There are many causes of anxious dental patients. You may have had bad experiences in the past. You may not like certain sounds or smells. You may respond to the lights, or just the closeness of the dentist. But no matter what the cause of your anxiety, the effect is the same: your brain goes into a heightened state of awareness, with rapid brain waves designed to help your body process and respond to information quickly in a stressful situation.
But NuCalm, our advanced relaxation technology, helps you overcome this problem by slowing down your brain waves to make you physically incapable of being anxious.
The Types of Brain Waves
There are five different types of brain waves our brain uses in different situations. Alpha waves, often associated with the first stage of sleep, but overall being linked to rest and awareness, the brain’s resting state, run about 8-12 Hz, or cycles per second–the number of crests you’d see pass by if you were watching a brain wave monitor.
Beta waves are divided into three types, a low, middle, and high beta state, and essentially represent brain waves of 13 Hz to about 38 Hz. High beta waves are associated with anxiety and excitement. These waves have a frequency of about 22-38 Hz.
Gamma waves have the highest frequency. They run from 40-100 Hz, and are associated with higher learning and deep cognition.
Delta waves are the slowest waves about 0.5-4 Hz. These waves are really only seen in sleep, when your brain is almost completely inactive.
Theta waves are slow waves ranging from about 4-8 Hz. They are dream waves, vision waves, and are often the goal of meditation, trying to reach a state where the mind is detached from confining reality and reaching its unconscious goals and aspirations.
What NuCalm Does to Your Brain Waves
If you’re an anxious patient, you likely come into our office with your brain firing off in the high beta range. Your brain is alert to everything around you, and telling your body to get ready to flee–just in case.
With NuCalm, though, we are able to slow those brain waves down. The natural supplements give your brain the chemical tools it needs to relax–neurotransmitters for sleep and rest. Gentle electric stimulation opens up your brain to receiving those chemicals. And then we introduce the neuroacoustic stimuli. This is music with special frequencies embedded in it. There’s a different frequency in each ear, and as your brain tries to reconcile them, it finds itself manipulated into changing its frequency into the alpha-theta range. Your brain frequency will be about 8-10 Hz, consistent with the time when you’re just falling asleep.
But you won’t actually be asleep. The stimuli helps keep you relaxed, but also awake. This is why users of NuCalm often call it “meditation in a box.”
If you are looking to transform your dental visits into deeply meditative experiences, please call for an appointment with a Hilton Head cosmetic dentist at Beyond Exceptional Dentistry.
