Shifting Your Nervous System with Music: Creating Your Desired State
The central component of Tony Robbin’s teachings is the notion of state. State is comprised of your physiology, language, and focus. Often, this is captured by where your energy goes focus or attention flows. This highlights the importance of your belief structures that produce different thoughts and emotional experiences. This is formulated by your word choice and where you choose to place your attention on a situation. Your attention can produce a unique perspective and frame to the matter at hand. The other key piece of this triad is what your body communicates through its physiology. This includes the energy behind the words you communicate internally to yourself and externally to others.
It’s incredibly important to consider how to foster a powerful and healthy state for yourself regularly. This can be fostered by a myriad of potential avenues stemming from behavioral choices that create routines and habits, certain patterns of thoughts, and ultimately your reaction and response to the world at large. Being in state is a critical framework for supporting feeling good and powerful from within. Many pieces come together to impact this positive feeling. Ultimately, being in a desirable state is a choice that you make through the way you carry yourself, how you express yourself, and what you choose to place your attention on. These are the key components to work with. There are definitely more applicable pieces to consider, but working within that triad is a foolproof way to optimize your mode of action and place of coming from with everything in your life.
A fundamental tip to produce your desired state with essentially the snap of a finger is music. It’s underrated how impactful music and its associated frequencies can be in generating your desired state. Regardless of the genre, it’ll undoubtedly invoke a powerful feeling of some sort. - this is why you can find yourself starting to tear up or feel happy at the whim of a tune that comes on. It starts to poke at familiar associations on the surface regarding the lyrics or the tone and pitch of the melody speaks to deeper aspects of your psyche and consciousness. Now, I’m not a musical expert, however, the power of music to foster a shift in mental, emotional, physical, and cellular responses is potently evident.
My encouragement is to use this information in your favor, specifically around promoting your desired way of feeling and being. For example, if you want to create peace and calm, consider binaural beats, sound baths, and Hertz frequencies to help penetrate the body deeply into a different state and mode of being. If you want to inspire confidence and energy, consider a vibrant or catchy tune, perhaps one that easily gets you up and moving. I’m thinking Beyonce or Whitney Houston, however, the song choice must speak to our mind, body, and soul. If you want to focus and feel alert, perhaps some background beats, jazz, or classical. If you are overdue for a good cry and being in tune with your emotions, perhaps listen to songs that foster a sentimental feeling or storyline for you. I’m thinking of songs about heartbreak, loss, challenge, loneliness, etc. - all common illustrations and expressions of the human experience. Ultimately, select a song that works for you and your intended state, and allow the power and flow of the musical expressions to wash over you from the inside out.
A main avenue I work with clients around incorporating the scientific underpinnings related to music and sound healing speaks its impact on the nervous system. Healing frequencies and soothing sounds can make such an impression on our body’s insides and it’s an effective method to helping ourselves create new pathways and foster new responses to life. Sound baths and frequency music work on the principle of vibration. The vibrations can influence the body’s own energy fields and resonate with the body’s cells, promoting relaxation and balance. Consider its ability to soothe your nervous system and help you shift from the sympathetic (fight, flight, freeze) to the parasympathetic (rest & digest). Certain frequencies can influence brainwave activity, promoting states of relaxation or focus. For instance, binaural beats are thought to help synchronize brainwaves, which can lead to altered states of consciousness and relaxation. Music and sound can affect the sympathetic nervous system, which controls physiological functions such as heart rate and respiration. Calming music or sound can activate the parasympathetic nervous system, promoting relaxation and reducing stress. The immersive experience of a sound bath or listening to frequency music can facilitate emotional release and healing. This can be particularly beneficial for processing and releasing repressed emotions.
There’s a strong emphasis on the soothing, calming, and relaxing nature of sounds to inspire a different state. The reason this is critical to consider and practice is that we can only get so far with the verbal processing of our emotions and thoughts. We can talk, talk, and talk some more about how we habitually feel and think, and the situation that provokes it may change, but the same flavor of feelings and thoughts remain. I see this happen countlessly with myself and my clients in session. Honestly, talk therapy can only go so far in our ability to generate new, desirable, and even rational forms of responding to life’s challenges. Therefore, I’m an advocate for bringing in the body to help ensure change is truly possible and sustainable. We cannot avoid the enormous amounts of practice that’s required to formulate new pathways and responses, however, learning to relax and radically shift where we operate from, our state of being in the moment, does wonders when it comes to change.
Therefore, learning to intentionally foster your desired state on an emotional level that speaks to the mental and somatic components of experience, affords you a greater opportunity to rework and recreate what will be. You then can more fully become the creator of your life when you truly become aware of where you’re at on the many levels that come together to impact your state of being and mode of action. I will often incorporate integrative and experiential components to my sessions to support the development of a person’s intentionality and embodiment of a state they most desire and crave.