick.

1. In at least half of my stressful situations, the lack of time is a huge part of the reason for the stress. Going to a session at a specific time just causes more stress.
2. Without the guided sessions, I just don't have enough mental discipline yet to do much meditatively except unleash a torrent of tangential thoughts that drown out the silence.
3. I am not really up for the religious aspects of nearly all traditions of meditative practice. While I think that the Buddhist, Hindu, etc. traditions have some great principles, I'm not looking to follow them nearly as much as the other practitioners at these places seemed to be looking for.
4. I'm certainly not up for the mystical crap aspects of many of the "New Age" traditions of meditative practice.

In short, while I could see the benefits of meditation on stress levels, going about it in anything that resembled

Along the way, I ran across the research on binaural beats. The basic idea is that if you put mismatched tones into each ear, you can pull the general operating frequency of the brain in the direction you intend to. That frequency has a correlation to the general state of the brain, including how relaxed you are.

Because the binaural beats pretty much keep your brain on track toward that relaxed state of mind, they act as meditative training wheels. I've tried a few "solo" sessions after doing the binaural version of the meditation session, I've been much more able to clear the distracting thoughts.

There are lots of sites and companies out there offering CD's and other products touting binaural beats as a silver bullet for nearly everything (make your hair shiny, get a better job and lose weight by listening to our $69.97 program!).

However, there are a couple of free ways to try the technique out yourself and see if it works for you.

• The easiest is the 20 minute binaural meditation MP3 that I've been using from JetCityOrange.com: the Nada Brahma X20. It's free, does a basic 20 minute meditation session and, whether placebo effect or genuine result, lets me totally relax in that 20 minutes without the tangential chatter of my inner voices.
• Gnaural, some software for generating your own. This requires a bit of fiddling, but means you can build them however you want. I'm working with this to get some momentary spikes into the pattern to keep from completely drifting off.

I've also used Gnaural and the information out there on this technique to increase focus as well as to relax and, anecdotally, am so far impressed with the results. What I've been doing is grabbing a conference room in the middle of the day, propping my head up (yes, I get that relaxed) and getting 20 minutes of bliss.

In every single case, I focus on my breathing for a couple of minutes and then there's basically nothing until I suddenly notice the diminishing volume at about minute 19. I've NEVER gone on beyond the end of the MP3, says something to me about not being "asleep". Beyond that, I've always hated naps because of how hard it is to wake up and how often I end up groggy and with a headache for the rest of the day. Not so with this.

Based on how I feel, this is much more like the 20 minute "recharge" naps that some people seem able to take and derive great benefit from.

Because I can do this anywhere I can sit with my MP3 player (I've done this in my truck in a parking lot), it doesn't have the time issues that some of the other solutions did. Similarly, because it's nothing but a couple of tones in my headphones, there's no religious baggage attached. And, I'm much more able to keep mellow and let things that used to bother me just roll off.

It's also helped me catch myself before I go into full-on rant and complain mode (something that is shown to actually make your perception of the situation worse than just calming down). That is certainly a good thing.

Hopefully, in the next few days, I'm going to start doing some more scientific evaluations of the results. The first experiment I want to try is measuring my blood pressure before and after, with a training wheel-free sit in the same chair as a control session (using the 20 minute "timer" MP3 from the same site).