Do Binaural Beats Work? [My Story and A Secret to Profound Meditation]

Do Binaural Beats Work? Here’s How Meditating with These Programs Has Enabled Me to Recover and Grow

In this article I will share with you:

• My story of years of repeated failure
• How that was followed by great success, and why
• How to use brainwave entrainment meditation to really empower yourself
• What program I advise that you avoid, because it’s dangerous (and expensive)
• The 17 secret benefits I’ve received from meditating using binaural beats
• My binaural beats study
• And, my most useful insights into what to do and how to do it.

The information contained in this article, a six-to-seven-minute read, is likely to change your life, as it has thousands of others who have read it since 2010.

So:

You’re probably wondering whether to buy a binaural beats program or not.

Well, I’ve used Zen12, Lifeflow, Holosync, Monaural Tones, Holothink, Isochronic tones, Genius Brain Power, regular meditation, Transcendmental Meditation, plain ambient sounds and also Hemi-Sync and they all helped me to grow, and to not be bored meditating, each also had it’s own pros and cons.

I first discovered Omharmonics and Holosync in 2010, and was impressed as they both helped to changed my life for the better month by month. Recently I switched to Zen12 because, after almost 9 years, I wanted to try something new. You can read my story here.

Unlike Zen12, Holosync is one of the most popular brainwave entrainment programs on the market but I found personally that it can cause terrible periods of overwhelm (see comparison table below for more info..).

Holosync is still considered a quality program that has helped many. But it’s not safe for all.

So is it good enough to justify the cost and time investment? You’re probably asking me again: Do Binaural Beats Work?

Why Listen to Me? (pssst: I’m a Binaural Beats Expert – I’ve tried almost everything.)

Who am I and why should you listen to me?

I’m David, and I’m a personal growth and spiritual practise advocate; I’ve been so since when I first had had a bout of depression in 1998. I strongly believe in working on yourself in order to cultivate health and happiness. I’ve been meditating since 1999 when I learned the Transcendental Meditation technique and between 1999-2010 I used the technique to meditate and benefited greatly from this practise.

I’m also a meditation teacher and an expert in the field of meditating with brainwave entrainment/binaural beats technology. I created the YouTube channel that highlights meditation some years ago, which contains a collection of popular binaural beats meditation videos that I made for fun in 2010-2012 using various software packages. The channel videos have around 1.5 million or more views at this time.

I engineered and composed all of the audios for the excellent Beyond Meditation iOS App.

I also run the “Source” meditation and personal growth group in my local town which is open for anyone to drop in to on any given week. We meditate as a group and also use and discuss material from the likes of Alan Watts, Ken Wilber, Bill Harris, Osho, Eckhart Tolle, David Stringer, Abraham-Hicks, etc.

In 1998 I graduated from University College Dublin at the age of 23 with first-class honours (Masters’ Degree in Computing) and worked in many small and large companies as a Software Engineer between the ages 21 to 33. Now I live in rural Ireland and am self-employed as a freelance technology consultant, working with companies at home and abroad.

I read and enjoy the writings of many authors in the genres of psychology, spirituality, and awakening of consciousness. Authors I enjoy most are Alan Watts, Ram Daas, Mooji, Eckhart Tolle, Ken Wilber, Charles Eisenstein, David Singer.

I like, now and again, to spend time on spiritual retreats; including meditation, mindfulness, yoga, hiking. I enjoy surfing and foreign travel and exploring foreign cultures and languages. I also spend time in Buddhist centers and in ashrams in India, Ireland, Spain, UK, and Portugal (though I’m not a Buddhist, I just like to chill and meditate).

Great Changes Still Happening

I still meditate daily and have experienced great changes in my life, but after some consideration I moved on from using Holosync and OmHarmonics to instead use Zen12. I just became too fed up with being incapacitated, often strung-out from overwhelm from it’s use.

Zen12 has higher production quality – amazing ambient audios (different for each level), I’ve had no overwhelm from using it (you won’t either, and it’s also much cheaper.

I hope you find that this account of my experience inspires you to get meditating with one of these programs or another program of your choosing, so you can experience too some of the benefits that I’ve had.

