THE SOUND OF WELLNESS
Keeping up with the current trend for wellness can sometimes feel like an uphill struggle. But there’s an easy way in – just listen up…
The easiest route to wellbeing? Just open your ears. ELLE investigates the power of sound therapy
If our social media feeds are to be believed, there is a visible currency in health and wellness today. And if you’ve ever ‘liked’ – or even photographed – your rainbow and cacao acai bowl, shared your latest Lululemon purchase, or posted a shot of yourself in a headstand on Insta-stories, you are already a fully paid-up member of the club. Congratulations – why not celebrate with a nice cold green juice?
The kind of results-driven practices that claim to give us radiant skin, bundles of energy and bright, white eyes in real life might come naturally to some who embrace the raft of selfcare, mindfulness, kindfulness and the many other remedies to modern living – but for others, not so much. Signing up for a month of barre, downloading the Headspace app or pledging to get your seven a day in pursuit of your #bestlife is all well and good – until work/childcare/busy social lives interfere. And interfere they almost do. In short: the busier we get, and the more jampacked our lifestyles and schedules become, the more difficult it is to fulfil our very best wellness intentions. Happily, there is a hack. Something we have used for thousands and thousands of years is being given a range of interesting, innovative and contemporary twists to maximise the benefits of conventional existing wellness practices while minimising the output required.
What is it? Perhaps surprisingly, it’s the power of sound. Across the country, a completely new wave of treatments and practices is making use of frequency and vibration with some quite startling results – promising to improve everything from sleep and your state of mind to mindfulness and relaxation. Time to make some noise.
THE BEAUTY of a GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP
You’ll already know how important sleep is to the way you look. As we sleep, our bodies work to remove cell-damaging free radicals. It is the peak time when we build more collagen, the scaffolding of our skin. For these and myriad other reasons – from digestion to our immune systems – decent shut-eye is essential. And yet two-thirds of us regularly fail to have the eight hours recommended by the WHO.
Enter Somnuva. It’s a machine that looks like a radio, but it emits tones and pulses overlaid with the sound of lapping waves, to extraordinary effect. ‘It is a magic machine,’ says Kate Wealden, a voluntary worker who used to suffer from debilitating insomnia. ‘More or less as soon as I started using it, if I woke in the night, I found I would listen to the waves and drop back off.’
So how does it work? The team behind the device analysed data from hundreds of sleepers and discovered that, in quality sleep, the brain waves moved through a similar frequency pattern.
‘Sleepers should go through five sleep cycles each night,’ says Somnuva’s Londonbased founder, Adam Spittles. During each cycle, we move through phases of rapid eye movement (the dreaming stage) and non-rapid eye movement (deep sleep). An algorithm enables the Somnuva device to play tones and pulses in frequencies that replicate the optimal pattern of brain waves in a dream, ahem, night’s rest. Medical product research company Creative Medical Research found that, in a test of insomniacs, 92 per cent slept longer and more deeply when using Somnuva.
For those of us merely wanting to finetune our repose, the device can be set for any length of sleep time, bringing you through your sleep cycle to wake just before your alarm. Somnuva launches later this year and is currently on offer for $3OO via somnuva.com
MEDITATION, MUSIC and MINDFULNESS
I’ve tried Headspace. Each year, I resolve to meditate daily, and fail. The theory of mindfulness is so persuasive, its benefits touching everything from hormone regulation (less acne) to improved cell turnover (fewer wrinkles), it’s a shame that actually doing it is so difficult. Happily, I’ve found salvation in the form of a new app, Wavepaths, which swaps the spoken word for music-based meditation.
The Wavepaths app is the brainchild of Imperial College neuroscientist Dr Mendel Kaelen. For eight years he researched the power of music on the mind. With collaborator Brian Eno – whose ambient music David Bowie credited with providing calm through the worst days of his addictions, and whose sound and light installations are already in hospitals – Kaelen is now bringing the healing power of music to a larger audience.
