Universal Sound Therapy For Stress and Anxiety
Sound is a natural element that can elicit many feelings, including peace and serenity. It’s not uncommon to turn to soothing music or the sounds of waterfalls as an escape to relax and unwind.
Sound therapy is also an excellent way to deepen meditation, providing a sense of clarity and focus. No wonder then that those suffering from stress and anxiety find regular practice of sound therapy so beneficial.
Though sound healing may seem like a modern-day fad, it has been practiced for thousands of years. Different instruments create soothing noises and vibrations that promote relaxation and health.
Sound baths can be enjoyed in several ways, but the most popular are group and private sessions with an experienced practitioner. Group or private sessions with a healer tend to be more cost-effective than one-on-one appointments and will ensure you get the most from your time spent with them.
Sound healing sessions can be found in yoga and meditation studios, as well as online. Some practitioners use gongs, crystal bowls or chimes to produce the sounds. Additionally, they offer chanting and other forms of meditation to help you reach a deep state of relaxation.
Sound healing has many potential benefits, such as relieving headaches and migraines, providing pain relief, increasing self-confidence and addressing underlying issues such as stress or high blood pressure that could negatively impact your health.
In a sound bath, you will lie back and unwind as the sound healing practitioner plays various instruments. They could use singing bowls, gongs or Tibetan bowls to create relaxing noises.
These instruments can be used to stimulate the chakras, energy centers located throughout the body that influence mental, emotional and physical wellbeing. Furthermore, they release tension and activate the glandular system, bringing balance back into both mind and body.
You can purchase CDs that contain the sounds from a sound healing session to take with you home and start practicing on your own. These can be an efficient way to bring the practice with you and get started right away.
Some sound therapy is personalized, in which a practitioner adjusts the music or noise to accommodate someone’s hearing or tinnitus. This strategy involves altering the frequency or tone of the sound to match someone’s hearing threshold and tinnitus pitch (Jastreboff, 2011).
Customized therapies are tailored to each patient, targeting a characteristic such as tinnitus or sound sensitivity. Studies have demonstrated that this strategy can reduce the number of episodes of tinnitus and enhance treatment success.
This strategy promotes patient involvement in the decision-making process, helping them decide if a particular sound therapy is beneficial to them. There are also psychoacoustic and questionnaire methods available that clinicians can use to assess whether someone will benefit from personalized therapy.
