Introduction:
Sound therapy or meditation helps calm the mind and harmonizes the nervous system. Some types of sound may help reduce stress and anxiety. This, in turn, helps in creating emotional balance. Many people suffer from mental illness. Anxiety is one of them. This can be tackled with sound meditation.
What Is Anxiety?
Anxiety is a feeling of fear and uneasiness. When anxiety appears, the individual may sweat, tense, and feel restless. It is a stress reaction. This can help a person cope with the situation. This anxiety may affect daily functioning. Worrying about daily functioning may exaggerate, and the anxiety is preoccupied in the mind. This type of worry is unrealistic to the situation.
Women are affected more than men with anxiety. It manifests in mental health conditions like generalized anxiety, panic, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The exact cause is not known. Triggers may vary from one person to another.
Symptoms of anxiety include
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Hot and cold flushes.
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Disturbance in sleep.
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Heart function becomes fast.
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A feeling of chest tightening.
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Worrying continuously.
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Thinking obsessively and showing compulsive behavior.
Meditation is a solution to anxiety. Researchers have shown that meditation often helps in reprogramming the brain's neural pathways and helps regulate emotions.
How Noise or Sound and Anxiety Are Related?
Research has found that noise-related stress may cause anxiety. This may increase high blood pressure, peptic ulcers, cardiovascular deaths, strokes, suicide, decreased immunity, and difficulty in learning.
Anxiety is linked to some events like social situations and public speaking. This may be due to bad experiences in the past or because of low self-esteem.
What Is Sound Meditation?
Sound meditation is a therapy that uses sound to support and form deep relaxation. Sound meditation intends to create a powerful experience that heals the body and clears the mind. Sound meditation helps keep the attention in the present.
Sound meditation has been in practice since the olden days. Still, in recent years it has been used to attain lateral thinking, self-awareness, efficient communication, mental health, self-confidence, increased attention, and consistent calmness. This therapy uses healing sounds to bring improvement in mental and physical health. It is used in the treatment of many mental health problems. It brings balance and harmony to life.
There are different types of sounds.
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Nature Sounds: Spending time in nature benefits having good health. Nature sounds help reduce stress levels and provides relaxation and a good mood.
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Chanting: Chanting mantras and other phrases provide mental health benefits. It reduces stress and depression.
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Musical Instruments: Sounds generated using tuning forks, singing bowls, and drums may help achieve health benefits. These instruments are hit or circled in a sequence to generate sounds. These sounds help fight tension, depression, and anxiety.
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Music Composition: Some sounds, like meditative music, white noise, and binaural sounds, have been used in recent years. These are of different tones and different frequencies heard. These soothing sounds help in relaxing the mind.
Research has shown that sound meditation helps reduce stress, depression, and anxiety, improves memory, and increases efficiency. It helps in reducing physical and psychological pains. Compared to meditation of other types, sound meditation allows the person to be passive, and sounds and vibrations lead him. Tuning out is easy in the case of sound meditation when compared to other traditional types of meditation.
One research has found that sound meditation showed less tension, anger, depression, and fatigue among those who were under sound therapy than those without sound meditation. The advantage of this therapy is its low cost than other medications.
What Is the Action of Sound Therapy on Anxiety?
Sound meditation helps reduce stress and anxiety. This leads to emotional balance. Sound affects the nervous system. It directly works on the ear-brain connection. It normalizes the automatic functions of the nervous system. The ear is connected to the nervous system, and it has effects on the vagus nerve. The latest research has found how neural pathways affect feelings of safety and social and emotional responses.
Brain activity can be increased or decreased based on sound quality. According to the researcher Dr. Tomatis, some sounds are equivalent to two cups of coffee. Listening to sounds for three hours normalizes the nervous system, calms the mind, and helps to counteract stressful effects due to low-frequency noise.
Sound meditation may also help counter insomnia (sleeplessness). Though sound helps manage activities during the day, it also has a role in helping a person to go quickly to sleep. Sound activates the brain and nervous system, leading to active calmness, which helps achieve sleep and deep rest. Research has found that sound therapy has improved sleep among 70-80 percent of people who underwent the therapy.
Some musical tunes created as calming tunes help create shifts in brain waves. These waves are responsible for affecting mood and cognition. Anxiety may be treated using many other methods like cognitive behavioral therapy, applied relaxation, antidepressants, along with regular exercises. Sound meditation is easy, immediate, and does not have side effects like other medications or methods.
Sound is associated with meditation and healing. It is a type of meditation that focuses on awareness. One kind of it is a sound bath. Sound is experienced not only through hearing but also through vibrations and frequencies. It is also observed that over-melody plays a role in physical pain relief.
Sound meditation is useful in conditions like arthritis, menstrual pain, post-operative pain, and knee replacement pain. It can improve mobility, reduce muscle pain, muscle stiffness, increase blood circulation, and lower blood pressure.
Conclusion:
Sound meditation is an ancient technique but has been used in treating mental health problems like anxiety in recent years. Hence it is important to know about anxiety, sound meditation, and how they are linked. Knowing helps in seeking help for conditions like anxiety early. Early diagnosis leads to effective treatment. This, in turn, helps achieve a good quality of life.