I will also talk about what I have found to be the real secret to success with these audio programs, a principle that has been the foundation stone of all my growth. If you merely adopt this simple guidance on its own without doing anything else, it will help you to be effective at and to enjoy the process of improving your life. So if you’re still wondering: Do Binaural Beats Work?, you’ll find out the answer in the next few chapters.

Much Lower Depression and Anxiety

I have found binaural beats technology such as Zen12, OmHarmonics, Lifeflow, and Holosync to be the fastest, easiest and most effective way to recover from depression and to grow as a person. For me, it’s the most effective personal growth methodology available.

Daily meditation using these programs has been the largest catalyst which has changed and healed me from being foggy, confused, exhausted and miserable – often barely wanting nor able to get out of bed, to being energetic and clear-minded, able to cope, work and socialise, and it’s given me the strength to build upon my growth.

I also like that every few weeks I look back at 2-3 months previous and realize that now I am happier, I can see retrospectively that the benefits are cumulative, each growth spurt building on the last. I did my binaural beats study and I was finally optimistic about my life.

Thirteen Years of Hell – Then Real Recovery

I spent over thirteen years in a “personal hell”, from the ages of 20 to 33 living with severe, chronic depression and anxiety. I tried everything to recover from it, from faith healers, spiritual and energy healers, holistic therapies, massage, quitting smoking, and exercising, self-help books and seminars, counselors, psychotherapists, traditional meditation, herbal supplements and even pretty questionable brain zappers.

None of the treatments benefited me significantly though, and hope always quickly turned to disappointment, and I was back to living a life of misery and desperation. I was reliant on seeing a psychiatrist, and on taking a high dose of prescription drugs (anti-depressants, tranquilizers, and lithium) to be able to function at all, and even with this minor life events would send me into a bad emotional tailspin.

But I always kept up hope that I would find something that would set me on the road to recovery. I was so desperate that I was literally willing to try anything even if I was skeptical.

Then through a friend, who is also into personal growth, I bought Holosync and used it for a year. Initially, I got pretty good results with it, despite often being in a state of confusion and emotional overwhelm. As I moved through the levels, however, the very low frequencies that it uses created intense overwhelm which lasted weeks at a time. So I had to quit using it. Then I’ve bought OmHarmonics. At first, I liked the flow and the audio quality, but I was quickly bored.

Nonetheless, I was encouraged by the boost that I got from it in the first while, so I researched some more products online, taking one step further and buying the first level of what I learned is the most effective and crucially, the safest, meditation program on the market – Zen12 from Inspire3.

 

Rocket-Powered Personal Growth

Zen12 is a 48-track meditation program that uses combinations of low frequency binaural beats and isochronic tone audio and beat patterns to produce specific low brainwave patterns, alpha, theta and delta waves – i.e. deep meditation. Every month you “unlock” 4 new tracks, which according to instructions, you need to listen that month. Each month produces a deeper meditation and expands your awareness further.

I find it is very relaxing and pleasurable to listen to – it stimulates the production of the brain’s energizing and healing “reward center” neurotransmitters Endorphins, Dopamine and also Human Growth Hormone (HGH) as well as Serotonin. As well as being a great relaxer and energy-booster during the day, I find that it’s excellent before sleeping, helping me to really wind down and drift off, especially if I’m going to bed with a “busy” head.

By listening for twelve minutes per day, using headphones and closing my eyes and focusing on the sound, I experience an extremely deep meditative state when I use it.

This meditative state is so deep that it is supposedly comparable to the deep levels of meditation that seasoned meditators like Yogi achieve after a long time practicing traditional meditation.

The great thing is that you don’t even need to know anything about meditation to use it, all you need to do to reap the benefits is sit or lie back and enjoy being in a let-go flow state and relaxing deeply.

This is an ideal meditation tool for beginners who know nothing about how to meditate, as the audio on the soundtracks creates the deep meditative effect, even if you’re wandering off in thought as you use it.

I find that accelerated positive effect of this deep meditation on the brain and body, on my mental, emotional and physical health is significant, and I found that the benefits began for me very quickly.

My Binaural Beats Study – Striking Gold…Big Time!

