Change Your Brain Every Day - Can Music to Help to Relieve Anxious Feelings?

Episode Date: December 6, 2018

Barry Goldstein is known for using specific tempos, keys, and frequencies in his music for healing purposes. In the final episode of a series on music and the brain, Dr. Daniel Amen and Barry go over the specific elements in music that can elicit specific responses in your brain and body. Their brand-new album, Feel Better Fast and Make It Last, is now available wherever music is sold.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Welcome back. I'm here with Barry Goldstein. We're talking about music and your brain. We've talked about our new album, Feel Better Fast and Make It Last. We so hope you get it. And, you know, I play it when after work, if I need to relax, or if I come home and I have 100 emails, which is not uncommon for me,

is I put the focus part on. And that can help. Tana likes the sleep part to calm her down, calm her busy brain down at night. Let's, you know, since this is a brain podcast, let's talk about how this works. What are the pieces of music that really seem to make a difference in people's lives?

Yeah, I mean, I look at this when I'm creating music for this. It's like a recipe, you know, and a recipe is not going to be the same for every dish. And depending on where we want to target someone, that dish is going to change, and the ingredients are going to change with that. So we're trying to induce a mood elevation or enhanced mood. The temple is going to be more up, right? I'm going to make use of major chords, which they have shown through studies that people are able to decipher even the most naive of listeners, that major chords make them feel more happy and minor chords make them feel

more sad. So give them examples for people who don't really know much about music. Okay. So I like the song Good Love. It's completely in major chords and it's very up and motivational. The Beach Boys song Good Vibration are major chords. But if you listen to Beethoven, a lot of those songs are in the minor keys, which can make you feel more sad or more reflective, which is okay. But if that's not what you're targeting,

you don't want to do that in a happy piece of music. Well, sometimes I've read even sad songs can make people feel happy. Yeah, if they're based on feeling that emotion, it can be freeing as well. Because you're processing the emotion. Or if you go back to a song that you loved in a movie that was super sad, but you loved the movie. Right.

So like in A Star is Born, born i loved it i saw it twice but the last song in the movie i think it's i'll never love again is it's so sad but it's so good right so it's it's rich with memory and emotion. And it can redefine for you too. One song that you initially felt sad about, now you feel happy because it has a more positive experience for you. Right. Everybody in the movie theater is crying when she sings that song. But you feel good when you come out still. But it's like, wow wow that is really amazing yeah and that's what we're doing with this album we're looking at every piece of music what's

necessary because music's a bridge how am I gonna get people from point A to point B in each one of these pieces so with mood elevation major chords major major chord progressions the tempo because we also think of faster music as more happy. So it's going to be a little bit more up-tempo. And it's going to keep them more active with music as well. There's more strumming guitars in there, in that specific piece as well. So there's a lot of different elements in each one of the pieces.

And how about focus? Because there's a piece on this album for focus. There's a piece on the album for focus. Now with focus, you want to keep people to the point where they're attentive. So it's kind of you want to enjoy the music, but you don't want to focus on it so much that you're paying attention to it. So that's why lyrics are usually not good, so we're not going to use lyrics with that. There are nature sounds. It's certainly not of me singing. Not me in this one either, although I do sing. But also those nature elements can tend to mask noise in specific areas. So we use rainfall in it. We're also using specific frequencies in this one as well to target a more

focused state. And in this piece, we're target a more focused state. And in this piece, we're using what's called monorial beats, where you're introducing two frequencies that are targeting a specific brainwave frequency. And we are targeting what we call the zone. So it's really peak performance, right, and flow. So really, even there's focus and then as you know with athletes is taking them to the zone is when they're kind of on autopilot

they're in ultra focus states and that's what we're doing with our focus one with our relaxation when we're really using entrainment we're using heart and train with that and we're targeting about 60 beats per minute so if you're slowly coming down you know down from your day you're gonna you're you're gonna adapt to the rhythm of the music what's interesting with that that's they've discovered that even listening to a metronome when a metronome is you know that thing us musicians use it goes back and forth at 66 relaxing me as we talk about it at 66 beats per minute and this was with no music at all that when people

just listening to that metronome at 66 beats per minute they had relieved anxiety just from listening to at that tempo so when we're coming back down to that relaxed state we're moving back into a parasympathetic state where we're not running from the bear anymore. So we've applied that. So a sympathetic state is a fight or flight state. Right, exactly. A parasympathetic is the opposite. That's right. Where you're really inducing relaxation and, you know, your body's just going, which is what it does, you know, with that piece.

And you're moving into a relaxed state by coming back down to that rhythm. And as we discussed, what's happening to your brainwaves when your heart's slowing down and your heart rate, we've shown through research that music can slow the heart rate down, what's happening to the brainwaves at the same time of that is your brainwaves are moving into more states of alpha, which is a more relaxed state as well. And that really sets the segue for our sleep piece

which uses a combination of really of the focus and the relaxation piece where we're targeting both the heart at a relaxed state and we're also targeting delta brainwaves through again, manorial beats. And we use manorial beats. Um, people can look that up online, but it's basically using two frequencies to target that brainwave state and manorial beats. You don't have to use headphones at all, which we really

wanted people not to have to use headphones before they go to sleep at night or to move into a relaxed state because it's just another thing that people have to do you know and sometimes people won't do it because their headphones aren't there you know so how can people get our new album feel better fast and make it last yeah our album is going to be available wherever music is is um so itunes uh cd baby and Amazon are going to be the primary ways of distributing the music. So everyone will be able to get that. And I also included it in the pledge package for my new show, Feel Better Fast. Exactly.

Make it last. And it looks great. It's right. The color's awesome. It's beautiful. I know you worked really hard on this. Thank you so much for helping us bring brain-elevating music to you. Exactly.

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