The "Brain Tap" App for Symptom Reduction

A User's Experience and Review

This continues on a theme of using the listening as a way into reducing chronic symptoms.

The Ears as a Portal into the Nervous System

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While I have mentioned the Brain Tap app before in several previous posts, I heard something in listening to one of their scripts today, that I so wanted to share as a quote because I felt it was such a good essential distillation of our own philosophy to chronic conditions. I then thought I might as well as report and document my overall experience with the app, on the back of sharing the quote [the short version: I’m a big fan of, and highly recommend, it![. Here is that quote:

“Pain vs brain.

Symptoms vs causes.

You are now willing to work with the underlying causes of situations.

No longer willing to cover up symptoms and leave underling causes not dealt with.

Getting to root cause: stress.

As you learn new ways to manage and handle stress, old symptoms of the past will melt away, disappear.

You will know that pain, of course, hurts, but stress kills."

~ Dr Patrick Porter, from "Activate Your Parasympathetics for Healing Balance", Brain Tap App

As an aside, my experience with the app only concerns listening to it through normal headphones. I haven’t tried the special light emitting headphone device you can find on their website.

In my time, I have tried many different types of listening-type therapies, from guided meditations, hypnosis, music, and special sounds [the “MyNoise” website is an excellent resource for these]. I found many of these types of listening therapies to have benefits. However, a few years ago, I heard about the Brain Tap app on the Better Health Guy podcast. It is, so far, and by far, the listening tool I have found the most beneficial. Indeed, I have been listening to it virtually every morning for the past few years, and my brain is still not bored. I continue to derive good benefits.

The app consists of playlists of scripts/tracks that are a unique combination of guided meditation, hypnotherapy, music and special sounds like binaural beats and isochronic tones, all in one. I [and my brain] especially like the tracks which use “double voice”: a main vocal track with the guided meditation, with a second, quieter, voice simultaneously speaking near-subliminal messaging in the background.

I listen to the app each morning after the first dose of my Parkinson’s drugs wear off. One of the benefits in doing this is I then don’t experience the physical symptoms while listening, because it puts me in a completely relaxed state, so my body doesn’t stiffen up and hurt like usual, during the “off” period before the next does starts to work. Another benefit is that it also seems to help the next dose of the meds kick in faster, and/or I don’t need such a high dose for it work.

One major advantage over guided meditation, yoga nidra, etc. type listening therapies is that you don’t have to focus too much, you can listen quite passively. I know when it is working because my thoughts change from words to an unbidden series of images, like a waking dream state. So another benefit is that it also gives me a break from the “monkey mind”, busy anxious thoughts, and internal chatter. I also know it has worked because of the profound change in sense of time that it induces - a 20 minute script will end and it will seem as if it only took a couple of minutes.

I started trying this app when I was desperately looking for anything that would help with insomnia, because the lack of sleep was greatly increasing my physical symptoms, making me suffer, and making it hard to get through the day. So I began by listening to the app’s playlist specifically developed for improving sleep, called “Sleep RX”. This gradually worked, and I am certain that it had a big role in eventually resolving my sleep issues.

Indeed, these days, I tend to fall asleep within in 10 minutes, and remain mostly asleep throughout the night. Sometime I have to “top up” by listening to one the sleep scripts, in order to keep my sleep on track. Also, when I have an occasional bad night, listening to one of these the next morning helps to combat some of the effects of the poor night’s sleep. Indeed, the app is in a class of therapies which Prof. Andrew Huberman has termed “non-sleep deep rest”, that give some of the benefits of sleep, but without actually going fully to sleep.

Once my sleep was fixed, I swapped out the sleep ones for the double voiced “Life Mastery” playlist, which covers everything from stress management, self-talk, focus, enthusiasm, dreams, etc. To this day, I keep cycling through this playlist, listening to one of the tracks off this list every morning. One other profound effect I noticed as I kept listening was that my anxiety kept diminishing, and my mind just quieter and quieter during the day.

For lots more suggestions of things to try, including more documentation of interventions and modalities that have worked for us, see the overview of our online courses.