‘There is evidence that music can be as powerful in reducing stress, anxiety and depression as psychotherapy,’ Kaelen tells me*. ‘Mankind has used music in this way for thousands of years. Often it has been the preserve of the medicine man or shaman, with a transformative, almost magical function. Today, neuroscience enables us to see how it activates every part of the brain: motor, language, emotions and memory. Further, it has an immense capacity to make us relax.’
I log on to the Wavepaths website (in Beta mode as I tried it) and choose ‘meditation’. On my screen, a shimmering sphere appears, as a gentle thrum of electronic sound wells in the background. As piano is overlaid, the sphere begins to undulate; pinks and blues pulse across it, like a jellyfish. I’m entranced. Within moments, my shoulders drop five inches. I can feel my breathing slow down. It feels good.
Now, life is busy. After ten minutes I need to get on – but I am sufficiently into the app that I keep it open on my screen, the music still playing, and find the equanimity the music seems to provoke continues even as I work. Every day now, I treat myself to ten minutes of engaged musical relaxation (this year’s mindfulness?) before gearing up to write. I find this process incredibly grounding, and easy to achieve. And this is only the beginning of the Wavepaths offer.
The full Wavepaths app will ask questions such as how the music makes you feel, and then use artificial intelligence to tailor the sound to you. As well as commissioning composers including Mercury nominee Jon Hopkins, Wavepaths will work with scientists to learn about and improve the impact of the listening experience. ‘We live in a time when we are disconnected from each other, and from ourselves,’ Kaelen says. ‘Music can help people reconnect and deepen these relationships.’
As well as accessing the experience through a screen, across London there will be evenings of Wavepaths music and guided meditation, and this month Kaelen launches an immersive space on Brick Lane. ‘Music has long been part of religious worship. The idea is to take it into venues that will almost be secular temples: places where you go to retreat from daily life, and access a profound calm,’ he says.
LISTEN and LEARN TO RELAX
There’s a growing interest in sound healing – the idea that the vibrations of sound heal the body by helping to restore the body’s natural resonance (the frequency with which our cells vibrate) – manifested particularly in the vogue for sound baths. Miranda Kerr and Robert Downey Jnr are fans; Russell Brand so much so he has learned to play the gong, as has Jasmine Hemsley, who has formed a group called Sound Sebastien, playing crystal bowls for sound baths at the London Edition Hotel.
Facialist and aromatherapist Annee de Mamiel has long been a believer. She opens her treatments by playing music with a Tibetan singing bowl. ‘Every living object has its own vibration at a cellular level,’ she tells me. ‘If we are stressed, nothing flows properly.’ De Mamiel also uses the sound of a tuning fork. ‘The vibrations are beneficial in so many ways.’
Paolo Lai at Belgravia’s Neville Hair and Beauty also uses singing bowls and quartz crystals in his Crystal Healing Facial. ‘The sounds and the energy of the crystals allow the body to recharge and rebalance,’ he tells me. ‘Sound healing is one of the most accessible forms of therapy. Its benefits include lower blood pressure and heart rate, and improved sleep. The music from the singing bowls has an effect on brain wave frequencies, and can bring the brain into a meditative state within minutes.’
Perhaps the best thing about sound healing is that it makes sense: we’ve all felt the uplift that comes from a really great track, the peace from something like a Gregorian chant. Now you can harness that effect in a range of ways. The good news is that, even if your neighbourhood is low on mega-facialists with singing bowls, you can use Somnuva or Wavepaths wherever you are. I am entirely hooked on the latter. For me, it has come to mean serenity in a pair of headphones.
“EVERY DAY, I TREAT MYSELF to TEN MINUTES OF ENGAGED MUSICAL RELAXATION ” “SOUND HEALING MAKES SENSE: we’ve all FELT THE UPLIFT of A really GREAT TRACK ”