 Are bineural beats a crutch for meditation? Do they make you less able to meditate if you use them often? And this is actually the question I got. This was an email that I got sent about meditation and bineural beats. And the question went something like this. I've been using bineural beats to meditate and the results have been really good. You know, I've been able to meditate deeper for longer. It's been more effective. I felt like there's been a deeper kind of effect on my meditation, right? This is all good. This is what bineural beats should do. They should make meditation easier. However, this guy, he's worried that if I keep using bineural beats, will it get to the point where my normal meditation practice without bineural beats is less effective? Will it get to the point, he's saying, where I can't meditate on my own because I'm tolerant or dependent on these bineural beats? This is an interesting question. This is actually a really good question. I often speak about the benefits of bineural beats because they can help you reach really deeply relaxed states, brainwave states without much effort. You know, it's a frequency following response. So your brain literally just sort of guides along and follows along with the bineural beats that you're listening to. This is a really powerful thing which can help you meditate if you don't have enough time. If you have let's say just 10 minutes a day and you want to meditate and get the benefits of let's say one or two hours of meditation, you can do that using bineural beats. However, the long term effect of that is that your meditation yourself will not be as good as if you didn't use the bineural beats. What I mean by that is that yes, unfortunately, if you keep using bineural beats every single time you meditate, you're sort of missing the point. The point of meditation is to train yourself and your brain to be able to disconnect your awareness from your thoughts, to be able to sort of watch your thoughts without interacting with them. That's kind of the point of meditation. Now, if you're relying on bineural beats to do that, then of course you never practice the skill. So you never get better at doing it. So over the course of let's say a few months, you don't actually become good at meditating. You might get the benefits of being more relaxed. Yeah, of course, and there are many benefits of bineural beats and the effects that they have on you, but you're missing the benefit of actually practicing meditation regularly on your own and the benefits that that can bring to your mind and to your life. So here's my advice to you. If you're listening to bineural beats and you're relying on them to relax you, you're stopping yourself ever actually getting good at meditation. You're sort of holding yourself back and making sure that you never become good enough to meditate without bineural beats. So don't rely on them. Try and split your time between meditating with bineural beats and meditating without them because if you don't do that, you're never going to be good at meditating.