Let me tell you some more of my story so you can see if you identify with me.

From the age of fourteen or so, I could sense that something was wrong. I always felt ill-at-ease with myself, always felt uncomfortable, and wanting something outside of myself to “make me feel good”. I felt inadequate, especially in social situations, and regularly felt anxious and fearful even though really looking back there was nothing to be afraid of.

I was quite bright and started university when I was just seventeen. But after four years in college, even though I did quite well academically, I was totally depressed. I had broken up with a girlfriend, and I was drinking heavily and using drugs.

It went further downhill after I left university, and I ended up in a psychiatric hospital for the first time at the age of 23. I had to take six months off from my job as an engineer in a software company to recover so as I was able to sit in front of a computer again.

From this point, over twelve years ago, I became dependent on anti-depressants and tranquilizers. My life was total misery, even when on very high doses of these drugs. I relapsed into deep depressions too many times to count. I was to need hospitalization in psychiatric wards three more times up until 2005.

I started on the road to personal growth in a big way after the last hospitalization in 2005. My family was so worried about me that I vowed to myself to do whatever I could to try to recover.

I read books, attended seminars, went to healers and therapists, took herbal remedies, tried exercise and dieting, even tried electronic brain zappers in order to try to gain emotional balance.

But still, I was totally miserable. Even though I was on high doses of medication I still felt anxious, sad, lonely and guilty and was always exhausted. I had zero confidence. I was totally incapable of enjoying life. The drugs left me feeling clouded and lethargic. I couldn’t think straight or focus. I was always worried that I would end up destitute and feared that I would end up on social welfare all my life, as I couldn’t work. I also looked terrible and was forty pounds overweight.

Through luck, persistence and the constant search for solutions I found Holosync, OmHarmonics, and then later Zen12. I was skeptical at first as I had read big promises and sales pitches about lots of products. I asked myself: is this real? Do binaural beats work? Can they actually help me… But this seemed different. I researched the science behind brainwave entrainment and it made sense to me how it worked in exercising the brain and peeling back layers of repression to reveal the innate capacity for joy that each one of us has.

I knew my brain was functioning poorly and this, if it worked, seemed to offer a possible solution. When I bought it I started to use it every day. I said to myself; it’s time for binaural beats study.

After just a week I could feel that something was happening. It was so subtle but yet so powerful.

After two or three weeks of using it, I was starting to cautiously entertain the idea that I might have found the most powerful tool for healing and growth that I’d experienced so far in my life.

Subtle things were different, and I felt unlike I had for years. I had new energy, and I felt sharper mentally.

The fog that I had been under for years was beginning to lift, very noticeably so. I felt more at ease talking to people and felt chilled-out and unusually optimistic about life.

I honestly thought that I would always be depressed, but now I rarely am, because (1) many aspects of my psyche which were repressed and buried out of view were brought to the surface through it’s use and (2) I now have the heightened awareness to know that I can choose to be happy, and I have the clarity of mind and awareness to make choices that help me maintain happiness.

For example, I finally could clearly see the damage that even minimal use of alcohol and drugs has on my life, so now I choose to stay well away. I also am able to choose to maintain good habits, such as daily walking in nature, and even maintaining regular yoga or chi gong, that I would never have done before. And these new habits are easy to maintain, unlike before, before awareness, vision, and insight were lacking in my life.

These choices feel intuitive, and good because they’re backed by powerful awareness. There have been many other changes and growth areas in my life that are backed by the awareness that deep meditation with Zen12 gives me.

Now I feel a heightened sense of freedom and joy, have started a successful business, have great energy and zest for life, and am finally excited, with a new sense of adventure and wonder. I have come to see mine and others’ true selves – that of love. What a gift!

What are Binaural Beats, In a Nutshell?

Here are some of the many binaural beats benefits I’ve received from using Zen12:

• It helps you to regulate sleep quickly (if I sleep to little or sleep too much it helps with both)
• It helps you to regulate eating patterns (I think that overweight people will lose weight). It also de-represses repressed emotions in the body, enabling fast weight loss
• Helps you create improvements in my focus and concentration
• Your problem-solving ability is enhanced, things that were previously difficult I found became easier
• Your productivity at work will go up, a lot
• Playfulness, fun and laughter are back in my life on a daily basis
• Your creativity and artistic ability will be greatly heightened
• Your earning ability is improved immensely (when I started using it I was flat broke and on Social Assistance, but then I started my own successful business, just 12 months later, and in the worst economic conditions imaginable!)
• It can quickly lower your stress
• Greatly improves your awareness and therefore quality of life
• Your confidence in yourself will sky-rocket.
• Your communication and relational ability will greatly improve, fostering great relationships with family and friends
• Both practically and spiritually, it helps you create a sense of being connected to existence (a part of, rather than apart from/separate from everything else).
• Your tolerance levels will increase. Things which used to annoy me or “get up my nose” no longer do.
• Your intuition will be enhanced, and continue to grow.
• Your inner peace, serenity and capacity for joy will grow and continue to grow.
• Your physical body will strengthen. I put this down to the increase in HGH (human growth factor) which is a youth hormone which is produced in deep meditation.

 

My Secret to Long-Term Success with This or Anything Else

My secret to long-term success with this technology has been persistent use and consistent use.

Persistent use means that I keep using it long-term and progressing through the levels.

Consistent use means that I use it every day, within reason.

Some people often show a lack of persistence, and discontinue use after a few days or weeks, robbing themselves of a chance for an amazing journey of growth and happiness.

Some will also show a lack of consistency and use it but only in a patchy way, maybe once or twice a week.

Many people fall short, only a few meters away from discovering gold, by inconsistency and lack of persistence. These two qualities of persistence and consistency are the hallmarks of every successful person you will ever meet.

I have consciously chosen to attain success by using it every day and using it long-term, and I’m reaping great benefit. I’ve come to view it the same way as brushing my teeth, I just use it every day without thinking about it.

I find that growth is progressive, with each growth stage building upon the last to improve my life as I continue to grow on all levels (mental, emotional, spiritual, physical health, awareness) through daily use.

 

Quick Comparison Table of Holosync, OmHarmonics, Zen12, and Lifeflow

For those of you who were thinking of buying, here’s a table comparing each program on all fronts.

[ninja_tables id=”5141″]

You will find that Zen12 is much better value overall, and I prefer the light, spacious feeling it gives me when using it.

The Final Juice…

Holosync got me started, but Zen12 suits me better – I get deeper meditations, much less upheaval and emotional overwhelm and it’s also only about one quarter the cost. I’ve even achieved binaural beats lucid dreaming with this program.

Overwhelm and questionable safety of the product is, in my view, the major Achilles heel of Holosync.

Inspire3’s Zen12 program is fantastic. I heartily recommend it. Click here to go to their site: Zen12 Program.
You get free program audio and $50 off the Zen12 program (Limited time offer)!

I also prepared a free binaural beats program with my friend Ollie.

I wish you the best on your journey. I really do hope that you feel the same binaural beats benefits as I did, and hopefully, I answered the most important question – do binaural beats work?

2016 And Beyond

The essay that you have just read was first written by me in 2010 and updated in 2013, 2014, and 2019.

Of course as humans, we constantly change our behaviors, and our taste changes too. Over the course of using Zen12 to meditate during a period of two years or so, I’ve received hundreds of comments and emails from readers who, like myself, had depression, anxiety, chronic stress, or some other personal problem to solve, or had some “itch” that needed scratching.

Something that kept coming up in these comments was the insane price tag of most binaural beats programs. Lifeflow and OmHarmonics were out of reach to many who otherwise would buy it, even Zen12, which for me was seen as a great boon compared to the exorbitantly-priced Holosync, came in for some criticism and dismay in this regard. When I first wrote the review, I really needed the Holosync program at that time, and any price seemed fair to me, within reason.

But many people these days simply do not have $670 to pay for a set of MP3s. I totally get that. Most people I know couldn’t afford that. Those who can afford it probably wouldn’t buy it at that price. Personally, I think that a reasonable price for a premium program is $30 – $100.

So to help those who would like all the benefits of Zen12 but without the price tag, I created the Infinite Beats, a free binaural beats meditation program. You can get it here.